Every Day an Adventure

Back in January, Shinsuke and I were taking a trip to Aizu-Wakamatsu via the Tadami line. The idea then was to see the scenery in the middle of nowhere in Niigata and Fukushima covered in snow. Unfortunately, as I wrote then, we completely FAILED in our quest BECAUSE there was so much snow that the line got snowed in.

That time, we also took a side trip to Doai and Yubiso stations because they are interesting; the way that particular line runs, going out of Tokyo, you go through a really big tunnel, and coming back into Tokyo, you go on a line outside that takes an incline down by going in circles and crossing over its own track. Doai in particular has a 420-step staircase going between the upper and lower stations, which took us 10 minutes to descend, and supposedly takes like 20 to ascend at least.

This time, we did no such thing, and started our trip at 9am instead of 6am.

Shin had an "unlimited local train riding" pass as part of 鉄道の日, the anniversary of the JR train lines, or something like that, on October 14 1872. So we could ride unlimited local trains all day for 3000 yen or so, and thus go to Fukushima in a huge loop like this and come back and all. (The ticket lasted until Oct 17th, which is why we went on Sunday.)

( Cut for tons of train photos and Japanese countryside scenery )

So I decided to go to Gunma and watch Hideki Nagasaka pitch. I said I would try to, and well, why not?

Isesaki is actually kinda halfway between Niigata and Tokyo -- I took the shinkansen to Takasaki, then the Ryomo line to Isesaki, and it turns out there IS a bus to the stadium, run for free by the team, so I took that. A bunch of the old folks on the bus talked to me in thick Gunma accents which were really hard to understand.


The stadium is apparently partially dedicated to Sataro Suzuki, the dude responsible for Babe Ruth coming to Japan in 1934. Who knew.


I got accosted by the Gunma Diamond Pegasus mascots. This is not out of the ordinary, really.


Inside the stadium. This photo was actually taken by Yuki Imai's mom.

(No joke, I basically ended up sitting with a player's parents. Well, two rows ahead of them. But I had yakisoba and takoyaki for lunch, and I don't like takoyaki, so I gave it to Mrs. Imai, so a bit later she came by with some yakimanju and grapefruit juice and gave that to me. This is more normal than you'd think, though... Yuki himself is injured and was just coaching first base again today, but his parents were blown away that I knew who he was at all, so that was kinda crazy.)

(Also funny: after I found out she was Yuki's mom, and she had explained how "we live 20 minutes from here, so we rarely go to Niigata but we always come when he plays close to home..." she was like "So who on the team do YOU know?" and I'm like "...well... I came to see Hideki Nagasaka... he played in the US so he likes to talk to me in English...")


Okay, so the game was a 4-4 tie in 11 innings. Nagasaka actually pitched pretty well, he went 7 innings and only gave up 1 run, so Niigata was actually winning 3-1 in the bottom of the 9th and then Hisanori Ohtani (who uses Johnny B Goode as his at-bat theme) went and hit a 2-run homer to tie it. Doh.

After the game, since this was the final home game of the first half of the season (the BCL does two season halves and then has a playoff between the two winners, or something like that) and the Gunma team clinched the first half champion title, they invited everyone in the stadium to come on the field to take a memorial photo with the team. I thought about going, but figured since I'm not really a fan it would be kinda weird.

Instead I waited outside for the Niigata players to come out. I got Yuzo Hino to sign my ticket and talked to him a bit like "Did you ever play at Jingu? I read that you went to Waseda and Soujitsu in the meikan... I watch Tokyo Big 6 all the time but I totally do not remember you!" He laughed like "Oh! Um, I got injured in college and never actually played in an official game, no, but I was in the baseball club at Waseda. Do you know Matsushita?" "Kenta? Now with Seibu?" "Yeah, him. We were classmates."

