There is a less than ideal side to everything, and Highway 125 is no exception.

On a National Highway an 86 year old man dies after being the victim of a hit and run incident –Ibaraki, Tsukuba city
Fuji T.V. 2013-08-23

Some time around midnight, on the National Highway at Oda, Tsukuba city, Tsukahara Kaneyoshi, unemployed, 86 years old, a resident of Koga, was hit by a passenger car. He was transported to hospital, but died soon after. The driver of the vehicle in question fled from the scene of the accident. Apparently Mr Tsukahara was riding on a bicycle in the moments before being struck. According to a witness, he fell off his bike, and was struck while lying prone on the road next to his toppled bicycle. The police are investigating the scene to acquire further details, and searching for the whereabouts of the car involved in the accident. According to the police, at the spot the accident occurred the highway is a two lane road, and there are no streetlights.

Comments from readers:
1)This road represents the shitty rural (kuso inaka-ppuri) aspect of Ibaraki

2)125 serves the area left behind, the region between the Ken-o Expressway and Kita-Kanto Expressway (privately owned four lane divided highways)

3)125 is a National Highway with nothing but rice fields on both sides.

4) It’s fairly well known in the Kanto area, but hardly a major road.

5)What was an 86 year old fart doing out at midnight? On a bicycle? Far from home?

6)That’s our “One-two -five”!

A caustic tone is not uncommon in the internet comments people make. To strike back at the discomfort this news item causes. Also, sniping is a way to relieve the stress of daily life. Nevertheless, in comments 1 through 4 there is a view of the highway as minor rather than major, the countryside as “shitty” and “left behind” compared to the urban sublime. An alternate headline to this story from another source was “A fatal accident on a minor National Highway, National Highway 125.” Minor, as in small, relatively unknown, Known only to locals. Comment 6, which might be ironic or affirmative, refers to that. “All Ibaraki folks call Highway 125, the ‘One -two-five (wan-tsuu-faibu).’ You can even say that in Ibaraki, if you don’t call it the One-two-five, no one will know what you are talking about.”

What attracts me to these images –the open space, pre-fab buildings, rice fields punctuated by power lines, construction sites or places that seem half-built and unfinished, the occasional solitary house –is a zone already full of other interpretations.