An unexpected snowfall brought us an unbelievable windfall of gorgeous scenery, as we wound south from Miyagi to Sendai and Koriyama.

The morning commenced with our first trip aboard the shinkansen: Japan’s famed bullet trains, flashing through the stations like liquid lightning, with the briefest of intervals at each stop to execute expedited itineraries the length of the country. I once caught the first train from Kagoshima to make an early morning flight to Singapore — the only public transit by land, air, or sea that could have carried me to Fukushima in time.

We assembled a luggage train of our own en route to the station, then settled gladly into the spacious seating. Outside increasingly snowy scenes whipped by, as our tour guide confessed he had never before witnessed this region under such an exquisitely frosty veil.

Read the rest of this entry →