Well I finally managed to get out of Tokyo and spend some time in the country. While the trip was solely work related it was good to see a little of Japan and to see some areas that I now want to visit later. We went to the city of Fukushima in the Fukushima prefecture, about 250 km north of Tokyo.
Luckily there are programs to restore the lower rivers to their former state and the pollution levels have been reduced markedly. The Fukushima prefecture (towards the south in the mountains) is renowned for its fishing in high mountain streams that are surrounded by virgin forest. Now I have another place to go and another thing to tick off the list.
www.town.hirono.fukushima.jp/english/traffic.html
This was a trip of many firsts with the trip on a one of the Japanese world renowned bullet trains (shinkansen). It’s a strange feeling, to me at least, sitting inside a train doing a couple of hundred kilometres an hour across the flat lands around Tokyo but one look at the people around you in the train and you realise that you are the only one and the people around you think that it’s just another day commuting.
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shinkansen.jpg
Fukushima is only 100 meters above sea level with a rainfall in excess of 1000mm but the mountainous land around the city rises very quickly and there are many ski resorts scattered through the hills that surround all of the major river valleys. The big buildings in the picture below belong to one of the many fine beer brewers in Tokyo - Kirin.
While the river valleys look a lot like some of the lower rivers on New Zealand’s east coast there is a distinct lack of any sort of fish life (I was caught leaning out the window looking for fish) as the entire substrate of the river has been removed and used for building and there is nothing left for the invertebrates that the fish require to survive. Those invertebrates that have not been eliminated following the removal of the substrate have had to endure generations of pollution going into the rivers that has also resulted in fish kills.
Luckily there are programs to restore the lower rivers to their former state and the pollution levels have been reduced markedly. The Fukushima prefecture (towards the south in the mountains) is renowned for its fishing in high mountain streams that are surrounded by virgin forest. Now I have another place to go and another thing to tick off the list.
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