About this guestbook
This guestbook was located in Hanno (Hannou, 飯能市) Central Community Center in Hanno, Saitama, and was labelled No. 12. I wrote a diary entry of my trip that day, and it can be separately found here.
This No. 12 guestbook contains messages roughly from August 2019 to October 2022. Also see:
I scanned this book on Oct 27 2022, using the vFlat Scan app on a Google Pixel 5.
Annotations
So, while the other guestbook covered about 18 months worth of visitors, this one encapsulated 38 months and counting. While it’s just my speculation, there are some reasons that immediately pop to mind as reasons for this wide gulf — COVID putting a dent in the number of visitors is one, and the attention dip between seasons 3 and 4 being another, but also that this isn’t actually the main pilgrimage location for Yama no Susume in Hanno, and as I pointed out in my blog post above, it had no signage or display or anything else whatsoever, not even a memorial stamp, so it was likely just skipped by lots of people as well.
Page 2 – You know… I never thought of getting an ink stamp for myself. Or more likely for Tigey. I wonder how hard it is to commission one to be made.
Page 7 – While the No. 11 book had one or two things pasted in it, this was the first “business card” that I saw in what was the second anime guestbook that I ever experienced. I would continue to see many more to come though. In some cases, when they were taped to the sheet, there was stuff underneath the sheet too, and sometimes I flipped it up to take an alternate scan of the stuff underneath. In other cases, like this one, there was nothing beneath.
Page 2/Page 9/Page 31/Page 38/Page 41/Page 44/Page 47/Page 49 – Who even are these characters. They’re not from Yama no Susume. Not even the same era, they’re more 80s/90s art. Cute to see people drawing random OG stuff in guestbooks though! These are all actually from the same artist, since the signature (馬盧馬, or Maroma/Maluma) is the same. A superfan that visited just to draw in the book multiple times? A worker at the community center? But.. the person hasn’t returned after Feb 2022. They were also not present in the No. 11 guestbook as far as I saw. There are several other users that feature in both guestbooks too, like @superscience890 and @new_misokatsu were names that popped out at me often, although I didn’t spend time analyzing recurrances.
Page 20 – Some of the character drawings are really nice.
Page 61 – Tigey was here!
Page 62 – This was a bookmark with the word 本日 (honjitsu, or today).
Document dated: October 27 2022.