Mini-trip #3: Seishun 18-ing to Onomichi & the end of Honshu

Posted on September 18, 2025 by eli. 4771 words.

*taps* Is this thing on? Yes, yes, I’m spending more time doing things (and procrastinating) than writing about doing things. I guess that’s a good thing, maybe? It’s now September 2025 and I’m writing about a very very long local train adventure I did way back in December 2024 (oh well). It’s kind of funny to write about so far afterward, and think back on, because I’ve done so much of this by now – but this was my first real, all-local train trip, and the start of me settling into the habit & hobby of going out of my way to ride strange/different/new lines just for the sake of it, seeing new places and landscapes and infrastructure and stumbling upon lots of unexpected things…

The background for this is that a certain bus company in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, the westernmost city at the very edge of Honshu, released a commemorative nimoca at a little-publicized, one-day 100th anniversary celebration back in November of last year, and all remaining unsold stock they made available online (in classic Japan fashion, through a very convoluted system, where you mailed them cash and they sent you a card in return, which you then had to pay more cash-on-delivery for). A couple friends asked me if I could use my domestic address to order them each a card when they went on sale – I don’t count online purchases or mail-order IC cards for my own collection, after all – and I said sure, of course. But I emailed the company to ask: hey, is it actually possible to purchase this from you in-person? The head of the automotive division (just small company things! ☺) wrote back to me to say, sorry, no… but we noticed you purchased some cards already and, if you want, despite the per-person limit we said prior, it’s alright if you order another.

I replied telling them about my IC card collecting hobby, shared that the cards I had bought were really on behalf of some friends, and explained that the “rule” I’ve set for myself is that I want to obtain everything on my own, in-person, and if they’d consider my request, I’d love to come all the way from Nagoya on local trains – using the Seishun 18 Kippu – to come get the card. They wrote back a couple hours later: OK, eli, we’ll make special arrangements for you. Let us know when you’ll be here. You can come to our head office at this address, during weekday business hours, sometime before the end of January, and bring cash. We’re looking forward to seeing you! “Holy shit,” I thought. “I got a Japanese company to bend the rules.”

(If this were a YouTube video, that’d be the thumbnail. But it’s not! Thank god!)

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Mini-trip #2: Oigawa Railway

Posted on May 9, 2025 by eli. 3402 words.

I took the prettiest train ride of my entire life.

This is the second piece in my series of blogposts about my handful of recent1OK, not really recent now, it was back in December of last year, but I’m behind here!, short, 2–3 day trips. While the month prior I had very spontaneously headed down to Kyushu, this weekend’s target was just one prefecture over, to Shizuoka, and things couldn’t be quiiite as last-minute this time. I had been wanting to ride the Oigawa Railway’s two collinear lines for a while – the Ikawa Line in particular is one of Japan’s only forest railways and the only cog railway in the country, too – and I’d figured that when the fall2OK, again, not really fall, but December is unfortunately now when stupidly-hot Japan finally cools down and has the leaves change color… leaves were changing colors would be a perfect time to do it. However, the section connecting the two lines was washed away in a storm in 2022 and hasn’t been operating since. Taking the replacement bus service operated by the local town is a bit of a hassle, takes more time, and involves a lot of looking at Japanese-style timetables to figure out exactly which train to catch and when, plus securing a place to stay somewhere along the line in order to have enough time to go down and back in the daylight. Luckily I had some time to plan the week before, and there was a place that let me make a booking just a couple days ahead of time!

At the end of two eventful days, I had the absolute most magical, wonderful time exploring and staying in the little tea-rich town of Kawane, specifically the district Nukuri, filled with a heartwarming, inspiring – and unexpected – community of artists and farmers, against backdrop of an unbelievably magnificent train station and some of the prettiest views I’ve seen in the country, across bridges and through forests while traversing the course of the Oi River.
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Mini-trip #1: Saga, Kumamoto, Hiroshima

Posted on March 26, 2025 by eli. 2516 words.

Oh my god ahhhh I’m leaving tomorrow for a two-week trip with my mom, and then a few days later it’s the opening of the World Expo (commemorative Myaku-Myaku ICOCA here I come!) and then a week after that I leave on my Golden Week trip. ALREADY. I feel like I just wrote about GW last year. It’s the second most recent post on this blog! And I want to write about my upcoming big GW trip year, of course, but have so much to write about that I’ve done in the recent past too that I’ve been putting off. I’m so behind. Ahhhhhhh.

