Railway fans both young and old are flocking to an onigiri rice ball shop and a hotel in Wakayama Prefecture that incorporate everything from train doors and windows to entire station buildings in their design.
Futa Nakamura, a third-year elementary student from Hashimoto in the prefecture, was in a dining area converted from a warehouse next to Nankai Electric Railway's Kudoyama Station. Watching the station platform through the window, he happily munched on an onigiri.
"The kids love trains, so we come here a number of times a month," said his mother Etsuko Nakamura, 44. She was there that day with 8-year-old Futa and his 5-year-old brother. They had bought six onigiri at the Kudo onigiri shop that opened inside Kudoyama Station last November.
The eating area was designed to look like the inside of a train, reusing doors from a train that was scheduled to be scrapped and with a map to places along the train line that had been used at Namba Station in Osaka. The Nakamura family ate their onigiri as they watched the trains that stopped every so often at Kudoyama Station.
The Kudo onigiri shop currently offers 14 varieties, as well as drinks including roasted tea and Japanese sake. Most of the ingredients are from Wakayama Prefecture, and the shop's okoge scorched rice is also popular.
Even people who are not taking the train can buy Kudo onigiri on the platform, so in addition to local residents, many railway fans visit from far away. Young women also come for the "cute Instagrammable onigiri."
On a busy day there are nearly 40 customers.
At the neighboring Koyashita Station, a station building constructed in the Taisho era (1912-1926) has been remodeled into the Nipponia Hotel Koyasan Pilgrimage Railway. Elements such as its original pillars and doors have been retained, and rooms that were used for such purposes as station staff sleeping over have been converted into guest rooms.
There is one room that can accommodate a maximum of two people, and another that can sleep up to four. The hotel is said to be almost entirely booked through mid-April.
Kudoyama is located at the foot of Mt. Koya, a UNESCO World Heritage site that has seen a growing number of foreign tourists in recent years. However, few people stopped by Kudoyama and it was seeking ways to increase its visitors.
Since the new facilities were set up at the two stations, their monthly users have increased by about 10%.
"If [Kudoyama] is revitalized by the new features at these stations, it will lead to more tourists elsewhere on the line as well," said a Nankai Electric Railway staffer in charge.
Music teacher Taeko Tominaga, 63, visited the Kudo onigiri shop on her way home from visiting temples around Mt. Koya. "It was so delicious, I had seconds. I want to come here every time I visit temples," Tominaga said.
Captions:
The Yomiuri Shimbun
The dining area for the Kudo onigiri shop in Kudoyama, Wakayama Prefecture, features train car doors. Railway fans, families and other customers like watching trains stop at the adjacent platform.
Courtesy of Kirinji Co.
A room at the Nipponia Hotel Koyasan Pilgrimage Railway contains old pillars from the building the hotel was converted from.
Read more from The Japan News at https://japannews.yomiuri.co.jp/