Then I chatted with Nagasaka for a while, told him it was a good game, shame about the result though. He said he pitched a pretty long outing, also said it was tough pitching to Caraballo. I was like "Did you hit him on purpose?" "No, I didn't... we go way back, I played against him in New Hampshire too." "You didn't tip your cap, I wondered..." "Hahaha, I'm too American now I guess, I don't tip my cap, but it wasn't on purpose, he knew that too."

And well... when the Gunma players came out I went and stalked them. I had bought a yearbook for 500 yen so I wanted to get a bunch of guys to sign it! So I did:


I got manager Hata, starter Kawano, cute catcher Seiya, weird first baseman Shirahata, random dude Okano, Yamakawa (who was wearing Kogure's uniform, he apparently JUST joined the team), and Naoya Fujioka.

Fujioka signed it "Nao", I was like "Eh?" and he said "My name is Naoya. Yoroshiku." Shirahata drew a pig and said "It's a play on my first name", but I don't get it, his first name 泰之 does not appear to have pigness in it.


Shinji Hata used to play for Yakult and was a coach for Chunichi and I think the Fighters too, and so on. He was asking me (in Japanese), "where are you from? ah, Seattle? do you like the Mariners? what brings you to Gunma?" etc etc, which was weird. Shrug, I really wanted his signature and a photo with him since I'd actually heard of him :) But I had my bag on my right shoulder so this photo came out at a weird angle.


Seiya Hirokami, catcher... I just thought he was really cute and wanted a photo with him after he signed my book.


Tomohiro Kawano, big lefty kid who started today's game for Gunma and woulda gotten the loss if Ohtani hadn't hit that big home run. He was so tall that I wanted a photo with him too.

I also took like 800 photos of the game itself, but I haven't had time to go through them either yet.

See, I left Niigata at 8:24am to go to Gunma, then went to that game, then got back to the station at 4:30pm or so, then it took another 2 hours to get home by train to Akabane, and I ate McDonald's because I was starving and exhausted. Came home, did some laundry, cropped some photos, but... omg it's 1am and I need to be up to go to my company tomorrow to apply for a visa renewal, actually. Yikes.

Still, it was a very full weekend. Independent baseball is kinda neat in how accessible the players are -- only 1000 people or so came to each game, and so the players make a point of coming out and meeting the fans afterwards and chatting, so getting a photo with a guy or a signature is relatively easy, although to be fair I wanted Kawamura from Gunma's team since he's a Teikyo alum and I couldn't find him. Still, most of the fans of these teams have jerseys or caps or bags signed by all the players.

And oddly, this weekend I did not have a lot of people trying to talk English to me, or treating me all that funny just for being a white person. It probably did help that before the game I went to watch Nagasaka warm up, took photos of him, and he even waved hi at me first, so the other Niigata fans probably thought I actually was a friend of his. Shrug.

Anyway, tired. Also I have a ticket to the July 3rd game in Niigata, which I got when I bought a t-shirt and megaphone and the ticket (it was 3000 yen for the t-shirt itself, or 3000 yen for the three things together, so I figured, why not?) but I don't think there is any way I would go up for it. It's funny because I find myself already trying to figure out where I can take another trip... might not get to go anywhere until Sapporo in late August though, when I get back from my US trip, which I also need to buy tickets for, argh.

Shinsuke and I had planned today to be a trip out to Aizu-Wakamatsu via the Tadami line, which involved getting up at 4:30am and taking trains through a bunch of crazy mountainous areas of Gunma and Niigata and such, to eventually make a big loop through the northern half of Kanto.

I got 3 hours of sleep and he got 1.5 hours of sleep, and we met up on the first Takasaki-bound train of the morning. He slept for half of the way, but I was awake for all of it. I made him get up to see the sunrise, at any rate.

524 Akabane -> 655 Takasaki
710 Takasaki -> 813 Minakami
821 Minakami -> 825 Yubiso

Everything up to this point was fairly standard, we rode trains, we talked, we slept, we saw beautiful mountains and debated about which one was which, etc. We ran to the train transfers at Takasaki and Minakami because there were a TON of snowboarders and skiiers also taking the same route out towards Niigata, and we wanted seats on the trains.

