The Daitoua Quest Bureau presents
DAITOUA QUEST
A Pan-Pacific Railway in Eight Stations
Yokohama · Showa 27 · First Impression
An Itinerary of Lost Junctions
Issued by the Bureau, Yokohama · Spring of Showa 27
The Pan-Pacific Line, as conceived by the engineers of the Bureau in the autumn of 1948, was to commence beneath the iron-and-glass clerestory of Rangoon Central, threading north through the teak-shaded valleys of the Salween before crossing into the rice plains of upper Siam. From the marble platforms of Bangkok Hua Lamphong the traveler would proceed eastward to Saigon Saigon-Eastern, where the locomotive was scheduled to take on water beneath the awnings of a station built in the manner of a Provençal sanitorium.
From Saigon the route describes an unbroken arc above the South China Sea, a feat made possible by the never-completed Hainan Trestle — a kilometric span of riveted ochre steel intended, in the renderings of the Bureau's draughtsmen, to be the longest railway bridge between two empires. Northward through Taipei Centrale, eastward across the strait by ferry of the second class, and at last along the volcanic spine of the home islands to Sapporo Terminus, where the journey concluded in a station hall heated by oil-fired stoves and illuminated by frosted globes.
No portion of this route ever ran. The locomotives commissioned for it were melted down in 1944. The brochure you now consult was printed on a small press in Yokohama in the spring of 1952, in an edition of perhaps two hundred copies. The Bureau dissolved quietly the following winter.
Of the Sleeping-Car Service
The Bureau's specifications for the second-class sleeping carriage required panels of lacquered teak from the forests of Burma, brass fittings cast in the workshops of Kobe, and reading-lamps with shades of pleated silk in a particular shade of yellowed cream — a color the Bureau's chief draughtsman, Mr. Iwasaki, referred to in his marginalia as "the color of an envelope long carried in a coat pocket."
The luxury of the long railway journey is not in arriving but in the slow accretion of unspecified hours, the rhythm of brass fittings and tobacco-colored leather, the privilege of sleeping while the country itself moves beneath you.
— Daitoua Quest Bureau, Bulletin No. 4
Each compartment was to be furnished with a small folding writing-desk of bird's-eye maple, a porcelain washbasin behind a louvered door, and a window of double glass through which the traveler might watch the passing of unfamiliar fields without disturbance from the noise of the wheels. Pillows were to be of horsehair, sheets of unbleached Manchurian cotton, and the cabin scented faintly with the camphor used to protect the woolen blankets in storage.
Published by the Daitoua Quest Bureau
Yokohama · Showa 27 · Spring
Set in Playfair Display, Cormorant Garamond, and Crimson Text
Printed in an edition of two hundred · This impression unnumbered