Bullet Journey

Appears in

Published 1998

About

The bullet train travels from Kyoto to Tokyo, a three-hundred-mile journey, in less than three hours. And perhaps even more amazing, there is a train every ten to fifteen minutes. The ride is smooth, the seats ample with lots of leg room, and as you sit calmly eating a good lunch from an o-bento (lunch box), the countryside scrolls by through the train window. Only if you try to look at anything close to the train do you realize how swiftly you are traveling.

In late October, the countryside we sped through was a panorama of agricultural life. It was Sunday, so families were out in their garden plots and rice fields cleaning up, harvesting, tilling. We crossed wide calm rivers with solitary fishermen standing patiently and small boats crowded along the shore. Outside Nagoya were fields of very ripe rice. Some was being cut by hand; in other patches, small machines were doing the harvesting. Farther along there were bare fields smoldering, the last of the rice straw being burned off. Nearby, rice was draped on racks to dry, great sheaves with the golden grain hanging down toward the ground. We saw beautiful stacks of yellow straw tidily piled at the roadside by small threshing machines. Farther north, on steep hillsides, grew small orange trees and tea.