Squeezed onto the Linimo

Aichi Expo is a world’s fair with an environmental theme. It is being held this summer, just outside Nagoya.

I had been debating whether or not to go, which seems a crime being already in Japan. But it was reported crowded, and Nagoya’s hotels were booked solid. I ended up going, and staying outside Nagoya. In fact I was outside Aichi altogether, bracketing my day with nights in Tokyo and Kyoto.

Fate lined up a Monday for my trip, and I was happy as it wasn’t a weekend. I caught a 6:05am Shinkansen out of Tokyo, and arrived in Nagoya in time to catch the 8:02 train to the expo. Or I guess I should call that the 8:02 “train to the train to the expo”. Surprisingly, there was no direct train service between Nagoya Station and the expo.

A brand new train, called the Linimo, was built to take people to the expo, but the new Linimo only ran to small suburban stations. I think the Linimo should have been run all the way to Nagoya Station, to meet up with the Shinkansen, the backbone of Japan’s rail network. Either that, or the Linimo should have been skipped in favor of extending an existing line to the Expo.

We aren’t talking about a prefecture that was resistant to expansion of the transportation system in general. Aichi built a whole new international airport in time for the Expo. The train from the airport, of course, ran to Nagoya Station.

So I was stuck with an unnecessary transfer. It turned out to be a maddeningly overcrowded one. I have spent a lot of time on Tokyo’s famously overcrowded subways, and have made many forays across its busiest train station, Shinjuku. The crowd at this transfer was worse than either. A massive press of humanity in which it was a challenge to merely stick together with my few companions — it was almost as bad as the crush at Aichi’s Konomiya Shrine during the Naked Festival. Incidentally, video footage of the Konomiya Naked Festival was reported to be on display at the expo’s Electric Power Pavilion.

There were a lot of people, and like me, most of them were probably upset to discover they weren’t getting to the expo early after all. We were eventually squeezed onto the Linimo, and later released to the expo gates, only to find more long lines for the security check at the entrance. Waiting in the security line took long enough that by the time my group was actually in the expo, it was already 9:45. Between the transfer and the security check, we had lost more than an hour. Failing to show earlier would turn out to cost us any practical opportunity to see our first choice of pavilions, but I’ll leave that, and the story of what we did see for part 2.

For today’s dose of hindsight, I wish I had started my day closer to Nagoya. There were rooms available in Kyoto, and the first Shinkansen from Kyoto rolled into Nagoya roughly an hour before the first one from Tokyo. The expo was clearly the early bird’s worm.

This story continues with part 2.