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This photo of a train has an amazing surprise

Master Blaster Dec 5, 2015
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If you look closely there’s a chance you’ll be able to see it…

If anything it would likely be the soft colors that give away the fact that this is actually a painting rather than a photo, but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone not initially fooled by this highly detailed work.

And that’s not even the most impressive part.

[tweet https://twitter.com/hazuki_cheke/status/672369647442759680 align=center]

According to the blurb that was also tweeted, this painting was done by Hisashi Fukushima, a 46-year-old Saitama man who has autism. Ever since he was young he took an interest in trains, railroads, and crossings and began to paint them.

Although it is a highly detailed painting to begin with, the most amazing thing is that it was said to have been done entirely from memory. Fukushima has the ability to remember every detail of a scene by looking at it just once.

With that fact in mind, take another look at the picture and just how many details he put into it. The relative sizes and number of floors on each building in the background; the bars on each window of the beige buildings; all of the numbers and signage around the signals; the intricate lattice work on the steel frames along the elevated track in the top right.

Then again, he might have just faked those details. How would we know otherwise…right? So I decided to try and track down where this scene was.

Since Japan generally doesn’t have excessively tall buildings, the ones in the background of Fukushima’s painting were conspicuously large. Knowing he was from Saitama I simply ran a quick search of tall buildings in the area. As it turns out, the picture actually shows a row of tall buildings juxtaposed on each other.

Image: Wikipedia/PRiMENON

Using the location of the buildings in the background combined with the presence of an elevated track to the side, I could deduce that this was the South end of platform number seven at Omiya Station in Saitama.

Google street view would have been nice, but since pesky labor laws don’t allow them to force their drivers onto train tracks, I had to resort to Google Earth. The position seemed to be right, but I couldn’t get enough detail to be sure.

Thanks to Japan’s sizable train otaku community, pictures of Omiya station were plentiful, but I couldn’t get quite that same position that Fukushima depicted. The best I could dig up was this video that appears to have been taken from the same platform but at a slightly different angle.

The platform six signal pole seems to have been faithfully recreated.

However, the buildings in the background don’t seem to match Fukushima’s painting. There could be numerous reasons for this though, such as the angle of the video and the fact that we don’t know when he took that photographic memory during his 46 years of life.

I don’t know if Hisashi Fukushima is truly able to perfectly recreate reality from memory, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, and it’s one heck of a nice picture regardless. Google Earth really ought to consider contacting him for their texture mapping.

Source: Twitter/@hazuki_cheke (Japanese)