Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

After checking out of the Holiday Inn, we took our bags over to Narita and put them in storage for the day. Then we caught a Narita Rapid train (Green car available, unreserved) out to Chiba, eating our bento boxes and finally getting to see the Narita Airport railway line in daylight. At Chiba, we boarded the Chiba Monorail, buying a minimum JPY190 ticket each.

We boarded the first Line 2 train that arrived, rode it to the end of the line, then back to the other end, then back to Chiba, where we changed to the Line 1 train and rode out to the end of its (much longer) line and back. Lisa shot vast amounts of video, mostly high-res stuff, and burned through the rest of her batteries and mostly ran out of memory sticks. Along with what's on my PC and all seven memory sticks, she's shot more than 40GB of video during this trip. Editing it into usable form looks to be a winter project.

To economize, we changed lines again and rode one stop out Line 2 before exiting the system and walking the 500m back to Chiba Station. Although we were inside the system for about two hours, exiting where we did meant we were charged only the minimum system fare.

The Osaka Monorail is a SAFEGE type, one of only a few of the French-designed underslung monorails ever built. Because of how it's suspended, you somewhat get the feeling that you are flying over the city at about 20 m AGL or so. It's pretty cool, and no amusement-park ride, as shown by how packed our train was as we headed back toward Chiba Station around 1630 or thereabouts. It's a serious piece of transportation in a country that has to move a whole lot of people efficiently.

I composed this message originally (handwritten) on the 1720 Airport Rapid to Narita Airport from Chiba. Our green car emptied out in Chiba's suburbs, and we ended up with a private car (or part of a car -- the green cars on this train are double-deck between the trucks, and we have the upper deck to ourselves) for our final ride on JR during our trip to Japan.

It would be difficult to work out how much we saved over individual fares for the travel we've done these past three weeks, but we think it must have been substantial. Of cours, part of that was that because we had already bought the passes, we had every incentive to use them as much as possible, whether it was a Shinkansen from Tokyo to Hachinohe, the Kamome from Hakata to Nagasaki, or just hopping on the Tokyo loop line for one stop because the station udon was better there than at Shinagawa.

Lisa, who handled our reservations, pointed out to me as I read the above back to her that in some cases, the only reason we got a seat was because we had Green cards, because there were only green seats available. Although not all trains had green cars, if you're going cross country the way we did, I'd have to say that the green card was well worth the difference in price.

It's going to be very difficult to go back to a country with a third-world transportation system.

After our local train rolled in to Choshi on time and after a brief stop at the restrooms at the JR station, we went down to the end of the platform on which we'd arrived, where stands the tiny station and single car of the Choshi Dentetsu [Electric Railway]. It seemed like a significant number of the people off of our eight-car commuter train were trying to fit into the single car of the little electric line. We bought a couple of day passes (JPY620 each) to give us the flexibility to get on and off as we chose, and squeezed aboard the little electric car.

This railroad is in chronic financial trouble. Lisa observed that if the line ran this full every day, rather than just on Sundays, they wouldn't have to worry about money. We bounced and jostled our way down the 6.4 km, ten-station, mostly single-track railway to the end of the line at Tokawa, where stood one of the most dilapidated train stations I've ever seen. Yet the station reproduced in miniature many of the things we've seen at mainline stations throughout Japan. There was a ticket gate, food service (a couple of vending machines), station information, and even coin lockers (only the little ones).

We could see the sea in the near distance, and at Lisa's suggestion, we walked down to the harbor and looked at the fishing boats and the queue of our fellow passengers at what at the time looked to be the only restaurant in the village (this was not the case, we later found). Fortunately, we were not hungry thanks to having eaten on the train down from Chiba. Having exhausted our interest in the waterfront, we walked back up the hill, passing a man patiently slicing up squid by the side of the street.

Lisa was thirsty, so the first shop we passed that had cold soda in it, she bought one. It looked like the proprietor was running a konbini out of the front room of his house. At the top of the hill, we found a grocery store, which was good because Lisa needed to buy more batteries for the cameras. Our cameras are good, but they go through batteries the way fans go through chocolate. Our timing was good, as the next inbound train to Tokawa was arriving as we got back to the station, giving Lisa a good shot at recording it. After a short layover (trains run three times an hour or so), it headed back, with us aboard.

We rode only one stop this time, to the line's main station at Inoboh, where they have their gift shop, restaurant, and other things to occupy your time. (See this link for someone else's video of one of the line's cars -- not in service the day we rode -- arriving at a much-less crowded Inoboh station.) Had we enough time, we could have gone out to the lighthouse that is one of the area's attractions; however, we did not have that time, and contented ourselves with exploring the gift shop and buying souvenirs. Our day passes included one free rice cake. Apparently sales of the rice cakes and other confections are (barely) propping up this railway line's finances. The crackers have an interesting taste, but not one Lisa cared for that much.

