The day started early for us. At 5 in the morning, a lonely siren wailed outside. It led to us and a few other worried hotel guests standing at the reception ten minutes later, asking what it meant. The night porter simply told us that we didn’t need to worry. Oh well… 🤔

Typhoon number 21 had weakened to a tropical depression, but still brought plenty of heavy rain across the whole country and really messed up the timetable for the Shinkansen bullet trains. In some cases, there were delays of over four hours!

We decided to spend the morning in the hotel room so we wouldn’t get soaked to the bone yet again. In the afternoon, a Shinkansen delayed by 70 minutes (so, on time by German standards) then took us to our next place to stay: Fukuyama. The sun even came out there, as if nothing had happened, and let us get a first impression of the city and especially its beautiful castle.