following the near-disaster on the nakasendo, it was clear that in order to keep up this trip i'd have to make a pit stop in tokyo sooner rather than later in order to shed the additional pack weight i'd picked up along my journey. though i could always get to tokyo by going back down the nakasendo in the opposite direction, i was now within close proximity of another historic road leading back to tokyo: the tokaido. it was the nakasendo's coastal counterpart, running from tokyo to kyoto down the eastern coast instead of through the mountains, the most important and heavily-trafficked of all the edo period roads, probably because it runs along nice flat coastal plains and doesn't require traversing any treacherous passesi had to wonder, why did anyone take the nakasendo? i looked into it and it seems that there were some that preferred to avoid the river fords along the tokaido, the nakasendo was also considered in some ways "the scenic route".. these days the tokaido still enjoys much better name recognition than the nakasendo, mainly because it lends its name to the tokaido shinkansen that roughly parallels its former route.

obviously i wasn't in a hurry to start walking japan’s historic roads again immediately following the Magome Pass Incident (2025), but i also wasn’t in such a hurry that i wanted to zip back up on the tokaido shinkansen in about an hour and a half. at times the shinkansen is almost too fast, you don't really get an appreciation for how far you've gone, there's no time to properly savor the landscape or the ride, no time to get really deep into reading or writing something. because of that, even when i had been in a hurry getting back to tokyo to deal with my bags a week or two before, i deliberately took the slowest "kodama" service that stops at every station..

the shinkansen is not the only rail option following the old tokaido, however. there is still a conventional rail line built before the shinkansen that runs along the entire route, the Tokaido Main Line. it is now used primarily for local trains, no one train runs along the whole line, at their furthest services run only from one major city to the next, though if you have the patience you can transfer at each major city and "hop" your way back to tokyo using only local trains. that is in fact exactly what i decided to do, except i planned on taking it even slower by staying a night in each of those major cities, riding only one local train for 1-2 hours a day to get to my next "post town" on the tokaido. i had no idea whatsoever what there was to do in any of those cities, but it didn't matter because i didn't even really want to do anything, after all the excitement on the nakasendo i just wanted to take it easy for a while and chip away at the writing backlog some more...

ok, so this isn't technically on the tokaido yet, but i absolutely have to bring it up somewhere. inuyama is one of the furthest north outlying cities of the nagoya metropolitan area ("chūkyō"), not too far from where the nakasendo emerges from the kiso valley and thus a convenient place to book a post-trail hotel. however, i had ulterior motives too, in fact part of the reason i decided to go down the nakasendo after matsumoto was because i would end up near inuyama, where i would have another chance for redemption. you see, inuyama is home to the museum meiji-mura, though it's called a museum and does indeed preserve a wide variety of historic japanese buildings from the namesake era and later, in practice it is also possibly the world's only architecture-themed theme park. that alone is already enough to attract my interest, but why i desperately wanted to go was because of its headliner attraction: the preserved lobby of frank lloyd wright's imperial hotel, designed in the very rare and exquisite mayan revival style. the hotel was demolished in 1967 (which i once called "the greatest architectural crime of the 20th century") and i had given up hope of ever experiencing it in person, then a couple years ago i discovered part of it had actually been preserved in a quirky museum/theme park in the far outskirts of nagoya and i've been obsessed with trying to visit it ever since.

unfortunately, my first attempt was foiled by an unprecedented catastrophe: a japanese train arriving late. to be fair, it was only by ten minutes (fun fact: amtrak still considers trains to have arrived "on time" if they arrive within 30 minutes of their scheduled time), but that was enough for me to miss my connection in nagoya and the next train left too late for it to be worth going that day. i decided i'd stay the night in nagoya (i found a wonderful cheap APA in central nagoya that even had an included rooftop bath) and try to go the next day. that evening in the hotel, i looked up their hours online to do a little planning and discovered that starting the next day, they were going to be closed for basically the entire first half of the month so i gave up and took the shinkansen back to tokyo the next day...

⊕inuyama castle also gets a shoutout for having the most absurd SDG bullshit i've ever seen, a sign at the exit saying you should take home the bag used to store your shoes and use it as a garbage bag, or perhaps reuse it when you take off your shoes at the next castle you visit. out of the hundreds of people i watched exit, i did actually see one person take the bag with them...then of course on the same day i planned on going to meiji-mura i ended up making the biggest tactical mistake of my entire trip and wasted half the day on what was supposed to be a brief detour to check out inuyama castle, the station had a good view of it and it looked kinda neat. anyways, suffice to say that is the LAST time i go inside a japanese castle, i was lured in by the typical japanese "almost free" (like $3) admission price and then discovered there was a huge line to get in because it was the weekend. after standing in the queueing area outside in the sun long enough to get my shirt soaked in sweat as always (approximately 15 minutes), i finally made it to the head of the line just as they stopped letting people in for a while to reduce crowding indoors. i waited there almost as long as i'd waited in the rest of the line as a steady stream of what felt like hundreds of people exited the modest castle keep, continually astounded that they hadn't decided to start letting people in again. at the very least the entrance was shaded and had an actual fan, so it was probably the best place to wait. then finally they let me in and it was the typical lame japanese castle interior experience (i complained about this before: shoes off, climbing treacherously steep narrow stairs that are effectively ladders to visit rooms that are either completely empty or filled with boring dusty museum exhibits), except this one was STUFFED with people, suddenly the staff concerns about overcrowding made total sense to me and i even thought that maybe they should have held up the line longer.

