Tokaido Day 21 – Wednesday, 29 November: Rest day

Usual morning routine for a rest day: laundry and catching up on emails and other admin.

This afternoon I visited the SC Maglev and Railway Park, which is a sort of museum for train nerds.

There are displays of various types of rolling stock (full size, real) through the ages, from steam locomotives to the latest Shinkansen, some of which you can walk through, plus displays explaining how various aspects of trains and rail systems work, all the way from the wheels to the control centre.

As the name suggests, there’s also an extensive section on the development of Japan’s maglev trains, which are due to come into operation in 2027. Apparently they’ll operate at speeds of up to 500 kmh.

One of my favourite things at the park was a giant model railway, which replicates in miniature some of the features of the Nagoya area.

This is a music festival:

This is central Nagoya and Nagoya station:

This is the level of detail of passengers waiting on the platforms:

Generally, a pleasant and relaxing day. Tomorrow I’ll head back to Utsube via (in part) that quaint little line I took yesterday and start heading up into the hills towards Suzuka Pass.

Update: I’m three-quarters of the way towards my fundraising target of $2000 for the Indigenous Literacy Foundation. As I’ve said, if we get to $2000 I’ll spend a night in a capsule hotel and post the pictures to prove it. If you haven’t yet donated, now would be a good time so that I can make a booking and be sure of securing a pod for the night! My fundraising page is here.

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Tokaido prologue

Hiroshige, Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido . No. 26: Kakegawa I visited Japan in 2017 and 2019, on the second occasion with Fred, as well as my partner (with whom I’d travelled in 2017) and her son. Like most people who come for the first (or second) time, we took the Shinkansen – bullet train – from Tokyo to Kyoto on the line called the Tokaido. Volumes have been written about the wonders of Japan’s Shinkansen system. It is, I think, something that should be experienced at least once in everyone’s life if possible. ‘Tokaido’ means ‘eastern sea road’, and the line bears that name because it follows – more or less – the route of the centuries-old road that linked the Imperial capital of Kyoto with the Shogunate’s headquarters in Edo (now Tokyo), respectively the seats of ceremonial and administrative power. For hundreds of years, thousands of travellers made the 500-kilometre trip between the two cities (and usually back again), the vast majority of them on foot: horses were rare, t...

Tokaido Day 1 – Thursday, 9 November: Nihombashi to Kawasaki (22 km)

Link to GPS track Any sense of excitement at the dawn of the day that I would actually start this thing I’d been planning for so long was somewhat subsumed by the need to organise my gear and arrange for stuff I wouldn’t need for a couple of days to be sent on to the next hotel. The front desk staff at the Hotel Sunroute in Asakusa were, of course, extremely helpful and told me that the bag would arrive at the Terminal Hotel in Odawarra the next day. That still left me with a pack that was heavier than I’d been expecting – I guess about 15 kg – and it was with a slight sense of trepidation that I checked out and headed to the subway to catch the Ginza line to Nihombashi. Nihombashi – which I think just means ‘Japan bridge’ – marks the start of the Tokaido and is traditionally the place from which all distances to Tokyo are measured. Today its historical significance is not immediately apparent, not least because of the dominating freeway overpass that crosses above. However, the c...

Tokaido Day 2 – Friday, 10 November. Kawasaki to Totsuka (27 km)

Light rain punctuated the day. For much of the time it was more of a nuisance to hold the umbrella than to get slightly damp, but although humid it was reasonably cool and pleasant walking conditions. Like the previous day, today was short on scenic beauty but long on immersion in the ‘real’ Japan of shops and houses and schools and workplaces. And people. To get back to Kawasaki from Odawara involved three trains, including a 15-minute blast on the Shinkansen to Ofuna. From Kawasaki station entrance I picked up the Old Tokaido route, and after a couple of kilometres at Hatcho-nawate came across this roadside memorial. A nearby plaque said it was to honour people whose remains had been unearthed in the area, suggesting they had been victims of natural disasters such as “earthquakes, large fires, floods, famine and epidemics”. A little further on was the day’s first shrine, a very small one set on a mound that had once been an ichi-ri-zuka or ‘one-ri-mound’. A ri was a unit of mea...

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