Parcly Taxel: As part of my stay at Morizuya’s place, I got a full Japanese breakfast, consisting of rice with several other condiments like fish, tofu and corn. Rice is, of course, the staple food of the East Asian cultures, and Japan as a whole is very proud of its agricultural/culinary output.

Spindle: Kinosaki itself is a very small place, part of the larger city of Toyooka (豊岡). Besides its onsen, the town’s main feature is the river bisecting it, crossed by a few stone bridges and the railway track. The streets are sparsely populated in the morning, except near the railway crossing when a train comes; shops and dining places are often run by one or two ponies each, in whom I could feel much dedicated love.

Parcly: The coldness of winter was now making itself felt, even within the room we had slept in under a blanket and over appropriate tatami mats. We visited Goshonoyu again, where the male and females’ rooms had been swapped, to soften our hooves up. The ice that Spindle formed upon contact with the water melted off within seconds, and she made a smile.

I bought matcha mochi, sushi and clear bottled tea for the upcoming journey. The craze in convenience stores now was taking refreshing but opaque drinks and making them transparent, the idea being that you wouldn’t want to be seen drinking anything other than water in an office. Labels aside, some were concerned about the additives within these novelties, but I had more delicious and nutritious food to taste between the trains.

Spindle: Railway timetables are accurate to the minute in most parts of the world. Railway timetables in Switzerland and Japan are accurate to the second, with trains leaving on the full minute.

At 11:33 we left Kinosaki the same way we went in, on a train running at 80 km/h all the way to Shin-Osaka (新大阪). Along the way I saw the forested mountains that make up Japan’s spine, some surmounted by electricity pylons. Since my species lives in high mountains, the forests below are our playgrounds, where we curve our ribbon-like bodies around trees to convert ponies full of hatred into friends.

Parcly, on the other hoof, saw farms and isolated clusters of houses, some of which looked like castles. A few cemeteries, immediately recognisable by their tall or flowery headstones, also came and went. As we neared Osaka, these remnants of a Japan forty or fifty years past slowly gave way to skyscrapers, apartment blocks and shopping centres.

Parcly: We made our way to Shinkansen platforms for the No. 31 to Hiroshima. At first I could not get a seat, since the three non-reserved cars at the front of the sixteen-car “bullet” were full, but a kind old mare in car 1 left at Shin-Kobe (新神戸), vacating her seat to me. As these trains are three times faster than what we had just got off and I was travelling west, I saw more tunnels, fields and rivers outside under a setting sun – in effect “chasing the sunset” just as I had chased the sunrise while flying from Hong Kong to Osaka.

Spindle: Upon arrival at the westernmost city in Japan we had reached till that point (the northernmost being Asahikawa), we went to our accommodation straight away. A steep narrow entrance staircase connected the rooms on top and a “camp zone” at bottom, the latter of which had an opening so tiny that Parcly had to float inside tethered to her bottle, her alicorn legs proving too cumbersome. Other facilities included a kotatsu (炬燵) and free cake (not a lie).

Parcly: We rested inside while deciding what to do in the long winter night, which began around six. Setting off at seven, we passed by the city’s beating heart and distant capillaries alike: carparks squashed between buildings, trams, huge junctions branching into alleys, bicycle stations, red-light districts. Some of these are by-products of the atomic bomb, some were present before that, but the majority came afterwards.

We had dinner in a very small okonomiyaki (お好み焼き) restaurant, with 21 seats arranged in a rectangular horseshoe. Inside lies the table and then the hotplate, overlapping to suggest continuity between the chefs and guests – a very intimate and somewhat intimidating experience, but in a style unique to Hiroshima.

Spindle: The dish consists of layered ingredients, always containing noodles and what Saffron Masala calls roti, compressed and flipped as time passes on the hot plate. The bottom layer always gets charred, but this improves the flavour, and while the proper way to eat it is from the same spatula used to cut and serve it, Parcly wasn’t fond of burning her mouth and used chopsticks instead.

Parcly: I felt full even with my alicorn-level metabolism and wandered around the city’s shopping district to help digest my fill, which includes such department stores as Don Quijote. By the time I left that, I was so disoriented that I had to take a taxi back, just to plop my hindlegs under the kotatsu.