Wikipedia does not have an English page for Shin-Shimashima Station.

Which is interesting, because the train fans have spent years making hundreds of new pages for each and every train station in Japan. There’s a page for both of the unused stations in the underwater tunnel between Aomori and Hokkaido. There’s a page for both stations at Narita Airport, because each requires a separate entry. There’s a page for every station on the Hokuriku Line, and the smallest of those stations probably service a population of 28 each. There is, of course, a page for that station that had only one passenger every day.

There is no page for Shin-Shimashima Station. Not remarkable enough or important enough to foreign tourists, I suppose. So on this trip around Nagano, I said let’s go there.

Shin-Shimashima Station is at the end of the line originating in Matsumoto. Its only purpose is to allow passengers to transfer to the bus terminal that goes up the mountains. I went to a place one mile up and one hour away called Norikura Kogen. I was actually there ten years ago, so I figured it was time to see it again and how little it had changed.

It rained the day I returned. I packed for early summer weather. It was 55 degrees Fahrenheit when I arrived, and getting colder.

There are no major stores or shops up in the heights. No one knows any English. The menu in the coffee shop doesn’t have any pictures for you to point to. It had that nice, very bumpkin countryside touch (and I mean that lovingly) to it all.

The coffee shop owner let me warm up by the stove, and apologized profusely that the rice pilaf I ordered wasn’t available. She apologized even more that the 1,000 yen notes she gave me for change when I settled the bill had been slightly ripped at the corner. I wasn’t a customer, I was a guest. It didn’t look like the place was run for a profit, but for the comfort of anyone who just happened to pass by. I think I was the only one who dropped in that morning.

 

Norikura Kogen is half ski resort. So when it gets warmed, half of it closes up. The big hotels are shuttered at the end of ski season, which means options run rather thin when I need a hot spring or a just a place to skim wi-fi from. Must come back in the winter.

As I mentioned in the last post, it rained during my 5K walk, so I would have loved to show you pictures of a downhill descent toward a recreational area and the uphill return. There was a posting on a tree warning me of bears early on, so I thought this 5K might have been the last thing I would ever do. The rain ended up being more troublesome. Best to get indoors at the nearby hot spring.

Yukemuri-kan is my chosen safe haven. There are all-purpose, full-service hot spring centers and tiny, mom-and-pop public baths all over Japan. Yukemuri-kan is decidedly somewhere in the middle. It has one indoor and one outdoor bath (on the men’s side; I’m sure the women have an identical floor plan), each fitting maybe six people comfortably. Which is no problem, since there are only maybe twenty people in the entire place. The water is infused with sulfur. I went on a Friday and did laundry yesterday and I still have sulfur all over me.

In the rain, however, everything at the hot spring is beautiful. You’re covered from the fiercest elements and a cold breeze hits you while the rest of you is immersed in 100 degree Fahrenheit water. From the travel to the venue to the reception desk to the locker room to the shower room, going to a hot spring is a chore for me, but it is worth it once I’m there.

The local craft beer they were serving at the hot spring was pretty good too.

The tourist center. No, there was no ice cream to be had.

Most train stations don’t have local touches. Passengers at most subway stations in Nagoya just want to get from home to work and back again. After the bus ride down the mountains, one can wait as long as half an hour for the next train back to Matsumoto. Which is why there’s a waiting room filled with little niceties such as these made by local artists who will likely never become rich or famous. But they’ll be remembered for brightening up an otherwise static place.

The next and last day in Nagano was spent at Matsumoto Castle. It’s a castle. Someone with more knowledge than me can talk about the history of the place. I hit the gift shop there and bought wasabi, supposedly the prefecture’s meibutsu.

I imagine kids travel up the stairs of Matsumoto Castle imagining what it must have been to imagine some great battle on the ground from up above (that is what the top floor is for, I learned). There’s no shortage of viewpoints along each of the four walls looking out over the castle surroundings on every floor. There’s even a “hidden” floor, I guess to trick enemy invaders and buy the ranking officials on the top floor a bit more time to plan their daring comeback.

You do get a nice view of the mountains in the distance from the top floor of the castle. Matsumoto is nearly enveloped in mountains from all directions. What little flat land was there, they dropped buildings and roads.

The last day was decidedly warmer than the day before. But not as humid as I think most of Japan is. At the tail end of Golden Week, families are scattered about and just passing time, not needing to rush off to any old place for any particular reason.

After soba noodles and a quick stop at the hotel room, it was time to run twelve kilometers. (My part of) Nagoya is a very, VERY flat course that offers no particular challenge to any amateur runner. Run from Matsumoto and head east, however, and you face a gradually uphill climb. Nothing like a flight of stairs, but the incline will eventually wear you down. But that means the return leg is one long, easy downhill run where times run quicker and runners become more daring.

Even in the countryside, there are vending machines with sports drinks in case I need to make a pit stop. Definitely one thing running in America lacks. If I’m running in Westchester and I don’t bring any water with me, I better be coming back home after a very short jog. In Japan, I can go forever if I wanted (and had the energy), and that wouldn’t have been a bad idea that day.

I did not partake in the local cuisine; there was an Akiyoshi (a semi-national chain of yakitori stores) and I had to go, worrying about how few opportunities in a year I had to enjoy yakitori five sticks at a time.

Time to go home. Three days is good enough. I always find it amusing that a handful of train stations have a track zero. I’ve never taken a train from one and I fear something scary will happen if I ever do.

I buy a bottle of local red wine at the train station before I go. I don’t do any sort of research in the wine they make there; if it comes in a fancy bottle, I’ll add it to the collection. I made pasta sauce with my newest addition: remove the seeds from the canned tomatoes, mash the tomatoes in its juice with a ricer, add garlic, basil, sugar and salt, then the wine, then reduce by half or more. Add pepper and correct the seasoning with more sugar and salt as necessary. The wine makes it sweeter.

All in all, a pretty good trip to have before the twelve-week slog through the rest of the semester. If you’re in Japan and you’re willing to stray just a bit off the beaten path, you’ll be awarded by a magnitude. For me, that place is Nagano, but there are a million places that aren’t Tokyo or Osaka or Kyoto that are waiting to be discovered.