I also received two very kind messages recently which motivated me to write this post in a very spur-of-the-moment fashion all in one go:

“haiii i stumbled across your blog while i was bored at work and i literally love reading them (especially the juzo itami one) can u please write more so i wont be bored at work. 🙏 thank you so much. you are awesome.”

“Just wanted to tell you and ive been reading your blog for the last hr and half and I’m and not only nostalgic (seishunjuhachi Kippu proud traveler) and learning (didn’t know ‘Kokeshi’ is actually Sendai Ben and I lived near the kokeshi museum in Kuroishi) but laughing my butt off […] I have a special love and respect for writers. I hope you continue.”

Thanks, guys!

OK, so for my New Year’s holiday three months back, I went to Hokkaido to bask in the snow. It was wonderful and that will be a long post at some point hopefully not too far in the future from now with lots of pictures as I make my way through all my trips chronologically. For now, this shorter post is focused on the first of a bunch of mini-trips I did before then.

It’s November 23, 2024. I had recently tried, and succeeded (I thought) in convincing some fellow-foreigner acquaintances from work to drive (the horror) to Shirakawago. They like cars and were down. We had plans in place already, but then one of them, the same morning, was afraid “there might be snow” (there wasn’t) so he pulls out. The other one suddenly “has to be back by afternoon” to “deliver some documents” and didn’t realize how far away it was despite living here since he was a teenager. OK. This is very typical, frankly. So the plan to go to Gifu is cancelled. At the exact same time, my Japanese IC card collecting friend Sunagawa-san, who lives in Kyushu, happens to be down in Kumamoto to see some plane that he’s obsessed with that looks like a dolphin, and confirms to me – I had asked prior – that the old Kumamon no IC Card design is still available in some vending machines, which I had learned about after having spotted it in a photo on Twitter few days back. And not only that, but the JR Kyushu Twitter account had posted that somehow the Sagan Tosu SUGOCA (commemorative design for the local professional soccer team who according to my undergrad friend are very mediocre) is also still available at one single station, five months after its initial release… with limited, decreasing stock. Who knows how long they’ll both still be around.

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My “Seishun 18 Juu-Pachi” Koshinetsu–Tohoku Obon adventure

Posted on November 26, 2024 by eli. 10199 words.

OK, I’m a convert. Sitting on trains for up to eight hours a day, mostly as a way to escape the up-to-40°C / 104°F temperatures outside and sit inside an air-conditioned vehicle? Getting to pay a flat rate for unlimited rides on JR local lines across the country? Finally getting to travel back up to Tohoku (north-eastern Japan) for the first time in seven years? Absolutely yes, sign me up. I was a little worried it might be too much for me going in, too much sitting, or too much traveling and transit-ing, but in reality, I can’t wait to do it again.

Every summer (actually three times throughout the year, for a fixed amount of time only) all the Japan Railways Group companies release the Seishun 18 Kippu, or the “Youth 18 Ticket”, a discount railway pass (intended for poor students, hence the name, although with no age limit or rider restrictions) which allows users to ride an unlimited number of JR trains and lines across the country for five non-consecutive days1Well… more on this at the end. for a pretty affordable price. The catch is that it only gets you access to conventional lines, which are of course slow, stopping at nearly every single station – no high-speed limited expresses or shinkansen, not even if you pay the express fare on top. But this ticket is famous in Japan, well-known and well-loved since the summer of 1982 when it first went on sale. As a public transit aficionado, it felt like a rite of passage for me to at least use it once during my time living in this country, right?

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Golden Week!

Posted on August 6, 2024 by eli. 4719 words.

At the end of April and beginning of May, I took a big Golden Week trip westward and down through Kyushu. I have multiple friends who’ve visited or who have extended family in Fukuoka – they’ve all had nothing but great things to say about it, and likewise I’ve wanted to visit Hiroshima on my own as well. I had a week off for the holidays, so with this, plus my general enjoyment of traveling and seeing new places… and motivated by the fact that Kyushu is unequivocally the best place in Japan to get tons and tons of IC cards… I made a spreadsheet to plan and figure out how to handle all of these magnetic paper tickets:

Most (not all) of my tickets. Not as complicated as it might look. I promise!

This was my first time making (heavy) use of both stopovers (途中下車 tochuu gesha) and round-trip discounts (往復割引 oufuku waribiki), as I was traveling along a single, straight route via shinkansen but wanted to stop off at various places along the way.

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