A Trip Back In Time on the Ohmi Line

May 11, 2005

Filed under: Uncategorized

This is an article I wrote two years ago for the (apparently) defunct website japan.box.sk, which called itself "Japan's Alternative News Source".



photo by Mark Shuster

Imagine being alone on a train, watching rice fields and farming villages pass by at a speed that can't be more than 60 kilometers per hour. Add to this image a train that consists of only one car, faded and yellowed with time, making a 'clickety- clack' that sounds like a sound effect from an old movie. As the journey continues, the stops at completely deserted platforms last ten, fifteen minutes at times, other stops passed by with hardly time to think about them. Upon arriving at your destination, there's a good chance the conductor himself will need to be dealt with concerning compensation for your ride, but how will he know how much to ask for? Riders of this train are bound by honesty to take a ticket from the machine by the back doors at the stop they boarded, and not any of the stops after.

A story like this doesn't seem to have any relation to the Japan of today. In the twenty-first century, Japan is fully mechanized, neatly arranged in geometric patterns, with no room for error. And most importantly, the trains are always on time. That's why I was more than a little bit surprised the first time I traveled to visit a friend in the middle- of-nowhere town of Minakuchi, at the end of the Ohmi line. It was only a few weeks after I had arrived in Japan, I was still getting used to the high prices, I hardly noticed the ticket price of 930 yen to travel fifty kilometers, but I did notice that the train that pulled up to greet me was the size of a bus, shaped like a box of Velveeta (its color matched as well), and sounded like it was going to fall apart.

I mentioned a moment ago that my ticket, one-way cost 930 yen. This may not seem like much to everyone, but after I had a bit more experience riding the JR train lines, I began to realize just how expensive that really was. Not only is the Ohmi line more expensive than the JR line, but according to a local history lecture given here recently, it is the most expensive rail line in the world. There is no other option for those who live in the rural areas of Shiga prefecture, so they have no choice but to pay. Interestingly, on Saturdays, it goes from the most expensive line in Japan to one of the cheapest, offering an all-day pass for 550 yen. Maybe they feel as if they are doing the locals a favor to thank them for putting up with the price-gouging on the other six days.

Perhaps because of the high cost, or perhaps because the citizens of the sleepy towns on the line don't really have anyplace they want to go, the evening trains on the Ohmi line seem to arbitrarily alternate between nearly empty one-car clunkers that my friends and I call 'the short bus' and comparatively modern, larger trains that are fairly packed with highschool students and salarymen just like any other train in Japan. If one is lucky enough to catch the former, they will be treated to a unique view of what Japan must have looked like thirty, forty, or even fifty years ago.

When tired of the nonstop pace of Japanese city life, instead of finding refuge in a park, a tiny refuge of the countryside locked in by ugly gray concrete and steel, or forgetting this modern age in a museum, full of pictures of the past lit up by brightly flourescing bulbs, I suggest finding a private line like the Ohmi that penetrates the heart of Japan. If lucky enough to be alone, or nearly alone on the train, one will be treated to the feeling that they've walked through the sliding doors into a dream of 1950s Japan. There's nothing quite like it, riding the Ohmi Tetsudou and its ilk are a surreality that anyone who loves this country should experience.

Comments

Your name:

Comment: