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so this is Toyama City

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Today I got up at 04:00, and was out the door at 05:30 to race downtown to meet a tour group and then take the bullet train to Nagano prefecture. From there it was quite a trek by bus to Shirakawa City, where we visited the historic city center. And then we took in a village where they still live in houses roofed with steep piles of reeds. And then it was time for the trek to Toyama, a city on the Sea of Japan. Shirakawa-shi and the village (Shirakawa-go) are in Gifu-ken, which made that my 25th Japanese prefecture. Toyama-ken is my 26th.

In this map, I've colored the two prefectures in Kyushu where I've spent most of my time outside Tokyo in blue. All the red prefectures are ones I've visited (not just passed through). The green ones are those that I've visited by my own steam (bicycle).

Toyama City itself is in a delightful plain between the sea and a range of mountains. While that probably describes most Japanese cities fairly well, I didn't get to see enough of the city itself to get a real feel for it. Some day!