{"id":93,"date":"2026-08-24T03:29:49","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T03:29:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/?p=93"},"modified":"2026-09-17T14:19:38","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:19:38","slug":"hidden-japan-rail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/?p=93","title":{"rendered":"Japan by local train, not bullet train"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Shinkansen has done something remarkable to Japanese travel: it has made the distance between major cities almost irrelevant. It has also made everything between them invisible.<\/p>\n<p>The Gon\u014d Line, running along the Sea of Japan coast through Aomori and Akita, is the corrective. Two and a half hours of grey water, fishing hamlets and wind-bent pines, on a train with seats angled towards the windows.<\/p>\n<p>In central Honshu, the Iida Line takes six hours to cover 195 kilometres and stops at ninety-four stations, several of which cannot be reached by road at all. The Hisatsu Line in Kyushu climbs a switchback through cedar forest to a station that has not changed since 1909.<\/p>\n<div class=\"pullquote\">Ninety-four stations in 195 kilometres, several of which cannot be reached by road at all.<\/div>\n<p>A rail pass makes this practical, but the calculation has shifted since the price increases; regional passes now usually beat the national one unless you are covering the full length of the country.<\/p>\n<p>The reward for the slower option is a Japan that operates at village scale: a stationmaster who is also the ticket clerk and the gardener, vending machines on empty platforms, and the specific pleasure of getting off somewhere you had no plan to visit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Shinkansen is magnificent and it skips everything. Six regional lines that show a country the express network cannot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":321,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[23],"touriza_theme":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-features","category-rail","tag-japan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":224,"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions\/224"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=93"},{"taxonomy":"touriza_theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.touriza.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftouriza_theme&post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}