A photo of Mount Fuji taken from the bullet train must have adorned thousands of social media posts. But, not mine. I had a good try though.

The Fuji-side of the train was fully booked so I had to stand between carriages and crouch to peer through a low window. An elderly security guard spotted me and smiled: ‘Mount Fuji? Er, 15 minutes’.

So I waited, charting our course on Google maps and glancing up every 5 seconds so I didn’t miss either the beautiful bamboo groves and the green tea plantations or the pitch-black tunnels and beige rectangular buildings.

Finally, we saw it. Or should I say, we saw a thick clump of cloud behind which may or may not have been Mount Fuji.

I was happy though. Basho wrote a haiku about how interesting it was being unable to see Mount Fuji because of cloud cover. And I can just upload a photo from a few years back.