Yokohama is south of Tokyo, and one of the first Japanese ports that opened to foreign trade, in 1859.
I made a run there on Saturday morning on the Nozomi shinkansen out of Shinagawa station— a trial run of sorts, for my trip to Osaka on Sunday.
It’s 19 km (12 miles) and only 18 minutes from station to station. A trip by car would take about 40 minutes.
I bought my tickets at Shinagawa at the machine. (The online website does not accept my US credit card.) This is the return ticket portion, and it was very complicated to use. An attendant helped me buy a return ticket for a specific date, time and train, and then I had to put it on top of this one, and both into the slot at the ticket gate to make the gate open up for me. Yikes! Too complicated. I have an electronic ticket for Sunday’s run to Osaka (with a QR code), and that should work much better.Incoming! Pay attention people, here comes the train.The train has 16 cars. I have a reserved seat* ticket, and I am at the gate for Car No 6. There’s the seat map as well, like the ones for an airplane when you pick your seat online. *The tickets for unreserved seats are cheaper, but you might get booted from your seat by a reserved seat ticket holder and then have to stand all the way.Built for speed. The N700 series is a Japanese Shinkansen high-speed train with tilting capability developed jointly by Japan Rail Central and JR West, for use on the Tōkaidō and San’yō Shinkansen lines. It has been in operation since 2007.Inside it looks like an airplane. This car has ‘Ordinary’ seats. The ‘First Class’ seats are a little bigger.All right, we’re skipping ahead all the way to the Yokohama Air Cabin cableway. A lot has happened since I stepped out of the shinkansen at Shin-Yokohama station. I boarded the local Blue Line and went seven stops to Sakuragicho station, and then walked 5 minutes to where I could board the Air Cabin cableway.This is the view from the end of the Air Cabin cableway, where there is a 6-story shopping mall complex called Yokohama World Porters. The tall square building is Yokohama Landmark Tower, which stands at 296 meters (971 feet) high. It was Japan’s tallest building from its completion in 1993 until 2014.A look outside the shinkansen window, on my way back to Shinagawa. The rooftops and steel trusses and pylons flash by at high speed.
