The Forgotten Timetable at Kentokusan

A Hand-Painted Bus and Train Timetable From 1983

On a May morning in 2015, near the bus stop at the Kentokusan trailhead in Tokuwa, I came across an old timetable board. It wasn’t on display. It had been propped up against a shed, weathered and rust-streaked, and was already long out of date. When I returned in 2020 to climb Mt. Kurogane it was still there but turned to face the wall. I’ve always been fascinated by what it shows: a time when a quiet trailhead in the Yamanashi satoyama was connected to a surprising range of places.

Bus and train times at the Kentokusan trailhead circa 1983

Repainted in 1983

In the bottom corner is a small note: 昭58.5 書替, meaning the board was rewritten in May 1983 (Showa 58). Even after that, it was clearly kept up by hand – several of the bus times have been painted over with later ones.

The board is in two parts: a bus timetable at the top and a train timetable below, listing connections at Enzan 塩山 Station.

The Buses

Two sets of buses served the area. Six buses a day ran between Enzan and Tokuwa, the first leaving Enzan at 6:15 am and the last leaving Tokuwa at 7:10 pm. A second route – the through service up the valley road towards Nishizawa Gorge 西沢渓谷 – passed the Magome 馬込 stop, just down the road, nine times a day in each direction, with the last bus towards Enzan at 8:00 pm. One Tokuwa departure, marked with a triangle, ran on holidays only between 30 June and 10 November – the summer hiking season through to the autumn colours.

The Trains and the Express Alps

The lower half of the board is a guide to onward trains from Enzan: where each train started, when it left Enzan, where it was going and when it arrived. Most were ordinary local trains to Kofu, Takao and Shinjuku, but the entries painted in red were faster trains – the Azusa limited express, the Kaiji express and, above all, the Express Alps.

This is where the board gets interesting. Express Alps services stopping at Enzan ran through to Matsumoto 松本 and beyond, some splitting en route, with one half heading down the Iida line to Iida 飯田 or Tenryukyo 天竜峡 in southern Nagano. Others came from Minami-Otari 南小谷 and Shinano-Moriue 信濃森上 deep in the Northern Alps. A hiker coming off Kentokusan in the afternoon could catch the bus down to Enzan and board an evening Express Alps that ran, without a change of train, all the way to Tenryukyo on the Iida line – arriving deep in the Ina Valley late that night.

Local trains were another matter. An ordinary train from Enzan to Matsumoto took four and a half to five hours! Heading home, the last train to Shinjuku left Enzan at 9:10 pm and arrived at 11:18 pm, the last to Takao left at 9:58 pm, and a final train to Otsuki left at 10:24 pm.

The Express Alps had a long history. The name was first given to an overnight Shinjuku–Matsumoto service in 1951, beloved by climbers heading for the Northern Alps – an era when an overnight local on the same line was nicknamed the Yama-otoko Ressha (Mountain Man Train). By 1968 it covered eleven return services a day. In October 1986, just three years after this board was painted, all the daytime Alps services were upgraded to the Azusa limited express. The overnight Alps survived until December 2002, and the name returned in 2024 as the Limited Express Alps, a seasonal overnight train from Shinjuku to Hakuba. More on its history (in Japanese) here.

Then and Now

Today two services stop at the trailhead. Yamanashi City’s Nishizawa Keikoku line – the descendant of those Magome buses – still runs daily all year between Yamanashi-shi Station and Nishizawa Keikoku Iriguchi, though only a handful of times a day. Yamanashi Kotsu’s line from Enzan, about 32 minutes, now runs mainly on weekends and holidays from late April to late November, and daily only in peak periods. The last buses back leave mid-afternoon – around 3:08 pm and 4:08 pm to Enzan, and 3:36 pm and 4:51 pm to Yamanashi-shi. Check the current Yamanashi Kotsu timetable before you go, as services change seasonally.

In 1983, by contrast, you could linger on the summit, walk down in the late afternoon and still catch a bus at 7:10 pm from Tokuwa or 8:00 pm from Magome, then choose between Shinjuku, Matsumoto or the Iida line. For anyone who has rushed down Kentokusan to make the last bus, the old board shows how much better served this trailhead once was.