Japan's beloved slow-motion train

BBC
5 January 2023 (Japan)

The Japanese are obsessed with bullet trains – but they're equally smitten by those that aren't so speedy.

In Japan, the line between the creative and curious is a fine one, and that morning at 08:49, my train was running late. Late by Japanese standards, if only three minutes in real time.

As absurd as it sounds, such inconvenience can cause outcry in a clockwork-run country like Japan. At Tokyo's Shinjuku Station, the world's busiest, officials have been known to issue written apologies, with conductors falling to their knees in atonement if services depart late or even early. Drivers have also been penalised for falling behind schedule.

When my train finally arrived, however, four minutes later at 08:53, every Japanese passenger on the platform softly applauded.

This was the first of many peculiarities about my experience on board the Resort Shirakami Train, which crawls along the Gonō Line through Akita Prefecture in northern Honshu's Tōhoku region. Slow by anyone's standards, it's a train purposely built for travelling tortoise-like from the city of Aomori to Akita, often averaging just 10km/h. Operator JR-East (East Japan Railway Company) calls the service a "Joyful Train", and a trip on such a leaden-footed locomotive is like few other sightseeing journeys in the country.

For many Japanese, Tōhoku is a lost world, part of the country that has remained unchanged in the minds of the Tokyo elite. There is no Hello Kitty theme park here. No international airport or shopping mall frenzy. There are no dazzling neon-lit Nintendo arcades, Godzilla-sized towers or robot-run hotels. No tourists, even. Here is old-fashioned Japan, pure and simple, and that's exactly why I came: to travel slow, to not watch the clock.

Besides the speed, the Resort Shirakami is unusual for other reasons. The only train to run directly along Japan's coastline, its USP is dealing in a special kind of nostalgia, and my trip on the limited-stop service was a sell-out. Three trains operate on the Gonō Line, with three return services daily, and I was on board "Kumagera". It entered service in March 2006 and is named after a black woodpecker that lives in the Unesco-listed Shirakami-Sanchi Highlands, the world's largest remaining virgin beech forest, through which the train trundles. The train also has a tangerine snub nose on the front inspired by the setting sun.

Source
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230104-japans-beloved-slow-motion-train