Minakami, btw, is 水上, which I kept reading as "Mizukami".

Anyway, so Yubiso is a train station in the middle of a tunnel. Well, the outgoing platform is in a tunnel, anyway. The incoming platform is above land, and the entire station is unmanned and in the middle of fucking nowhere, with very little else there except, apparently a campground, an onsen, and a post office. So we took photos of the station and the tunnel and so on, and eventually holed up in the "waiting room" there to eat donuts for a bit and wait.

Went down to get a bus from Yubiso to Doai. An old couple was also waiting for the bus. They apparently had stayed at the onsen and were doing some kind of tour of the mountains of this area, something like that. They had come from Kyushu. Shin ended up talking to the lady a bunch, about Mt. Aso and other parts of Kyushu. The funny part was, I could understand everything they were saying, I just didn't know how to respond, so when he translated for me I was like (in Japanese) "Nono, I get it, I just didn't know what to say. Smoke all the way to Hokkaido when it erupted? That's unbelievable!" The lady was all like "OMG you speak Japanese! What are you two doing out here anyway?" and Shin's like "Uhh... we're enjoying being train nerds."

We rode the bus with them a bit once it showed up (it drove past us and we had to wave it down!) but we were only going one station, to Doai, which is ANOTHER tunnel station. The upper track, going incoming towards Takasaki, goes in a big loop and crosses itself in order to go down a big hill, but the lower track just goes through a new tunnel, which was dug in order to not have to go up and down the damn hill. But unlike Yubiso, there is a HUGE staircase from the upper platform to the lower platform -- it's great, you go across a bridge over a river, and the bridge feeds you right into the side of a mountain, where there's a big sign in the other direction explaining "This is Japan's #1 Mole Station. You have gone up 462 steps to arrive at this point, but there are still some more! Good job! Good luck!" And then there is literally just a HUGE FUCKING STAIRCASE IN A HUGE FUCKING TUNNEL going down. It doesn't take so long to go down, but at the bottom they warn you, "It's gonna take you at least 10 minutes to get up this thing."

They actually number the steps in intervals, and there's a bench around #240 or so, so I took a photo of it. This ended up having us chat about 15-212 and 18-240 for the rest of the way down. ("Which 240 did YOU mean?!")

There were two other people down there also taking photos of the tunnel and whatnot, though. Eventually the train showed up and we were on our merry way towards Koide... except...

905 Yubiso -> 910 Doai (bus)
956 Doai -> 1021 Echigo-Yuzawa

...Shin's camera ran out of battery in Doai. So he wanted to buy a new battery. That combined with a desire to get food and whatnot, when we opened my train schedule book and looked through it, we noticed there was a weekends train from Echigo-Yuzawa that ran at 11:19, so we could stop there for a while instead, since Shin said Koide was a very inaka town but EY is a big ski resort and train hub for heading to Hokuriku and so on.

And sure enough, we found convenience stores and food and everything near or in the station. We ended up getting some kind of pork katsudon thing for lunch, went shopping a little but didn't buy anything, and then went to our next train. Where again, I looked at cool snowy mountains, and Shin kept falling asleep.

1119 Echigo-Yuzawa -> 1202 Koide

And here, unfortunately, is where the adventure turned sour.

We should have been taking the Tadami train from Koide at 13:17, to 17:18 at Aizu-Wakamatsu. That was our entire purpose for this trip -- Shin said it was a beautiful line to take in the winter and see the lovely snowy countryside. Keep in mind this line runs in entirety all of THREE TIMES PER DAY each way, and has maybe 9 cars per day each way, but mostly only running for a few stations on either end, to hook school kids and old people up with bigger better trains at either end.