after leaving inuyama castle, i rushed back to the station and got on the bus towards meiji-mura, the bus was completely empty which got me a little concerned that it might be closed again. nope, turns out everyone except me had the good sense to head out to meiji-mura earlier than 3pm... as soon as i got in, i wasted no time in making a beeline for the imperial hotel lobby, conveniently located at the far end of the park...

i used up nearly half my remaining time admiring it, then went off on a breakneck tour trying to see as much of the rest of the park before closing as i could. the park consists of a collection of historic buildings (originally mostly western-inspired meiji-era buildings, but now including many different time periods) rescued from demolition during the post-war development boom by relocating them to the "rolling hills" alongside a reservoir near inuyama, all bankrolled by nagoya railroad (better known as "meitetsu"), which still operates the park to this day. it was incredible, even though i was only there for two hours at one of the most expensive admission prices of anywhere i went in japan (2.5k yen) it was worth every yenny, i could easily spend a whole day or more there, i saw a meiji-era prison and photo studio, a catholic church, a vintage post office, an old bathhouse with a single pool split into halves for men and women by only a wooden partition in the middle above the water (IMAGINE bathing in the same water as naked girls one inch of wood away), a japanese meetinghouse from hawaii, natsume soseki's house, an ancient burial mound that was apparently there from before the museum was established, and that wasn't even half of it. i was rushing anyone so fast that once again my shirt got completely soaked in sweat (which got me thinking "i am NEVER coming back to japan in the summer again" for the fiftieth time), even then it feels like i barely scratched the surface, i will have to go back someday...

my first real "post town" on the tokaido was toyohashi, on the coast just southeast of the nagoya area. getting there from inuyama was unexpectedly convenient because there was actually a meitetsu limited express train that let me go all the way between them without transferring, a distance of about 100km, and the good thing about getting on near the terminus is that it was easy to snag a seat for the whole ride. in toyohashi i finally managed to bag a cheap room at a route inn, i'd been wanting to stay at one for a while but they were always too expensive because it's one of the more upscale business hotel chainsmy main observation about route inn is that they have the cutest mascot of all the business hotels, a sheep named "ruton" (presumably a portmanteau of "route inn" and "mouton", french for "sheep"). i soon found out why it was probably so cheap: toyohashi is the trashiest city i've ever been to in japan. just outside the station i saw my first genuine homeless person of the trip, and in order to get anywhere (including the route inn toyohashi) you had to go through this whole sleazy nightlife district right by the station. maybe i caught it on a particularly bad day because it was the evening before a holiday, but there were many rowdy groups in the streets already ugly drunk at 8-9pm. as i was desperately searching for food after not having eaten almost all day, aggressive touts called out to me from the street corners and then a drunken crew of old schoolmates ("we went to the same... uhhh... junior high school together... we graduated... 17? years ago...") invited me to drink with them, but we drifted apart because they couldn't choose a place and i really needed to go somewhere with proper food.

as far as i could tell, the only thing toyohashi had going for it was that it's the setting for something called 負けヒロインが多すぎる (sマケイン for short), big banners featuring the characters were hanging from the roof of the decaying shoutengai. it appears to be one of the current popular flavor-of-the-month romcom haremslop franchises based on a light novel, i looked it up and the two sentence plot summary on wikipedia begins "self-proclaimed 'background character' Kazuhiko Nukumizu...", which led to me reflecting briefly about the fact that the protagonists of those things always seem to be "self-proclaimed background characters". as far as i can tell, it's only set in toyohashi because it's the hometown of the original light novel author.

i suppose it's not very fair to judge a city by just a couple blocks around the main train station... then again, it is kind of representative of a city, if they can't bother to clean up the part of the city most visitors will first encounter, then what must the rest look like? but toyohashi still has some good parts, in the sober light of day i found a convenient book-off by the station and made some additional ill-advised increases to my pack weight, but how was i supposed to turn down a chance to buy the first four volumes of 微熱空間 for 110 yen each after searching for it on a whim?what can i say, i'm going through a phase of aoki umania right now... kinda crazy that the reason hidamari sketch is on hiatus is because she's busy with a "what are you doing stepbro?" manga.... then, on the main street right across from the station on what probably should have been prime real estate, i stumbled upon a shuttered pachinko parlor with the most incredible rooftop ornamentation i've ever seen in japan, a huge model of the space shuttle columbia that was probably installed well before the real one exploded in 2003, not to mention the establishment was apparently named "USA" and also had a wonderful vertical neon sign saying "𝒫𝒜𝒞𝐻𝐼𝒩𝒦𝒪" that reminded me of the "GAMBLING" sign outside binion's on fremont street in vegas. i should buy it and turn it into a rhythm game arcade, with japanese real estate prices and the exchange rate the way it is there's no way it can cost more than i can get maxxing out my credit cards and running away to japan.

before leaving toyohashi, i posted up in tully's coffee by the station and (you can't make this up) a japanese girl genuinely sat down at the table next to me and spent two hours drawing touhou fanart, a lavish illustration of remilia and flandre...

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