Nankai 22.2.22 Ticket

According to the Japanese way of numbering the year by the current emperor its the year Heisei 22--or the 22nd year of emperor Heisei. It's important to know the year if you live here because many forms require you to put your birthdate in that format. Many receipts print the date in this format YY.MM.DD with YY being the two year Japanese year. Train tickets also follow this format. So combine silly numbers with the mass of train fanatics in this country--such as myself--and you get the 22.2.22 ticket. In the Kansai area JR and Nankai both did promotions surrounding February 2nd and February 22. I will talk about the JR tickets in a later post.

Nankai really went overboard for their 22.2.22 promotion. They added another 2 to the mix by incorporating the two stations that have the Japanese word for 2, ni or 二, in their names. Those stations being Nishikinohama [二色浜] in Kaizuka city near Kansai airport and Nirigahama [二里ケ浜] in Wakayama on the local Kada line. Nankai sold a two platform ticket set at their major stations, but offered till the end of March special stamps at each of the stations. I was able to go on the March 29th to get these stamps.

I have two of these 22.2.22 ticket sets for sale up on Flutterscape if your interested. Only 3,000 of these sets were printed. Both have the special stamps also.

About the stations

I got to Nishikinohama late in the evening and walked to a near by supersento for a bath. The station is about a 10 minute walk to a beach-side park that looked like it would be quite fun in the summer. Both stations have that beach-side chipped paint and wear from the sea air that characterizes smaller stations on the Nankai line and really endear them to me.

Nirigahama station is about half way to the Kada terminus. Kada is a beautiful little harbor village with a few onsen ryokan. The area around Nirigahama is very suburban with schools, many single family houses, and small streets. There is a sea wall about 5 minutes from the station, but the sea itself is quite farther out. The kind station staff let me enter the booth there to stamp the sets myself.