Postcards
Hideo Yokoyama’s novel Kuraimāzu Hai (‘Climber’s High’) tells the story of a small, local fictional newspaper as it covers the story of the crash of Japan Air Lines (JAL) flight JL123 which crashed on 12 August 1985. Whilst the novel itself is fictional, the crash of the Boeing 747 jumbo jet is a real event and remains to this day the world’s largest single biggest plane crash in terms of fatalities. There have been two dramatizations to date based on the novel – a 2005 NHK TV dramatization and a 2008 film. The location for the newspaper in the 2008 movie can be found in central Maebashi by some bridges (which also feature in the film) that cross the road to a local hotel, which was also the locale for a few scenes.
