Marklow has a list of train journeys he'd like to take. His #10 is Tokyo to Nagasaki, on Japan Rail.

And now I will reminisce...

Mrs. Cleek and I took most of that trip (we did Tokyo to Kyoto then Kyoto to Hiroshima, then back to Tokyo), and here's what it looks like:

Seriously. 95% of it is a 120mph blur of the backsides of an uninterrupted string of industrial cities, with occasional tunnels. It's as charming as NJ Transit from Newark to Manhattan. The speed of the bullet trains (a.k.a. "shinkansen") is fun, no doubt. And there are sections, near Kyoto IIRC, where it goes between some mountains and you get to see some tea plantations. And there are a couple of spots where you can see the ocean. And Mt. Fuji is visible for the first couple of hours out of Tokyo - if the smog is thin enough that day. But overall it's not really a scenic trip.

They do have a choice of toilets: western style, or traditional Japanese style (a hole in the floor).

And here's what we had for lunch when we stopped in Osaka:

Japan being a civilized country, you can buy beer and whiskey from vending machines, even from vending machines on train platforms. And the Snickers was better than most Japanese snack food.

Personally, I thought the little train ride we did from Tokyo to Kawaguchiko was more interesting. It rattled around the valleys between incredibly steep mountains and puttered through the small rural towns, for a couple of hours. That's quite a different scene from Tokyo.

Kawaguchiko is a small tourist town on one of the lakes surrounding Mt Fuji. There are paddle boats and ice cream shops, kitschy souvenir shops, resort hotels and an amusement park - but it's all geared towards Japanese tourists, not Western tourists. It's the Japanese Lake George.

Can you spot Mrs Cleek?

And then the bus ride from Kawaguchiko to Shizuoja (IIRC), where we picked up the shinkansen to Kyoto, was pretty fun, too - though because of the language barrier, we were completely at the mercy of the bus driver to tell us where to get off, or to not get off, as it turned out. But it too, snaked around the mountains, and then down through a different set of small towns and cities. It was the only time we got to see Japan outside of the big cities.