Shinkansen dreams

Before I had planned anything else for this boys trip together with Miles, I knew I wanted to ride the Shinkansen. Miles has been obsessed with Shinkansen and all things train-related for a while, and he had a blast riding the city trains the last time we were in Tokyo in March. I had thought about trying to squeeze one in on that trip, but the schedule was just too tight. Once this trip was booked, though, I immediately set aside a whole day for a potential Shinkansen journey.

I looked up a few different day trip options from Tokyo involving Shinkansen routes, including Kawaguchiko to the west of the city with its beautiful views of Mt. Fuji and even the ancient capital of Kyoto, but I eventually settled on the picturesque mountain town of Nikko in nearby Tochigi Prefecture. We woke up bright and early that morning to catch the 7:40 AM Shinkansen train from Tokyo Station to Utsunomiya Station, where we would switch over to the local Nikko Line and ride it all the way to its terminus, the JR Nikko Station. The total journey would take a little under two hours. There was another option to take a train from Tobu Asakusa Station all the way to Nikko without needing to switch trains, but, one, the Tobu Asakusa Station was a bit far from where we were staying near Tokyo Station, and two, it wasn’t a Shinkansen.

The first thing we did after entering the station gates was head to Ekibenya Matsuri Gransta Tokyo, a popular spot to grab some ekiben, or bento boxes sold specifically to be consumed for train journeys. While riding a Shinkansen may have been Miles’ dream, eating an ekiben while riding a Shinkansen was mine. The shop was packed and buzzing even at that early hour with commuters and tourists trekking up and down the aisles looking for the perfect ekiben. I found a Shinkansen-shaped ekiben for Miles and a larger box for myself, and checking that bucket list item off a few minutes later on our train was immensely satisfying.

The Shinkansen journey from Tokyo Station to Utsunomiya Station look less than an hour, and we followed the signs in the station to the Nikko Line platform with little difficulty. After waiting for maybe 10 minutes or so, the train arrived to take us on a 45-minute ride to the town of Nikko. From the JR Nikko Station we walked a couple minutes over to the Tobu-Nikko Station where I picked up entrance tickets to the famed Toshogu Shrine ahead of time. There are some bus passes allow visitors to hop on and off predetermined sections of the local bus system at discounted prices, but as I only planned to take the bus from the station to the entrance of the shrine area and back, I just used my Suica card to pay for everything. Miles, being under the age of six, was able to ride for free (just as he was able to take the Tokyo metro for free).

Temples in the forest

The town of Nikko has its origins in the 8th Century Buddhist monk Shodo Shonin, who established the Rinno-ji Temple in 766 A.D. That temple was the first of what would become a whole complex of religious buildings, shrines, and tombs nestled in the sacred foothills of what was then known as Shimotsuke Province. The site took on further significant when the ruling Tokugawa clan took a shine to the place and interred founder and legendary samurai Tokugawa Ieyasu’s remains in the Nikko Tosho-gu shrine. The clan, which ruled Japan as the Tokugawa Shogunate from 1603 to 1868, constructed a number of other buildings in the complex, holding elaborate processions between Tokyo and Nikko along the ancient Nikkō Kaidō path.

We took a bus from Tobu-Nikko Station to the Shinkyo Bridge at the entrance to the temple complex to begin our walk towards higher ground. I knew we would be limited by Miles’ energy and attention span so I focused on getting to Tosho-gu as quickly as possible, with the very real possibility that he’d be out of both sooner than expected. If you look up pictures of Nikko, chances are the first few photos you’ll see are of Tosho-gu and its bright pops of colour set against a tranquil forest landscape, and I made seeing that our priority that morning.

There was a bit of a crowd outside of Tosho-gu when we arrived, most of it being a number of different school groups, but the mood was relaxed and the lines were orderly. We made our way up the stone steps and into the shrine proper, where there were wooden walkways showing the way to various sections of the complex. There’s a famous carving of a sleeping cat in the east corridor of the shrine which leads to Tokugawa Ieyasu’s tomb deeper in the woods, and we went partway along that path before Miles wanted to turn back. So we did.

For the rest of the morning we stuck around Tosho-gu and its environs, chilling in the shadows of ancient monuments and watching tourists and visitors make their own way through the shrine. Miles didn’t really want to keep walking further in to see the other Nikko temples, and I was okay with that. It was enough to just come and see a new part of Japan and experience it together with my son. He’s so used to thinking of Japan as just the dizzying city environment of Tokyo, and even back home in Hong Kong his life is mostly trains and buses and skyscrapers, so it was pretty cool to walk slowly through the forest that morning and have him realise that this is what Japan is like as well.

Fall foliage among the avenue of cedars

I was hoping our trip up to Nikko would coincide with the turning of the leaves, something I took for granted growing up in Canada, and I did get my wish in a small way. A few of the trees along the huge pathway leading to Tosho-gu had some nice red, russet, and gold highlights, and given the lack of fall colours in Hong Kong I was happy to get even that. I loved that tree-lined walk, though. The towering cedars along both sides of the path serve to accentuate the significance of the sacred spaces at the end of the avenue, but they’re also impressive enough to be celebrated themselves, as if they are another constituent monument in the Nikko temple complex.

In the town

We had tickets for the 4:21 P.M. Shinkansen from Utsunomiya Station back to Tokyo Station, which meant we had to leave Nikko by about 3:00 P.M. to make it onto that train. Miles and I were pretty much done with the temples and shrines by around 1:30 P.M. so we made our slow way back to the JR Nikko Station. The town of Nikko isn’t very big, but these smaller urban areas have a charm all on their own, especially as a visual breather from the dense cityscape of Tokyo (and Hong Kong). And of course there was an old, restored tram on display harking back to a different time, like probably many other small Japanese towns with histories that closely track the nation’s boom and bust cycles.

Back to Tokyo

After riding the local train back to Utsunomiya Station, Miles and I settled into our Shinkansen seats for the hour-long train ride back to Tokyo. We arrived in the city a little bit past 5:00 P.M. that evening, perfect timing to grab some dinner after a long day out and about. Miles wanted to have some sashimi so we found the Sushiro in the depths of the Tokyo Station basement and feasted on conveyor belt sushi that night.

It had been a pretty good day for us – Miles got to take a couple of rides on the Shinkansen and marvel at the countryside speeding on by, and I got to check out a new and beautiful part of Japan. Perhaps not as in-depth as I would have normally done it, but enough to enjoy it for what it was. Part of it is just accepting that traveling with young kids is not going to lend itself easily to that kind of holiday, and part of it is knowing that Japan is just a few hours’ flight away and there’s always opportunities to come back and see more. Miles and I were already on our second Tokyo trip of the year, and actually we’ll be heading back to another part of Japan with the whole family for the Christmas holidays coming up in a few weeks.

We stayed in Tokyo for the rest of our trip, the details of which were pretty much covered in my previous post. As always, there were so many more things in Tokyo we could have seen and done, but that’s what makes the city so special – there’s always a new part of town to explore together.

Until next time, Japan!