Living and working in Tokyo, the city’s immense train network is both an incredible convenience and a horrible necessity. You can reliably get almost anywhere in the capital, but the major problem is you have to do so with countless millions of other passengers. And it regularly gets so busy that individual stations feel like they are actually filled with each and every one of those many travellers.
In Hokkaido, however, it’s a very different story.
The trains are hours apart, rather than minutes, and even then there are few, if indeed any, passengers. So local stations are invariably deserted, which makes visiting them a slightly odd experience. A world where the lights are still on, but the inhabitants have all inexplicably disappeared.