Location hunting: Sound! Euphonium edition

The Sound! Euphonium x Keihan Railway Collaboration started yesterday, and since I was in the region, I decided to check it out… If you want to use one of these one-day passes, not all stations stock them, so look it up before you go!

The first stop was Ōbaku Station on the Uji Line…

…to pick up one of these. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one… in fact, that plastic bag was a dead giveaway…

Back on the train, and on to Uji, around which Kumiko, Shuuichi, Aoi and Reina all live…

The path around the back of the Genji museum actually leads to the approach to Mt. Daikichi, so it wasn’t too difficult to find. Unfortunately, personal circumstances had me forego climbing to the top, otherwise, I’d probably have planned an evening hike.

Carrying on down the hill, however, brings you to the shrine Reina prefers, Ujigami Shrine.

Quite a different atmosphere during the day, huh?

Incidentally, I agree with Reina… (Ujigami Shrine is on the left, and Uji Shrine is on the right.)

But Uji Shrine also has something memorable…

After that, I hit the river, and sought out a familiar spot on the bank. Must admit that I’m stunned that Hazuki lugged her Tubacabra all the way here!

I stopped by Byodoin next (it’s the building on the back of the 10 yen piece), and this turned out to be round the corner from the south exit… Yup, the apartment block in which Kumiko’s family lives doesn’t actually exist, though Japanese fans have found its model elsewhere…

Then, I picked up some green tea ice cream (made with Uji tea, I think), and then found my way to this little bench…

…before finishing off at the bridge. This was also the place where Gotō and Riko met up for the festival, but someone was on that bench the entire time I was there…

And that’s pretty much all the photos I took that kind of matched up. The trick, of course, is to make print outs of all the shots you want to take so that you can fine-tune the camera angles on the fly. (NB: I didn’t do this. I hadn’t even planned to visit Uji when I started on this trip…) You might even try to match the time of day! Personally, though, unless you live in the area and want to document every little thing, I’d recommend limiting the number of shots you really want to get, lest you forget to enjoy yourself and chill a little!

One other thing I should note for anyone planning to try this before the promotion ends in September/October: if you can, try to go only after a spate of good weather (i.e. no rain). There’s a dam a little further up the Uji river, and they occasionally let the excess water flow out, thus sending a torrent down the river. As it turns, it had been raining for most of the week, so that’s precisely what happened yesterday. Unfortunately for me, that meant that a couple of locations were closed off… I also didn’t make it to the Uji travel centre, so if anyone finds a Sound! Euphonium location map there, please let me know so that I can lament my terrible planning!

And after all that, I felt exactly as Kumiko did here… though I did not let down my hair that much, honest!

p.s. I did make it out to the Keihan Otsu Line after all, even though I didn’t have enough time to actually jump on the train. And unfortunately, despite using the previous train for a test run, I didn’t quite work out the right camera settings to use…

The front and rear of the train…

Kumiko and Hazuki (sorry, I wasn’t quick enough to get a closer shot of the latter…)

…and Reina and Midori…

If anyone’s planning on going out there, here are a couple of little tips. First, you’ll probably want to spend the day doing this, as the two sides of the train are different, and you’ll also want to hop on in order to get shots of the interior images. That’s probably why the collaboration tickets–which I didn’t buy, since I’m not too fond of the designs and had already spent way too much elsewhere–are one-day passes. The real trick, however, is to find a quiet station and ask the attendant when the train will be there during the course of the day — if it’s not too busy, he’ll probably be happy to look it up for you. Luckily for me, the other train I wanted to see currently follows this one by about 15 minutes. Which train? Well, if you can’t figure it out, it’ll be in my next post.(^_^)