A Personal Experience

Quiet. Quiet enough to sleep. Slight, gentle rocking relaxes me even more. I think I’ll have a green tea before settling in for the three hour ride to Kobe. Visiting the vending machine is a different story. It’s almost as if the engineers found a way to bottle up all the violent metal-on-metal clanging and release it into controlled sections of the train. I’m not sure what’s worse: the thunderstorm of high-speed rail travel or the Japanese business man trying to beat off the noise by yelling into his phone. Suddenly I don’t feel like sleeping. Being shocked awake does a number on your adrenal gland.

The best part of riding the Shinkansen is the view. I found a nice window seat and prepared for a swift sightseeing journey through Japan’s changing landscapes. Bounding through towns and cities, across mountains and flatlands - I can’t imagine why anyone travels on the boring mile-high alternative.

The triumphs of Japanese locomotive engineering are astounding. The sleek aerodynamic design of the duck billed trains, the faultless blend of speed and comfort; all this mixed with a tireless dedication to precise scheduling create a thrilling mode of transport. Unfortunately, it’s only possible thanks to the most primitive approach to laying down the tracks - blowing stuff up. To find the quickest path through the mountains they blew holes and drilled tunnels through the centre. Rolling scenery became fleeting darkness and concrete walls. I wouldn’t mind some fluffy white clouds to look at now.

Most passengers have their heads buried in newspapers or manga. Others are wearing headphones and tapping away on touch screens. I make eye contact with a young Japanese woman. I smile. She smiles back timidly. I can’t say much more with my eyes so I point to her and mimic sleeping. She giggles and holds up her manga. I give her the thumbs up and she returns to her comic book. It was short; only a quick exchange of silly gestures, but I’ll be telling my friends back home that I flirted with a Japanese girl.

We pass through town after town, some littered with factories, others nestled amongst the hills and peppered with cherry blossom trees. A tiny old lady with a food cart enters the carriage. She stops at my row and gestures at her inventory. She is selling everything from biscuits and drinks to bento boxes. I purchase another green tea and she moves on. I sit back and take a sip, wondering what I would have missed if hadn’t gone out to that vending machine.