In the late summer of 2009, while standing hung over on a pier at Fushiki Port in Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, one of those little-visited industrial cities on the west coast of Honshu, I suddenly found myself staring into the eyes of a tiger. This came as no surprise: It seemed a quite proper way to end our journey, first by the Trans-Siberian Railway, 9,300 km from Moscow to Vladivostok, and then another 1,160 km with the ferry across the Sea of Japan. The weirdnesses of that journey, in fact, seemed perfectly in keeping with a giant cat roaring at me in the middle of a windswept, monochrome harbor.