OK - let me try to set the stage a bit better.

The tower you see in my photograph is not a viewing tower as far as I can tell - it looks more like a communications tower. My photo was taken from the top of the viewing tower which is what I paid 100 yen (which is only about CDN 1.00) to go up and which is the white tower pictured on the right hand side of the ticket.

The radio tower is the taller of the two towers but lower down as you surmise and is approximately at the point on the map marked with a spot height of 922m I would guess. The viewing tower is approximately at the point on the map marked as a trig point (with a triangle) - about 100m from the geocache. My GPSr indicated that the tripoint was approximately 800m from the viewing tower in the direction of the radio tower. From the map I conclude that it is beyond the radio tower.

I see the white post you refer to but, from the above analysis and the map I would think this is unlikely to be the tripoint marker since it seems to be too far to the left to my thinking.

From my observations at the four dry tries I made (and, indeed, the wet one) I conclude at this stage that boundary and tripoint marking is sporadic in Japan. Some of the markers I photographed (the stone ones) appear to be older, some newer, and some (the plastic ones which are very firmly embedded in the ground, by the way - I did try tugging on them) very new indeed, possibly recently surveyed for specfic reasons such as the construction of the golf course etc. It is also instructive that in the area of Kanagawa-Shizuoka-Yamanashi, the only border markers I could locate were those on the Kanagawa-Yamanashi and the Shizuoka-Kanagawa borders - the Shizuoka-Yamanashi border did not appear to be marked, providing further evidence for my supposition.

In summary - I don't think that all dry tripoints in Japan are physically marked on the ground.

Cheers

Hugh

From: BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com [mailto:BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of aletheiak
Sent: Wednesday, November 16, 2005 10:19 PM
To: BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [BoundaryPoint] Re: My last 3 Japanese Tripoints

now hugh about fsibtc again at the bottom of http://tinyurl.com/9gzsz i have still not been able to get completely clear you say there is a viewing tower at the top of the mountain & you show 2 towers either one of which could conceivably be the one you mean but then i also would have just guessed you photographed the taller but apparently lower tower from the shorter but apparently higher one that is until i saw the 100 yen price tag on the latter & the slight difference between the 2 viewing angles of this taller lower tower also suggests you may have taken your magnificent panoramic atmospheric photo of it not from the actual summit & small tower & geocache point necessarily at all like the other one if indeed they were all 3 of them at this singular mountaintop location as perhaps hinted by you & the gcm5pp dot & or nearby triangle on your map swatch but rather from perhaps much closer to the bottom center of this map swatch i would guess where you also evidently passed & i have guessed this as well as provisionally placed the tall tower on the elevation point indicated as 922 on the map swatch just for lack of anything more definitive to go on which perhaps you can still provide in correction & then continuing hypothetically by measuring the viewing angle toward the tripoint at about 20 degrees left of the centered tower based on all the above surmises lo & behold what do i see there in plain view but a tall thin white post in a light brown patch set off by a dark green background at roughly kilometric range about midway between the tower & the power pole line cum perhaps roadway to its left but do you follow any of this or more importantly do you s e e in your pic the object i am talking about for thats a clear class d guess rather than some impossibly elusive class e hope or has my imagination run away from us already but anyway while you are mulling & or laughing over that a perhaps bigger question now that we have had serious tries at so many as 4 dry ones is do you imagine they are all in fact marked with some just being more elusive than others for various reasons or do you suppose they are indifferently & haphazardly marked as chance would have it in other words given sufficient time & care & luck etc from all youve seen & been able to learn for sure as well as just guess do you think you would have bagged all 4 of these class a just like you surely did with knszyn & that we can therefore still expect or hope there are as many marked prefectural tripoints in japan as there are dry ones or is it still too soon to hazard any such generalization --- In BoundaryPoint@yahoogroups.com, "Hugh Wallis" <hugh@o...> wrote: > > Report is now available at > http://freepages.misc.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis/Japan_2005-11-12_to_2005-11-1 > 4/ - a.k.a. http://tinyurl.com/9gzsz > > This covers my visits to: > > Kyoto-Mie-Nara > Kanagawa-Shizuoka-Yamanashi > > and > > Ibaraki -Fukushima-Tochigi > > Enjoy > > Thanks > > Hugh >