Tokyo to Fukui by E-Bike, Day 1: Tokyo to Gunma on the Green Healthy Road

Sayonara, dinosaurs, see you again! I took one last look back at the robot dinosaurs in front of Fukui Station, then pushed off and started the long ride back. Fukui likes to call itself the Dinosaur Kingdom, and after three days there I’m not about to argue with that. What I saw and learned in such a short time was honestly a bit overwhelming. I rode along a coastline that looked like some old master had painted it in sumi-e ink centuries ago. I walked through the ruins of a town that burned for three days straight and then lay hidden under farm fields for close to four hundred years. I climbed the steep corridors and stairways of a mountain temple where Zen monks spend their days among giant cedar trees. And, most important of all, I learned that dinosaurs are still alive.

Each of those is going to get its own post, I promise. Back in my Kanazawa article I said I’d be writing up this whole trip day by day, so this one covers Day One. To do it properly, though, we have to go back to the very beginning, to a sunny mid-October morning in Tokyo with 125 kilometers between me and my destination for the night, and the Beast, packed and eagerly waiting at the door.

Departing from Tokyo, I rode north through Kawaguchi in Saitama, and pretty soon I was on what would turn out to be my road for a good part of the day, the Midori no Healthy Road, or Green Healthy Road. It’s a walking and cycling path about 56 (!) kilometers long, running all the way from Kawaguchi up to Gyoda, where it stops at the Tone River. The road really goes on forever. One minute you’re riding between open fields, the next you’re squeezing (and nearly trespassing) past houses and backyards in some quiet suburb, and then you’re out in the fields again. Most of the time, there’s a narrow strip of water running right beside you, with thick greenery growing along both banks. For the first hour or so I just assumed it was a small, unimportant river.

It isn’t, as it turns out. It’s a canal, the Minuma Daiyosui. Like a lot of things in Japan, it’s been there for almost three hundred years. In the 1720s the shogun Tokugawa Yoshimune wanted more rice coming in, mostly to fix the shogunate’s finances, so he had a big old reservoir called Minuma drained and turned into paddy fields. Those new paddies still needed water, so an engineer brought in from Yoshimune’s home domain of Kii, Izawa Yasobei Tamenaga, dug a channel to bring it all the way from the Tone River instead. The work took roughly half a year, and the canal was finished in 1728. The name fits perfectly, since daiyosui means something like “replacement water,” the water that replaced Minuma. It’s counted as one of Japan’s three great agricultural canals. It still waters more than 10,000 hectares of farmland in eastern Saitama, and in 2019 it was registered as a World Heritage Irrigation Structure. Some of its water even ends up in the taps of Saitama and Tokyo these days. So yes, I spent a good part of the day riding next to a shogun’s irrigation ditch, and honestly, I can’t say I’ve ever followed a nicer ditch.

It’s also flat. I mean properly flat, the whole way, which is exactly what you want on the first day of a long trip, when your legs are still working out what they signed up for. The weather was on my side too, sunny and so warm that it felt like summer had come back for one last visit. And everywhere along the path the cosmos were in bloom, pink and white and orange, spilling out of every patch of ground that nobody had bothered to mow.

At noon I stopped for lunch at a Gusto, the family restaurant chain, in a place called Kisai, somewhere between Kuki and Gyoda. I won’t go into what I ordered, because after a whole morning on something called the Healthy Road, I’d rather keep a little dignity. Not long after lunch, the Green Healthy Road came to an end in Gyoda, right on the bank of the Tone River, at the very spot where the canal takes its water from the river.

From Gyoda (no, not Gyoza!) I followed the Tone upstream, riding mostly on the levee roads along its banks, with the river on one side and fields stretching out on the other as far as I could see. Every now and then the river would open up into something that looked more like a lake, all calm and very blue, with a line of mountains sitting faintly on the horizon.

Before long I was in Kumagaya. If that name rings a bell, it’s probably because of the heat. In July 2018 Kumagaya hit 41.1°C, the highest temperature ever recorded in Japan at the time, and the city has been famous as one of the hottest places in the country ever since. It finally lost the record in 2025 to Isesaki, just across the river in Gunma, which reached 41.8°C, so the title didn’t exactly travel far. I’d picked autumn for this trip partly to stay away from that kind of thing. Even so, it was warm enough that I kept forgetting what month it was.

