North to Aomori

Riding the Tōhoku Shinkansen

By Lee Harker

May 21^st, 2014

I’d stayed in Shibuya for the view, a thirty-second floor indulgence in the Cerulean Tower Hotel. Life is uncertain and if I was going to be in Tokyo, I should have at least a couple of nights as high in the sky as I could get.

A high window wasn’t my main reason to visit to Japan – that had come to me while reading the Japan by Rail guidebook. It described a railway in Hokkaido, the northernmost island, called the Senmō Line. Relatively remote, single-track, running between the towns of Abashiri and Kushiro, first east along the frozen edges of the Sea of Okhotsk then cutting southward through the edge of the Akan National Park. It was, according to the guidebook, an effort to get to but utterly beautiful. More research suggested it was really not somewhere where tourists went in winter, the nights full of heavy snowfall and temperatures that could fall below -10ºC.

It sounded great.

To get there, first I needed to leave my hotel and travel to Hokkaido. Every journey planner agreed the optimal route was to get the monorail to Haneda Airport in Tokyo, fly up to Chitose Airport in Hokkaido and travel the relatively short distance to the largest city, Sapporo. The flight takes an hour and a half.

I didn’t want to fly, I had a rail-pass. I wanted to take the train.

The sensible option, then, is the sleeper train. Slide out of Tokyo in the early evening, dine, rumble and hopefully snooze your way north, peeking your head out early morning as you exit the Seikan Tunnel and see Hokkaido, roll on into Sapporo in time for a late brunch. You pay extra for the sleeper but it’s comparable to a night in a hotel.

Good luck booking a place on a sleeper train, said the Internet: the booking process is all in Japanese, domestic demand is high, all the places are almost instantly filled when the schedules are set each month and tickets are made available. Maybe, perhaps, if you have a Japanese-speaking friend or great language skills you might get lucky over the phone or in person at the start of the month, otherwise it’s not going to happen.

Time to settle down spend time with Hyperdia, the excellent online rail timetable, find another way – there is one and it’s quite simple really. Here’s how:

Take the earliest Shinkansen of the morning from Tokyo to Shin-Aomori where it terminates. Switch over to the Super Hakucho Limited Express and run through to Hakodate in Hokkaido, where it terminates. Change again to the Super Hokuto train which will take you on to Sapporo, where, guess what, it terminates. It’ll take around twelve hours, if you include a modest gap in Hakodate for lunch.

Importantly, type out your simple schedule, train numbers and times, and print it. Bring it with you to Japan and present it to the JR Rail Information Booth at Shibuya Station. The two attendants there will smile, examine it politely, nod, smile again and then, even without any Japanese language skills, you’ll understand instantly that your plan needs work. You’re not being judged, it’s clear from hand signals and apologetic noises that everyone at JR Rail is very happy and delighted that you’ve had a go by yourself and you’ve done very well, considering, but perhaps your plan could be improved just a bit… would that be alright?

Of course it is.

They go to work. Conversations are had in Japanese. Timetables as large as phone directories are consulted. Computer keyboards are tapped. The vital green reservation tickets are printed. They are in Japanese. Relax. An attendant reaches for her pen, it is one of those that contains different colours of ink, with sliders to select the colour – the tickets are carefully annotated. In English. In colour. The printed plan too is annotated, sections are apologetically crossed out, amendments are added neatly without, it is hoped, spoiling the plan which is a good plan but needed a little work. Explanations on the changes are given in understandable English, directions to the station platform needed the next morning are pointed to.

Say “thank you very much”, in Japanese.

Say it again a few more times. Then tell them they’re awesome, in English, because they are.

At 6.32am Tokyo slides by, viewed through the astonishingly clean windows, the city warm in the morning light. The Shinkansen is big and comfy and the chairs in the Green Car have power assisted reclining modes and plenty of power sockets. It’s easy to become distracted. A nice attendant hands out coffee, a towel to clean the hands. Tokyo is a soft rushing scroll of apartments, infrastructure and construction sites, the train is smooth, almost silent. It glides.