After exhausting our interest (and wallets) here, we caught the next train heading back toward Choshi. Due to the large numbers of people on the line today, they were now double-heading one of their trains, and we hopped aboard the trailing car, which was being towed by the car we'd came out on originally. (Actually, it's unclear whether the car was being towed or if the two were simply coupled together and being operated individually, a la steam train double-headers.)

This time, we rode to first stop out from the line's origin at Choshi, that being Nakanocho, the line's shops. We spent a few minutes exploring the line's yard and shops -- they let people wander around and take photos, giving it the air of the Oregon Electric Railway Museum to us. I wanted to buy the commemorative pin set, but they were sold out, so I settled for yet another key ring. The double-headed train came back through, and we got to see them cut out the second car and take it out of service, passenger loads having subsided sufficiently to do so.

Finally, we boarded yet another car -- we managed to ride all four cars that were in service on the line today -- for the 500 meter ride back to Choshi. Here we had roughly an hour to explore the area near Choshi station before the Limited Express Shioshi #14 was scheduled to leave for Chiba. (A couple of local trains came and went while we were around.) We walked a few blocks out and back from the station and picked up some take-out food for the return trip. Unlike the morning express out to Choshi on which we were unable to get a seat, this train seemed mostly empty, and only a handful of people were in the Green car.

The relatively luxurious limited, with transverse seats, fold-down (albeit unstable and tippy) tray tables, was a great contrast to the local commuter train on which we'd come to Choshi. Of course it doesn't run as often, and it makes fewer stops, and covers the distance back to Choshi much more quickly.

We had a great time at the Choshi Dentetsu. While it imitates mainline railways in miniature, what it really evoked to me was the classic interurban railway (except for the lack of street running), with its bumpy track, slow speeds, un-airconditioned cars, and tiny stations. It also got us out into the Japanese countryside, away from the big cities, which people have been insisting that we should do at least once on this trip. In the end, we missed some of the "big name" attractions in Japan, but have seen other things that we thought were at least as interesting, if not more so.

We were out of the hotel by 0800, and after a routine and quick check-out, we rolled across the street to Shinagawa Station. There we decided to go ahead and get up to Tokyo before making seat reservations for the limited express train from Tokyo to Choshi. This may have been a mistake, but it's hard to tell. We popped down to the Loop Line and caught the next train up to Tokyo Central, but then -- thanks to our unfamiliarity with the station -- exited the wrong gate and had to go back in the same gate we exited after Lisa had a session with the only groundside reservation agent at that gate. She said he talked like he had marbles in his mouth and she could only barely understand him, but that it appeared that the train we wanted had no more seats, green or otherwise, available to reserve. He did, for some reason, go ahead and book us reservations on the return train from Choshi to Tokyo and a Narita Express from Tokyo to Narita Airport that evening.

Heading into the station core, we went to one of the larger reservation counters, where Lisa found a female agent she could understand better. (Lisa says she can understand women speaking Japanese much better than men.) She worked out that while the limited express was sold out, the local all-stops train is unreserved and would still get us out to Choshi with a few hours to do what we wanted. Furthermore, we could get on an "Airport Rapid" train to Chiba, then come back from Choshi only as far as Chiba before taking the Narita Express to the airport (and thus on to our hotel by shuttle bus). This was overall a better deal for us, because it meant we could go store our luggage at Chiba rather than at Tokyo, saving us around two hours of back-and-forthing to retrieve it. So Lisa booked the tickets and we hied our way down to Chiba.

Exiting the Chiba station, we looked for lockers. Good news: Several of the large lockers were available. Bad news: while internally they were large enough to hold my bag, the doors were too narrow for the bag to fit into the locker. I had to partially unpack my bag to get it to compress thinly enough to fit through the door. The ten minutes or so we spent fussing over luggage meant that we couldn't even try to get on that limited express train to Choshi (it had been gaining on us from Tokyo). That train has unreserved standard seats as well as reserved and Green cars, and we might have been able to grab a couple of seats, but we'll never know.

Anyway, with 40 minutes or so to kill before the local to Choshi, we went looking for breakfast. However, we were unable to find much close and convenient to Chiba, so instead we grabbed a couple of breakfast pasteries from a cafe next to the station and then bought bento boxes, rice, and drinks from stores in the station, and headed up to the platform for the nearly 2-hour slog to Choshi.