Get off where only the Kodama stops: three Tōkaidō towns in two days

The Nozomi crosses from Tokyo to Nagoya in about a hundred minutes and treats everything in between as weather. The Kodama (こだま) takes an hour longer because it stops at the stations the fast trains pass, and on the Tōkaidō those stations are the trip rather than the delay.

Kakegawa, and a keep rebuilt in wood

Kakegawa station puts you ten minutes' walk from a castle keep rebuilt in 1994 out of timber instead of concrete, the first postwar reconstruction in Japan done that way, and the stairs tell you so. Behind it stands the ninomaru palace, an Edo-period building that survived where almost all of its kind did not.

The hills north of town grow fukamushi-cha, tea steamed longer than usual so the leaf breaks down and the cup pours opaque and dark green. Shops near the station will pour a small measure at low temperature and wait while you drink it, and the distance from what comes in a bottle is not subtle.

Toyohashi, a streetcar and rice at the bottom of the bowl

Toyohashi kept its tram when most cities its size gave theirs up. The cars leave the square in front of the station and run down the middle of a wide road, stopping at painted islands in the traffic; the whole line takes under twenty minutes and arrives nowhere in particular, which is the point.

Lunch is curry udon, built here to a local specification: rice at the bottom of the bowl, grated yamaimo (mountain yam) over the rice, then the noodles and the curry above. You eat downward through the layers, and the last third of the meal is a different dish from the first.

The virtue of a fast train is that it does not stop. That is also the only thing wrong with it.

Ōgaki, where the water comes up on its own

Gifu-Hashima, the Kodama's own stop out here, sits in rice fields with little around it, so give the last night to Ōgaki, thirty-odd minutes west of Nagoya on the Tōkaidō main line. Groundwater rises under the city on its own pressure, and Ōgaki has left taps running into stone basins on street corners for anyone carrying a bottle.

It is also where Matsuo Bashō closed Oku no Hosomichi, the narrow road to the deep north. The riverside where he took a boat onward is marked and reachable on foot from the station, and ending a train journey at the end of someone else's walking one is a symmetry the Nozomi cannot sell you.

こだまは、のぞみが通り過ぎる町に、ひとつずつ停まる。