I travel by express train several times a week – a lengthy commute down the West Coast Main Line from the Lake District to the Fylde Coast. The Shinkansen feels just a little bit faster. A little stronger. It’s being deceptive. Though I didn’t know it then, it’s barely stretching. Noise limits, the legal result of the ear-cracking tunnel boom, the reason behind the long green aerodynamic snout, keep the train from speeding in Greater Tokyo.

Clear of Tokyo, we reach Ōmiya and the limit rises, the train picking up speed toward 170mph. It’s impressively fast and we’re not at full power yet. After Utsunomiya falls behind us we pick up even more speed, a different league. You feel acceleration push you back into your chair, firmly,have the sensation of being inside a large, heavy machine full of power.

It’s the fastest I’ve ever travelled at sea-level, but how fast am I going? I want to text my brother to show off. I download a speedometer app over 4G to my iPhone and confirm that at the moment, in an almost imperceptible lean into a curve, I’m tanking along at 196mph.

Shutter speed and focus might be a problem here.

Take a moment. Take a breath. Change the settings. The Fuji has nice controls, everything important is on a dial and can be set quickly even while plunging along inside a big green monster.

1/2000s shutter, perhaps? Modest aperture, f5.6. Trade some ISO for reaction time but try and get enough light through the lens to keep the quality acceptable. Better, much better.

Japan flies by, the almost silent shutter of my camera ticking in Drive mode. It’s not quite pray and spray photography; I’m riding the exposure comp dial as the clouds shift in the sky, looking ahead of the lens to anticipate when potential scenes will pass by.

Perhaps I should be taking one-off shots, not blasting in batches, but there’s a tension between trying to pull off the shots I want and the knowledge that this is a time and journey I won’t experience again. Missing a chance at a purer photo for the sake of, frankly, ego seems foolish.

A camera is a tool. It has functions and performance. The one I have is very good, better than me. It can handle this moment, so I let it.

Towns flash by, shielded by noise deflectors, lesser stations with glass panelled sides. Gathering clouds boil in, hugging the mountains in the distance, the morning commuter traffic heading in one direction.

Tokyo had been sunny and crisp, though recently Japan had enjoyed more snow fall than is usual, the month before it had snowed heavily there. As we pressed north the landscape outside began to shift from warm browns to fragments of white.

Stubbled-ground, snow-sugar. Clouds falling away to a solid grey-blue sky.

Turn to sip the coffee, look at the map on the phone, raised head to the window once more and the land has abruptly shifted white, ice collects by the sides of the line, snow is falling through the air, whumped out of the way by the train. It doesn’t slow down. We dash over bridges and frozen rivers.

It’s a full on snow-storm and we fly through it at 200mph passing small towns buried in the white.

Is there any technical skill in the photos I’m taking? Am I making any improvement, progression? I find I just don’t care. I’m lost in the moment, a grin from ear to ear.

Sometimes the air clears of snow, the reflected light bright and clear, the line raised a little from the land. Smaller towns, distant clusters of houses, picked out in white, run level with the window. Dots of colour, cars. They snatch by outside as the train rushes on, my only hope that a few of the photos I take might show people what it looks like.

I think they do.

Did I plan to take these photos? No. Did I react to the land outside? Yes.

I’m ok with that. I’d never really shot from a moving train before, never taken photos moving at such speed. Heck, other than the sterile tube of a jet, I’ve never been travelling this fast in my life. So, it’s luck and happy accidents; maybe a little anticipation.

I’d seen a few birds startle up a moment before and started shooting.

In 2016 the line won’t terminate at Shin-Aomori, the Shinkansen will continue onward, diving through the Seikan Tunnel to Hakodate. This ambition is not without complication: in the deep confines of the undersea tunnel the surging power, the turbulence, of the bullet-train risks the derailment of the slow but vital freight trains that run the other way. Another twenty years later, it is hoped, the Shinkansen will depart Hakodate and bore on through new tunnels to Sapporo, cutting the journey to Tokyo down to five hours.

As it is, after two-hundred minutes give or take, often at two-hunded miles-per-hour, give or take, I arrive a Shin-Aomori, the end of the line. I step onto the icy platform, having roughly half an hour to find food and the next train, the Super Hakucho that will take me under the sea and into Hokkaido, on to Hakodate.