Akita Nairiku Line

Akita Nairiku Line is one of the reasons Akita keeps coming up whenever the conversation turns to Japan's landscapes.

The Akita Nairiku Line runs ninety-four kilometres north to south through the middle of the prefecture, from Takanosu to Kakunodate, on a single track that was never finished as a national railway and was completed by a third-sector company in 1989. It goes through country that has almost nothing else in it — the Ani valley, which is matagi country, home to the hunting culture of the northern mountains, with stations named after it.

The stretch between Hitachinai and Oku-Ani crosses the Ani river gorge on a bridge, and in autumn the train slows on it so passengers can look. Three services a day run as the Moriyoshi express with an attendant giving commentary and selling food, and observation cars run at weekends. A supplementary express fare of ¥160 or ¥320 applies. It is one of the last railways of its kind and it is not certain how long it lasts.

The line survived a period when many of Japan's smaller regional railways were closed outright, converted instead to third-sector status with local municipalities and the prefecture taking a stake to keep it running — a common fate for rural lines built too late or judged too lightly used to remain under JR ownership. Ridership has thinned as the towns along its route have aged and depopulated, and much of what keeps the line viable today is a combination of school commuters, elderly residents without cars, and tourists drawn by the scenery rather than daily point-to-point travel. The stations themselves reflect this quiet decline in the best way — small unstaffed platforms, some with only a bench and a timetable board, set against forested hillsides that see little other development. Riding the full length end to end gives a sense of Akita's interior that the coastal towns and better-known sights rarely provide: narrow river valleys, scattered farmhouses, and long stretches where the train is the only visible sign of modern infrastructure. Photographers and rail enthusiasts increasingly make special trips for the line specifically because of this uncertainty about its future, treating a ride as much a documentation of a vanishing kind of rural Japan as a simple journey between two towns.