Hi! I’m eli. I live in Japan, collect IC cards, and ride a lot of slow, local trains around the country. The thumbnails below link to some of my trip writeups – or you can learn more about me, see where I’ve traveled, or scroll down to read what I’ve written recently.
Enjoy poking around!
My trip westward through Kochi Prefecture continues! If you haven’t seen part one of this trip report, feel free check that out (though personally I’m never one to shun reading non-linearly!) The second half of my Golden Week 2025 travels are highlighted here:
Out of my collection of – prior to Golden Week last year – 129 unique IC cards from all around Japan, there was only one regularly available one I was missing: DESUCA, from Kochi Prefecture. Kochi’s one most out-of-the-way regions of Japan, but also one I’d been hearing for ages was stunning, wild, not to mention full of fantastic food… Despite this, it’s the third-least visited prefecture by inbound tourists, and in the bottom five for domestic tourism. It’s also time-consuming – annoying – to get to by train. After all, it’s not like the Shinkansen network even gets close to Shikoku, much less running to the southernmost part of it… COME ON SHIKOKU!!
So, with a little over a week free for the holidays, I set off for Kochi, and to explore the south of Shikoku as a whole, via a route I’d long wanted to travel: going southwest from Nagoya, traversing the Kii Peninsula along the coasts of Mie and Wakayama, and then hopping on the ferry across to Tokushima Prefecture, the other remaining prefecture in Shikoku that it’d be my first time visiting. My trip was eleven days total and dense, so in this post, I’m just covering the first half of it – in Wakayama, across the Seto Inland Sea to Tokushima, looping up through Kagawa, and then back down to the far south of Cape Muroto. As you can see on the map below, the areas outside of this are shaded out. I’ll write about the latter half in a month or two!
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. (Not to mention, their 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.
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. :)
