The Shinkansen is a miracle of engineering and an efficient way to miss Japan. At 320 kilometers per hour, the country resolves into a blur of rice paddies and tunnel darkness, with brief, sharp interludes of city. You arrive where you were going, and you have seen almost nothing.
The trains worth taking are the ones that do not go fast. The Iiyama Line in Nagano Prefecture, the Tadami Line in Fukushima, the Kiha 40 services that still run on single-track rural lines using diesel rolling stock from the 1970s — these are the trains that move at the speed of the landscape they pass through, stopping at stations that serve villages of a few hundred people and sometimes fewer.
The Tadami Line
The Tadami Line runs 135 kilometers through the mountains of Fukushima Prefecture, following the Tadami River through a series of gorges and river valleys that are, in late October, an unreasonable shade of red and gold. The line is not fast — the full journey takes around four hours — and it does not go anywhere that a traveler in a hurry would need to reach.
That is its point.
The train stops at Mishima, a village of 1,700 people, where the platform overlooks a curved river valley and a bridge that appears on approximately every list of Japan’s most photographed railway scenes. It is legitimately beautiful, in the way that things built for function and maintained with care become beautiful over time.
Staying off the itinerary
The villages served by these lines have not organized themselves around tourism, which makes them rare. There are no English menus, few English speakers, and almost no infrastructure for the kind of visitor who arrives with a checklist. What there is: guesthouses run by families who have been running them for three generations, restaurants serving whatever was caught or grown locally this week, and a quality of quiet that is increasingly difficult to find in the parts of Japan that have decided to welcome the world.
The practical difficulty of these journeys — the infrequent departures, the need to plan connections carefully, the absence of the scaffolding that makes popular destinations easy — is, at this point, their primary attraction. The people who take the Tadami Line tend to be Japanese retirees and a small number of foreign visitors who found out about it by accident. The accident is worth engineering.
