Japan for Bus Travelers & Highway Riders

About this book

Every country keeps two journeys. The first is the famous one — the train, documented platform by platform in every guide ever printed. The second is quieter, longer and almost unwritten: the journey by road, in the care of a driver, at the pace of the land itself — the expressway coach climbing out of the capital at dawn, the mountain bus counting its hairpins like verses, the local route that is also a village's school run and shopping trip, the night highway drawn in light between two sleeping cities. This book is a guide to that second journey: 200 complete bus days across Japan, each composed around the same four questions. How is the day boarded — the floor read, the seat claimed, the log opened? What does the road contain, scene by scene, on the other side of the glass? How is the day kept — logged, tokened, filed and handed over complete? And what do the coach, the ground and the driver ask of the guest they carry?

Japan answers the bus rider's questions better than almost any country on earth. It runs coaches up passes that have no rails, along shores the trains abandoned, across bridges that are themselves journeys, and through villages where the bus is the last public thing — staffed by drivers whose craft at a hairpin in the rain is a form of calligraphy. This guide designs two hundred of those days: great terminals, pass roads and sky roads, coast roads, bridge crossings and island circuits, sleeper journeys on the night highway, the local last mile, the city sightseeing loops, and the craft of composing such a day anywhere.

A word on honesty, because method here is a form of it. Buses are retimed; roads close for snow and open again; seasonal services come and go. This guide asserts none of those changeable things: every entry closes by naming the official channel through which its day is to be confirmed. What the entries teach is the durable part — the shape of a well-composed bus day, the keeping discipline that turns a ride into a possession, and the manners that keep the world's most considerate bus network considerate for the riders who come after you.

Eight parts: great terminals and departure floors · mountain passes and sky roads · coast roads and sea windows · bridges, islands and causeways · the night highway · local buses and the last mile · city loops and sightseeing circuits · and a closing craft part — 25 method days (the departure floor read as a map, the front-seat protocol, the two-bus day composed, the rest stop kept as discipline, the last bus honoured, the finished day filed and handed over) that teach you to compose a bus day anywhere.