THE 10.18am Max Toki bullet train left on time... even after being hit with a triple catastrophe, Japanese still manage to run their trains on time. We settled back into our seats, which were inconveniently on the downstairs floor, too low to see over the ubiquitous concrete walls which cradle the shinkansen track on its route across Japan. My mum scuttled upstairs to get a better view, but I was frankly happy just to look at concrete. Japan is the land of concrete in some ways, it has almost fused itself on to the landscape. Gunning up the Jouetsu Line to Takasaki and beyond, I found myself thinking: "This concrete is my friend." It is an appreciation only longterm residents of Tokyo would understand! After a while the vast suburbs of the city began to fall away, to be replaced by fields and mountain peaks, many of them still covered with snow. It seemed to be rice planting season up in the interior of Honshu! Eerily lifelike scarecrows could be seen in the fields, and farmers driving quaint tractors, planting rice. We passed through Takasaki, which serves as a transfer point for the Nagano shinkansen. As I remembered from previos trips, it is at Takasaki the real fun begins: the train plunges into a tunnel which is bored right beneath the Japanese Alps, bearing west by northwest, and eventually depositing you (in wintertime at least) right in the heart of the sublime snow country. It was the nearing the end of spring today, of course, but there was still plenty of snow lurking about, up in the high places. And plenty of ski resorts whizzing by, including the famous Echigo-Yuzawa. Naturally enough, I wanted to take photos of the passing scenes, and I had borrowed my parents' old digital camera for the job. Unfortunately, I hadn't worked out how to switch off the flash. It bounced off the windows of the shinkansen, creating atomic sunbursts on the rice fields.