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Into Hokkaidō

Through the Seikan Tunnel to Sapporo

By Lee Harker

June 8^th, 2014

Shin-Aomori station is clean, modern and the current end of the line for the Tōhoku Shinkansen, although there are no buffers. The physical rails travel on beyond the station into the horizon, in a couple more years the bullet-trains will roar on down them and dive under the sea, across to the island of Hokkaidō.

As it is, if you’ve come this far and want to leave Honshū and venture to Hokkaidō you need to transfer to the Super Hakucho express which runs through the Seikan Tunnel from Aomori to Hakodate. When I planned the journey from my study in the UK I worried about transfer times, the unfamiliar language, missing trains, getting lost. The ride up to Sapporo was a long way, saner people fly up in a couple of hours, I’d already taken four to get this far and it would be another eight before I’d reach my destination, Sapporo.

I was glad that I’d spent my first two days in Tokyo. The crowds and the pace were such that adapting to cope was made easier, I’d just had to crack on and do it. Use body language to demonstrate you apologetically accept being a total idiot for not knowing the language, smile, say “thank you very much” whenever something is said or done and, critically in shops, make sure to know how much money to hand over.

Mental currency management when pricing in Yen turns out not to be difficult, I worked on a crude shorthand of 100円 = £0.60, backed up by the excellent Kurrency app for the iPhone for more critical purchases. I can’t stress how much of a difference renting a 4G modem made to my travels. I got mine from Global Advanced and it was excellent throughout the trip; along with the exchange rate, I had constant GPS on my phone, could Skype and iMessage my family when I needed to and keep track of the train times using the Hyperdia app.

Shin-Aomori station proved both surprisingly resistant to my preternatural ability to summon chaos and pretty easy to navigate. Soon I found myself shivering mildly on a lower platform with time to spare, clutching a bag that I hoped contained crisps and a diet cola. The express to Hakodate starts at the Shin-Aomori on the outskirts of town and a few minutes later arrives at Aomori station proper. In a week I’ll spend a night here, before taking trains back toward Tokyo and on to Hiroshima, right now all I can see through the window is snow, more snow, and midday commuters queuing for local trains.

A brief stop to take on passengers and we’re rolling back out of Aomori again, past snow-topped rolling stock, snow-covered infrastructure and snowed-up trains.

Aomori retreats into the distance and the train heads back out through a landscape of snow and at the occasional crossing, views down long country roads that lead to the hills and mountains in the distance. This is what I wanted to see and feel, the sensation of being in the journey, on the edge of something, being far away, not knowing my surroundings, the possibility and the potential of the land ahead.

The Seikan Tunnel is the longest and the deepest operational rail tunnel in the world, at least for a couple more years till the Swiss open their tunnel under the Alps. Happily JR Hokkaido provide a laminated information sheet to let you know exactly when you’re 240m below sea-level. Theres’s also a handy, cute, infographic at the end of each carriage.

The ride though the tunnel is relatively uneventful, I’ve been up since 4.30am and the adrenalin surge of the 200mph train from Tokyo has taken its toll, so I half-nap my way through the darkness until we reached daylight and my first glimpse of Hokkaidō.

To the left, when the trees do not obscure the view, long vistas of snow covered fields, distant buildings, towns and villages, flash past snow soaked barns and farms. To the right we track with the coast road and the sea, arcing round the island, first travelling due East, in the distance first Honshu hangs back in the mist, then as we turn round into the bay Hakodate comes into view, far off on the other side.

I’ve never seen snow in such close proximity to the open sea before, enough falls every year that the road has overhead snow markers for safety.

We tilt past an artificial bay, all the boats parked up, except one heading out. I can’t follow it to see if it stays inside the bay or ventures onto the open waters. The boat looks so tiny, the sea and sky so big.

We curve into Hakodate, the station is a terminus. I’m starving too, the crisps I thought I’d bought back in Aomori turned out to be thin sugary stick biscuits. I banned biscuits, cakes and sweets from my diet a couple of years ago, in attempt to lose weight. It worked. I’m eight stone lighter these days. If I hadn’t made this shift, I’d never have made it on to a trip like this, likely not had the courage to switch jobs and be able to have the time, or have the fitness to carry it off. I’ve stuck to the sugar ban ever since, so one crunch on the first stick and they went back in the bag. I have no willpower when it comes to sugary stuff, no ability to be moderate in my diet, I just have the means to be stubborn and not eat any; I kicked the biscuit bag under the seat in front, recovered and binned it when I arrived at Hakodate.

