The Tadami line runs three times a day — build two days around it

A flood in the summer of 2011 took out three bridges on the Tadami Line (只見線, Tadami-sen), and for eleven years the middle of the route was a gap filled by replacement buses. Full service returned in the autumn of 2022. It runs roughly three times a day in each direction between Aizu-Wakamatsu and Koide, which means the timetable is not a detail of this trip. It is the trip.

Start with the departures, then draw the map

Aizu-Wakamatsu sits in western Fukushima, about three and a half hours from Tokyo if you change at Kōriyama. Take a morning train west out of it and you have committed: the next one is hours behind you, and the parallel roads are not served by anything you would want to gamble on. Photograph the printed timetable on the platform before you board, because reception thins out once the line enters the gorges.

Mishima, and the bridge that is photographed from above

The First Tadami River Bridge — Daiichi Tadamigawa-kyōryō — is the image that sells the line, a low steel span over water the colour of slate. You do not see it from the train; you see it from a signposted hillside trail behind the roadside station at Mishima, a walk and then a short climb from Aizu-Miyashita. Time it against a scheduled crossing and you get thirty seconds of train. The rest of the hour is river, cedar, and the sound of your own breathing.

Three trains a day is not a constraint. It is an itinerary somebody has already written for you.

A night at Kaneyama, where the water fizzes

Kaneyama, further down the valley, has a natural carbonated spring at Ōshio that you can drink from directly — cold, faintly metallic, unmistakably sparkling. Stay here rather than pushing through to the end of the line. The village empties by early evening and the only real decision left is what time to walk back to the station in the morning.

Out the western side into rice country

Past Tadami town the line climbs, tunnels, and drops into Niigata at Koide, where the landscape flattens into Uonuma paddy. From there the Jōetsu Line runs north to Urasa for a shinkansen back to Tokyo in around ninety minutes. The whole crossing takes most of a day at a speed that has not changed much in fifty years.

只見線は速さを競う路線ではなく、時刻表そのものが旅程になる。