Mini-trip #4: How do I keep finding myself in Saga?

Posted on February 28, 2026 by eli fessler

Nobody likes Saga Prefecture for some reason. There’s a Japanese company that carries out yearly “prefectural attractiveness” surveys, and every year Saga’s right near the bottom. It fell one spot to last place in 2022, leading to a lot of cheering from residents of Ibaraki, which had formerly held that position: “Ibaraki casts off title of Japan’s ‘least attractive’ prefecture” the newspapers reported! Saga was the new #47 out of 47! But a year later, they switched again: “Ibaraki regains ignominious crown as least attractive prefecture”, and Saga was back to #46… but alas, the following year, in 2024, Saga dropped to dead last again. Poor Saga. (The name doesn’t even get mentioned in the newspaper headlines…)

For what it’s worth, this is frankly quite strange to me, since the Saga International Balloon Fiesta brings in a million spectators annually to see hot air balloons, and Imari ware and Arita ware are both well-known types of porcelain… yet people still insist the prefecture has nothing going for it!)

But you know who does like Saga, or at least somehow finds themself there a lot? Me! I passed through multiple times in 2024, but didn’t have a chance to actually stay in the prefecture overnight, despite my efforts. That finally changed with this trip though – a quick two-day, down-and-back train expedition to Northern Kyushu.

 

So what’s bringing me to Saga this time? Well, in mid-February 2025, JR Kyushu suddenly announced that they’d be – quite unexpectedly! – selling two commemorative IC cards in only two weeks’ time to celebrate the SUGOCA area being expanded to cover more stations in Saga and Nagasaki Prefectures. The cards were due to release on a mid-week weekday, and I was lamenting that there wasn’t any decently cheap and fast way that I could get down there and back with only taking minimal time off… until a friend in my “IC card collecting in Japan” Discord alerted me to the fact that JR West was apparently selling a 2-day all-you-can-ride pass for all their lines, including shinkansen (with free seat reservations!!) for a limited two-month campaign period that happened to align just perfectly.

Continue reading →

Posted in Transport | Tagged , | Leave a comment

From Nagoya to Nagoya, riding the Iida Line and KURURUing through Nagano

Posted on January 30, 2026 by eli fessler

Happy 2026! Now almost a year behind, this post recounts a circular trip I took over the course of a long weekend in February 2025 to get the brand new 2-in-1 regional collaboration IC card KURURU. I’m trying to finish up this blogpost before the Olympics start next month and take over my life temporarily, which is a perfect segue to talk about my destination this time around, since it was the site of the 1998 Winter Games… Nagano!

 

This was my second time visiting Nagano City, a place in the prefecture I think is super underrated compared to the admittedly more hip-and-happening Matsumoto (although I did stay there for a night as well, my first time returning since my summer in Japan as a tourist in 2017). My route to the prefecture, as shown on the trip map above, was from the south, riding the Iida Line, which I’d long wanted to travel. It’s famous among railfans for its extreme number of secluded hikyo stations,1A 2018 article in the Asahi Shimbun calls it the “holy land for those who love touring hikyo-eki”. but the aspect that was really of interest to me was that services on the line are the longest local trains in all of Japan in terms of running time and number of stops. My two-car train stopped at a whopping 94 stations, departing Toyohashi at 10:42 and arriving into Okaya that night at 17:332In practice, even a bit longer, as we were six minutes late getting in.… a continuous run of nearly seven hours!

The ticket I started and ended this journey on is from Nagoya City to Nagoya City – quite a curious item, right? at least to anyone not into weird ticketing stuff – and it was my first time getting one issued like this, something that I suspect is probably not possible in other countries with train systems less complex (and therefore less fun!) than Japan’s. ;D The route’s printed in Japanese, but from Nagoya it follows the Tokaido Line east to Toyohashi, then branches up onto the Iida Line, which in turn connects with the Chuo (East) Line, and then at Shiojiri it turns eastward to follow the Chuo (West) Line back into Nagoya. The bottom ticket shown in the photo is the Shinshu One Day Pass3A bit sad they retired their old version of the info webpage for this pass, which had a much more fun map showing local specialties of each area, compared to the the uniformly sterile one they have for all of their tickets now. (a “free pass”, or all-you-can-ride ticket) for the Shinetsu region (Nagano & Niigata) which let me ride around the following day on a bunch of JR and non-JR lines. I bought some others as well on top of these main two which I didn’t take photos of, but all-in-all I had a pretty great time exploring the Greater Nagano Area (is that a term? it is now) on a whole bunch of different trains.