The station is warm, air conditioned and glass lined, it’s pretty comfortable, but there’s an oddness – the public toilets, while clean, provide no means to dry your hands. I find myself in the dubious situation of wandering around the conveniences for a few minutes with dripping wet hands. I figure perhaps there’s a special room with the dryers? Or some kind of kooky hot air vending machine people go to? In the end the mystery is solved when another guy comes in, and having whisked them under the taps just shake his hands vigorously in the air and then walks out drying them on his clothes. I do likewise and then coat my hands anti-bacterial gel to top it off; a bit excessive perhaps as everything in Japan seems astonishingly clean but I’ve mentioned my ability to cause myself chaos – if anyone is going to go and get food poisoning here, it’s probably me.

The food situation wasn’t great either. Upstairs, a local art exhibition of some kind, a couple trying to have a private conversation behind the blue push-pin screens and over the way a canteen with a fair few smokers in it. Downstairs is a bakery, so that’s the choice made. Another curiosity, observing the local passengers I do as they do: I pick up a likely looking item which might be a cold bacon and bread twist with a pair of tongs and place it straight and naked on to a brown serving tray, picked from a large pile by the door. I then take it to the counter, where the lady takes it off the tray with her hands and wraps it in a bag and hands it back to me.

It is a cold bacon and bread twist, and it tastes pretty good. After killing an hour munching on the bread and checking email, I go to find my final train of the day, the Hokuto limited express to Sapporo. The attendants at Shibuya had done their best, but weren’t able to get me a window seat or a green car booking; this wasn’t the Super Hokuto either – the “Super” trains were modern tilting diesels that cut forty minutes off the journey time – but the older, slower regular train.

For all that, as the most basic seat on an older train it wasn’t bad; the carriage was obviously old and tired in a well travelled sort of way but there were a couple of power sockets for every seat and all the seats reclined. Put it this way, it was still far nicer than what Virgin inflict on me most mornings. The man next to me was, I surmised, a college student, who promptly went to sleep as the train rolled out.

I shot what I could from my aisle seat, trying not to annoy my fellow passengers too much. It helps that my camera is pretty discreet, the shutter is silent unless your ear is against the lens.

After waking up a while later, my neighbour took a shot of a train fan on a platform with his phone, as I took one of him with my camera. Noticing my camera, he quickly offered to switch seats so I could get a better view – with some English and gesturing he explained he did the trip regularly and planned to sleep most of the way, so the view didn’t matter to him much. I nodded and thanked him as best I could, he politely waved it off, popped in his headphones and shut his eyes while I pushed my camera against the glass and started shooting again.

Necessarily the view from the main freight route running into the island is going to have its share of infrastructure and industry, for me these scenes were as pretty as the “unspoilt” snow vistas I’d seen earlier. This was a working landscape, one which given the climate in winter, must be pretty hard to work in. It looked bleak, tough and almost foreboding, it also looked exciting.

As we rolled on through a town I caught some almost entirely English graffiti; because of this I think this is a deliberate retail design of some kind, rather than just the local kids being busy with their spray cans.

The working landscape continued on, flashing between light-to-heavy industry and nature in rapid succession.

Factory, river, factory, river…

Culverts and excavators, power lines in all directions, to the distance more long roads stretch out to the mountains.

Light fades, tail-lights can be seen, and the suburban fringes of satellite towns come into view. Soon it’s too dark to shoot anything useful and I busy myself grabbing all my gear ready to leave.

Twelve hours or so after I set off from my hotel in Shibuya, I pull into Sapporo station. It’s been a heck of a journey.

Would I do it again? Possibly. I’m glad I did it. Travelling this sort of distance with the landscape rolling by the window, not far below in the clouds, is almost magical. It feels grounded and real, the miles rolling under you, the destination moving steadily toward you, but also panoramic, a personal movie playing out and scrolling along outside.

Still twelve hours is twelve hours and I’m pretty tired, but I have a rough idea of the geography and increasing confidence in Google Maps to just work on my phone wherever I am. The challenge now is to make way to the (in)famous Susukino entertainment district where my hotel is; in theory, if I can find it, I can now walk underground in comfort and warmth for twenty minutes using the Chi-Ka-Ho, the lengthy heated underground walkway that runs from the station all the way there.

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