Yamagata – Wakamatsu

BY distance a short hop across a mountain of about 100km. In reality this trip seems to take most of the day (9 hrs). Even taking Shiskansen takes the journey down to 4 hours.

The final jump from Yonezawa to Wakamatsu is covered by numerous health spa’s and ski resorts. However the links between the two areas are minimal. No rail lines cross the mountains, and the bus services only seem to flow down to local centers, not across the ranges. You can take the railway down to Fukushima, quite a large city.

I have a suspicion that this timetable links Yonezawa station with Kitakata Station. Although the translation services dont know what to make of it.

On further invesitgation i found the destination of the bus to be http://www.vivi.ne.jp/shirabu_kanko/. Which is (again based on educated guess and the PDF map) the town of Takayu on the Northern side of the mountain, approx 17km by road

Akita – Yamagata

Continuing down the middle of the country. It is a little slow going.

09:43			KAKUNODATE
	%	20min	JR Tazawako Line
23min	10:03 10:26	35km	OMAGARI(AKITA)
	%	17min	JR Ou Line
56min	10:43 11:39	55km	YOKOTE	¥2940
	%	85min	JR Ou Line
75min	13:04 14:19	135km	SHINJO
	%	67min	JR Ou Line
	15:26	196km	YAMAGATA

Slow but an interesting route.

Yamagata is the middle of on of Japans Ski areas, so there are lots of places to stay. My aim is to get as close as I can to Wakamatsu as I can. Yonezawa is one option, around 1 hr further along the line south in the mountains. Alternately you can head east to the major centers of Sendai and head south to Fukushima.

I guess it comes back to the question, how much regional travel vs how much local travel do you want to do. For the sake of sanity 3pm is a reasonable time to finish. It allows for breaking the journey at any intermediate stop with at least 3 hrs of daylight to play with.