To Hanno

This day started off bright and early with breakfast scheduled for 8am in the Kakiya Ryokan affiliated restaurant across the road. I noticed that they had a bunch of autographs hung up on the wall, though I had no idea who any of them were (although one of them prominently said AKB48 on it, so).

Breakfast was a teishoku (set meal), no buffet this time, but it was still good, especially the miso soup, although I wish the Japanese used/gave out spoons more often. Spoon + chopsticks is the way to go, not just chopsticks even when there’s a rice bowl and a soup bowl, and this isn’t a culture thing, it’s a COVID sanitation common sense thing. There was no spoon to be found here (though I didn’t specifically ask for one).

After breakfast, I walked to the nearby Koshigoe Station, noting with amusement this sign along the way:

Koshigoe Station, like a couple of the stations along the line, was a one-track station, and was right up against people’s houses and backyards.

I guess reading further up on the railway, the entire thing is considered to be a one-track railroad, with five of the fifteen stations being equipped with passing loops or whatever. That’s a weird way of saying “five of the fifteen stations are double track” though. Enoshima had two separate platforms for the trains going two different directions. That’s no longer a passing loop even if it was single rail before and after.

Anyway, apparently the street that my ryokan was on, between Koshigoe and Enoshima, was also the only segment of the rail that actually goes down the middle of the street, and it’s one of a very few occurrances of this in the entire country, so that was cool. I didn’t realize that it was that unique of a location.

The ticket cost here was 220 yen from Koshigoe Station to Fujisawa Station (6 stops), which was the same cost from Fujisawa Station to Enoshima Station the prior day (5 stops). I had also taken the train 2 stops from Kamakura Kokomae Station to Enoshima Station the previous day, and that had cost 200 yen. Mystifying formula. But I ended up at Fujisawa Station, and waited for the train to Yokohama Station, which was 3 stops and 418 yen away along the Tokaido line.

Yokohama Station was fairly large and served quite a lot of different train lines, so it took me a while to find where to go to transfer to the line that I was trying to get to, the Tokyu/Minatomirai line.

It involved going down a long tunnel. Once I arrived at the correct platform, the train system also baffled me.

That platform I was on served all the northbound trains from Yokohama Station, which on the right hand side map above sits on the border between the blue and red lines. My target was Hanno Station, which was at the bottom of the left orange line. But the electronic train ticker only showed the next two trains at a time, and every train was basically going to a different place — down the blue line, down the orange line, stopping at the end of the brown line, etc, and they didn’t always stop at the end of the line either, sometimes they stopped at the start of the line or seemingly some random hub station in between.

In addition, they were a dizzying mix of express and limited express and local trains that might or might not decide to stop on any given stop, and in addition the name of the route itself changed after every coloured segment, so I wasn’t quite sure if the name of the train coming was the name of the first segment, final segment, or what. There were occasional English translations, but not many, but really the main problem was that the signboard did not list more trains. Even Hyperdia, the train route planner website, completely failed to make sense of this situation as it kept insisting that I should wait for a Hanno-bound train in 7 minutes that never came.

In the end, I noticed that one of the trains was an express train to Kotesashi Station, which was the first station down that orange curve that would lead to Hanno Station, and where express here basically meant that it stopped about once every 3 stops. I reasoned that this train would get me close enough, and there surely would be local trains from there going to Hanno Station since it was just a few stops away.

And I was right — once I reached Kotesashi Station, the train on the other side of the platform was literally a Hanno-bound local train waiting for the passengers from our train to cross the platform and get on it, which several people, including me, did. The doors then closed and the local train took off along its merry way. Fastest transfer ever!

This rail segment was such a local line that there were no train station announcements (Next station is X, the doors will open on the left/right) and no electronic tickers in the train either. Some of the stations along the way looked to literally be just a long slab of concrete.

The train quickly reached Hanno Station though, and this was a proper, if small, station. I picked up a couple gift items at the Tomony shop here and realized later on that evening that they had mischarged me — I bought two items but was only charged for one. Oh well!

I also started to see signs of why I had come here though, for a mini Yama no Susume pilgrimage! The show’s fourth season was currently airing and I was hoping to find some cool tie-ins or something and a memorial stamp.