What we didn't know at the time was that a huge heavy nasty snowfall had kind of overrun the tracks somewhere near Tadami city itself -- in the 5 or so hours since a train had last passed through the area.

So Shin and I went walking into Koide town to waste an hour. There were lots of cute little shops on the town's main drag, but nobody actually walking around town, which was kind of freaky. We went a few blocks to a supermarket, and Shin told me last time he did this route he stopped in there for a bento. (They had sushi bento for 298 yen, which is dirt cheap.) This time we just got candy and walked back to the station, talking about the ramifications of Japan's youth tending to all desert the countryside and want to move to Tokyo.

We got ready to get on the train, and hear the announcement,

"Due to snow, the Tadami train is being delayed until 15:30."

And we're both like, "WTF?!"

Shin goes up and has an animated chat with the stationmaster, and finds out the details about the stations being shut down and so on and so forth. And he comes back and tells me, and we're both like "Dude, if it's delayed 2 hours, we can't stick to our original schedule without being stranded..." and we look through the train book trying to figure out how feasible it is, maybe taking a shinkansen. In the meantime, another Joetsu train arrives and a ton of tourists get off and rush to the Tadami train and take all the seats. And ALSO another train comes in and leaves to return to Echigo-Yuzawa.

Then there's another announcement: "The train will depart at 13:17 as scheduled. But we make no guarantees about when or if you will arrive ANYWHERE."

So we're doubly WTF. Shin has another chat with the stationmaster.

We get on the train, but after 5 minutes of discussing the situation, Shin says he recommends we turn around and go back. I'm a little sad about it, and debating whether I want to spend 5000 yen for a shinkansen or what... but we both notice the skies are getting really dark and the snow is getting heavier. We realize that we can still make it home if the train is up to about an hour behind schedule, but more than that and we're gonna be in trouble.

So, ugh, we end up getting off the train. It pulls out. I immediately feel super-sad. PLUS we have to wait another hour for the next Joetsu train back to civilization :(

Shin and I went to the waiting room to pass the time, chat a bit, and then both fell asleep for about 45 minutes before starting our journey back to Takasaki and so on. We spent most of the next two train segments telling riddles and stories, and Shin got out his laptop and surfed some train geek sites to see if there was any news about the Tadami line (we eventually learn it was delayed for an hour and a half, but we never find out if it landed safely.)

We also determined that the Tadami line implements a really primitive mutex, given that there's only one line and occasionally trains have to travel both ways at the same time. Shin said there's no central tower connecting it, but instead, the conductors give and take special tablets to/from stationmasters to let them know they're travelling on a specific track segment, so if a train arrives at a station and the tablet isn't available, that means someone else is on the segment, and you need to wait for them to release their lock on the track until you can use it.

1422 Koide -> 1543 Minakami
1548 Minakami -> 1651 Takasaki

We get out and walk around for a little while in Takasaki... basically long enough to eat taiyaki and for Shin to buy some kind of special bento from the Yokokawa station or something like that. We admire the bazillion Daruma all over the place, it must be a Gunma thing. Then we hop on another train.

1723 Takasaki -> 1852 Akabane

Shin sleeps through about half of this too, before he actually starts snoring so I wake him up and make him talk to me. I suggest we go do something like videogames or dinner, but he decides he'd rather go home and sleep. I point out that we should have still been on a train to Koriyama at this point, but he's just looking really zonked. He promises he'll take me to the train museum in Omiya when I get back to Japan, apologizes again, and we say goodbye and I step off the train as he continues to Ueno to go home.

I get dinner at Yokado and go home alone and sad and cold. The end.

Here are some photos:


Seriously, the inaka is beautiful.

( More of actual trains and stations and snow and stuff )

I wonder why it is that train stories always loan themselves well to innuendo? Like when Shin and I chased down a steam engine last year, I joked that we were "getting steamy in Chiba". And this time I could pretty much sum up the day like "I slept with Shin on a bunch of trains. But we didn't go all the way."