Out on the cycling roads through all those fields, my only company for long stretches was… grasshoppers! Japanese grasshoppers are surprisingly big, some brownish and some green, and they have a habit that I can only describe as a test of nerves. They sit right in the middle of the path, completely still, just waiting. And then, at the very last second, when you’re absolutely sure you’re about to run one over, they torpedo themselves off to the side. Every single time. I played this game more times than I could count that afternoon, and I’m happy to report that not one of them ended up under my wheels.

The last town on the Saitama side was Kamisato, and its edge is the Kanna River, which is also the border with Gunma. Right by the crossing, at the Kannagawa Bridge South intersection, there’s a gravel plant that looks like it was put together by a giant who lost the instructions halfway through, all rusty conveyor belts and steel towers leaning over one another, with a big “Safety First” sign hung across the middle.

It’s a quiet spot today, but it turns out that this crossing used to be a battlefield. In 1582, about two weeks after Oda Nobunaga was killed at Honno-ji in Kyoto, his general Takigawa Kazumasu, who had been holding the province of Kozuke (more or less today’s Gunma), ran into the army of the Hojo clan here along the Kanna River. It’s said to be the largest field battle fought anywhere in the Kanto region during the whole Sengoku period. Takigawa lost badly, gave up the province, and retreated all the way back to Ise. I found it a strange little coincidence. A few days later I’d be walking through a town in Fukui that Nobunaga’s army burned to the ground, and here, on the very first day, I was riding past the place where his army got beaten nine years later. Travel around Japan long enough and you start to notice how the story of one place keeps turning up in another, even when they’re hundreds of kilometers apart.

By the time I got near the border the sun was going down and everything started to turn gold. For the last hour or so I kept stopping to take photos, which is probably not the smartest plan when you’re trying to reach your hotel before dark. But I really couldn’t help it.

At one point the road crossed a river, and I stopped on the bridge for a while. Below me the water was winding over pale stones, catching what was left of the light, and behind it the hills went back in layers, each one a little paler and hazier than the one in front, until the last of them just melted into the orange sky. There were power lines and pylons strung across all of it, of course, because this is Japan, but somehow even they looked good in that light.

Soon, the whole sky went orange behind a row of old farmhouses with heavy tiled roofs, and a field of rice in front of them, golden and ready for harvest. Off to the west, there was one more mountain worth stopping for. Arafuneyama has a top so flat it looks like somebody sliced it off with a knife. The name means something like “ship on rough seas,” because that long, flat ridge with a sheer cliff at one end really does look like a ship cutting through the waves, and the rock at its northern end is even called Tomoiwa, the stern rock. It stands 1,423 meters tall on the border between Gunma and Nagano. On the Nagano side people have long called it Toyama, the whetstone mountain, which I think describes it pretty well too.

My bed for the night was at HOTEL R9 The Yard in Kanra, a small town in southwestern Gunma right next to Tomioka. It’s a container hotel, where every room is its own separate container unit, lined up in rows like a very tidy freight yard. About three kilometers before I got there, though, Komoot, the app I use to plan my routes, decided to get creative. It took me off the road onto a narrow track through a patch of forest, then down toward a river and onto a stretch of loose gravel. By then it was already completely dark. I kept going anyway, because I figured this must be some clever shortcut that only the app knew about. It wasn’t. The gravel just ended at a construction zone, and there was no way through, not on foot and definitely not with a loaded e-bike. So there I was in the pitch dark next to a river, turning the Beast around on loose stones and feeling more than a little silly.

I rode back the way I came and found a proper road, which, as it turns out, had been pretty close by the whole time, and it took me straight to the hotel. It’s funny how these apps try so hard to find you something shorter or quieter, and then lead you onto a path that’s right next to where you need to be, but that you can’t actually get to. So if you plan your rides with one, keep half an eye on the actual map, especially once the sun goes down. Oh, and make sure your phone still has enough juice left.

I parked the Beast right in front of my container and threw a cover over it. The nights were already getting chilly, and with all that moisture hanging in the air I knew it would be soaked with mist by morning. 125 kilometers done, almost all of them flat, which made for a pretty gentle warm-up as first days go. My legs were fine, the Beast was tucked in for the night, and nobody, not even a single grasshopper, had been harmed along the way.