Also, yes, per my previous criteria (“three-day weekend trips”) this post should be classified as a “mini-trip” but I really packed a lot in, and it felt different to me, and also the title is long enough as is without an additional prefix, so I’m eliding the classification and label this time. :)

Continue reading →

Posted in Transport | Tagged , | Leave a comment

SNOOOOOOW IN HOKKAIDOOOOO!

Posted on November 18, 2025 by eli fessler

Japan is so hot. So absolutely, unlivably hot for a solid four, arguably even five months of the year. But I grew up in the snow – it’s my favorite type of weather, and winter is my favorite season bar none, so for my second year-end holiday period in Japan, I went up to Hokkaido, the last of Japan’s major islands I’d yet to explore, home to some of the world’s snowiest places (and, not coincidentally, also from where I was missing quite a number of IC cards!)

And what can I say? Well, it was cold… and pure magic.




I traveled around with this ticket, the “Hokkaido & East Japan Pass”, which is like the Seishun 18 Kippu I’ve talked about in two previous posts, but just for the JR East and Hokkaido regions. So that means all local trains… the 鈍行列車 donko ressha, or slow trains, the kinds that let you soak up all that great local culture and feeling… and loads of travel time through snowy landscapes:

Partway through my trip, I decided to start asking for stopover stamps, seen in the photo above – a practice that I’ve continued to do with all my long tickets since. It wasn’t strictly necessary with an all-you-can-ride “free pass” like this one, but they’re a fun representation and visualization how much I’ve traveled on a certain ticket. Every station where I alighted got its name marked in a colored oval, and while Hokkaido does have some automatic ticket gates in urban areas, a lot of the island (and severely underfunded, in-debt, still-government-subsidized rail company) is still doing everything by hand, and there’s something quaint about this way of capturing how much benefit I’m getting from their services – and, frankly, JR Hokkaido was wonderful. I’d heard how unreliable trains up north were for delays due to weather, and with services more generally on the decline due to financial problems, but my experience on the network was really exceptional, surpassing my expectations; I felt welcomed by accommodating and kind station staff and impressive operations even through very inclement weather. It comes across as if the rest of the country is oftentimes eager to shut things down at the first sign of wind or rain… but not JR Hokkaido! Go JR Hokkaido!

My trip was nine days – I shot up to Noboribetsu on the shinkansen the first day, with a brief stopover in Fukushima (to get an IC card) and then transfer in Sendai, leaving pretty early that morning to make it to my ryokan by dinnertime. Riding the train up there as opposed to flying was great since I got to see the country get snowier and snowier as I got more and more north. After that I headed toward Sapporo, but then quickly sped over to Asahikawa the next morning – my beloved, oh man I can’t wait to go back, more on this below – to get some more IC cards, since one of the ticketing offices was closed the entirety of the New Year’s holidays! Then it was back to Sapporo (spontaneously via a different long route) as I figured Hokkaido’s largest city would be the best place to spend New Year’s Eve and the first couple quiet days of the year. I rode around the whole metro and streetcar system, and took a day trip up to Otaru as well. Finally, I headed far east to Kitami to grab my final IC card from Hokkaido and, of course, freeze my butt off too. After a day on the eastern coast of the island in Abashiri, and a quick jaunt to Shari at the base of the Shiretoko Peninsula, I flew home, from a tiny airport with their one-direct-flight-a-day back home to Nagoya. I have way too many photos – I did say snow was my favorite weather, after all… – and so many stories. And as always, it came with a ton of fun signs seen, great food eaten, cozy trains ridden, &c &c. Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading about some of my adventures here!

Continue reading →

Posted in Transport | Tagged | Leave a comment

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

Posted on September 18, 2025 by eli fessler

*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.”

(A couple people have asked if I make YouTube videos, and the answer is no, thank god. But I did go ahead and made a nice chaotic thumbnail-style image in lieu of that. Whee!)

Continue reading →

Posted in Transport | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Mini-trip #2: Oigawa Railway

Posted on May 9, 2025 by eli fessler

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.
Continue reading →

Posted in Transport | Tagged | 3 Comments