Tokyo trains

(Dear reader, I promise sometime I will write a post that discusses something other than public transit or language. This is not that post.)

Last week, during Sonja’s spring break from school, we took a trip to Japan. It meant that we missed Taiwan’s biggest earthquake in 25 years, which was both a relief and perversely guilt-inducing (see the post on missing an earthquake). The trip also felt not particularly well planned, since we ended up spending at least as much time traveling as we did sightseeing. But upon reflection, I think that may have made it in some ways the quintessential Japanese experience. 

Mostly because of something a Taiwanese colleague had said when I’d mentioned a month or so earlier that I was considering this trip, we spent relatively little time in Tokyo. When I’d said I had bought tickets to Tokyo, he said, “If I were the one going I’d spend more time in Kyoto. It’s more interesting, with more temples and historic sites.” So I decided we’d take the Shinkansen, the bullet train, to Kyoto and spend most of our time there. But by the time I started to look for lodging in Kyoto, there was none—at least, none to be had for any price that we could afford. In retrospect, the logical conclusion to draw from this observation would have been, “Kyoto is full. Let’s give it a miss this time.” Instead, I decided to book us a room in nearby Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city. So we would need to take the train from Tokyo to Osaka, and then from Osaka to Kyoto each day, and finally back to Tokyo to catch the plane home–and use the metro systems in each of those cities to get from place to place. Hence: many hours on train platforms, at ticket machines, on platforms, and standing and sitting on trains.

A couple of observations about that experience: first, Japan’s train infrastructure is fantastic. There are so many different kinds of trains going so many different places: the blazing Shinkansen, one of which leaves Shin-Osaka station every few minutes bound for Tokyo, and vice versa; the rapid-express commuter trains which feel almost as swift as the bullet train but stop in more places; the sub-express trains that stop more often; and the local ones that plod deliberately along and feel more like riding regional rail in Philadelphia. But second: Japan’s train infrastructure can be confusing, and as is often the case when a plethora of choices confront you, a bit overwhelming.  

Our forays to Kyoto were a kind of Goldilocks trial-and-error process, but unlike Goldilocks, I’m not sure we ever found the perfect fit. On the first day we flew there from Osaka on a speedy, comfortable, but budget-busting Shinkansen. In the afternoon we decided to take the rapid-express train back. At around twenty minutes it was almost as fast and much less expensive than the bullet train, but consequently way more popular, so we ended up standing in the aisle cheek by jowl with other passengers. Not a great way to end a tiring day of tromping around. The close quarters also made it clear why the cars designated “women only” are in demand—though to be fair, I’m sure many of the men packed in our car were no happier than any of the rest of us about contorting themselves around other people’s bags and bodies. 

The lesson I drew from that was: to avoid the crowd, take the sub-express or local train instead of the rapid express. So the next time we set out for Kyoto we rode a subway-style train that hit every stop. We were able to get seats without a problem, and unlike everywhere else we’d been in Japan, we were just about the only visible foreigners* around. For a few stops I felt like we’d discovered a secret, superior way to travel from Osaka to Kyoto. But by the time our train trundled to a stop at our destination over an hour later, that feeling had disappeared entirely.

What compounds the proliferation of options is this: unlike Taipei, where one entity (the municipal government) operates the whole metro system, in Japan different private companies operate different subway and light-rail lines. In Tokyo, for example, our hotel was near two different subway stations named Ryogoku: one that served the four lines of the Toei subway system and another one a few blocks away that served the nine-line Tokyo Metro system. You can switch from one company’s trains to the other’s, but you have to exit Company A’s turnstiles, find the entrance to Company B’s station, and pass through a second set of turnstiles to get to your next train. Altogether “about a dozen different companies” operate the bus, train, and subway lines in Tokyo, and  “over seven different subway and railway companies”serve Osaka, according to the posts linked in this sentence. 

Below, with thanks to some clever folks on Reddit, are examples of the maps of the Tokyo Metro, Toei, and JR Rail lines merged into one hypermap. I believe these convey the scope and scale of the thing pretty well.

Nor is it always possible to access the train in both directions from the same station, as we discovered when we realized that the train that stopped at the platform we were standing on was traveling in the opposite direction from where we wanted to go. There was no recourse but to leave the station, walk to a separate one about 800 meters away and buy a new ticket.

No wonder they have a problem with people rushing onto trains. There are signs everywhere admonishing commuters not to rush onto trains, such as this one:

There are also workers with mini loudspeakers standing on the platform trying to dissuade people from rushing onto trains. And in some stations, like the one in Kyoto pictured below, they have a barrier that reminds me a little bit of a cattle gate. The bars rise before the train doors open, and come back down before they close, keeping the rushers from getting in the door.

But still, people rush onto the trains. I don’t blame them–by the time you’ve made your way in and out of gates and across a city block or underground passage between different companies’ lines, it must be tempting to try to slip onto that about-to-depart train and make your commute a few minutes shorter.

Apparently not everyone finds Japanese trains as confusing as I do. Poking around on the Internet while writing this post, I encountered long, thoughtful posts (here and here) by seemingly rational people praising the Tokyo metro system as a model of usability and good wayfinding cues. Having thought about it a little, I think there are two plausible explanations. One is that they were comparing the Tokyo system to the subway systems in their own cities back in the US: New York and D.C., respectively. I can well believe that Tokyo’s system seems accessible and transparent compared with what exists in American cities; it would be an absolute dream to get around Denver as cheaply and swiftly as you can get around Tokyo. But if you’re coming from a place like Taipei with an even more user-friendly public-transit system, things like abundant, clear signage in multiple languages aren’t revelations so much as basic expectations. 

To be fair, let me take a moment to note that Japanese cities are much bigger than Taipei. Population of Taipei: 2.6 million. Population of Tokyo: 14 million.

Second, one of the authors mentioned how easy it is to get around without knowing the language. Here I think I ran into the conundrum I encounter sometimes when traveling around Taipei with Sonja: sometimes it is easier to navigate these cities when you can’t read the language in which most things are written, so you don’t even try. At Taipei bus stops, I’ve found myself scanning the names of all of the stops on a route before eventually declaring, “Yes, this one goes to the MRT station—we can take it,” only to hear S say, “I know.” “How?” I ask, amazed. S points to the little train icon that appears at the end of one of the stop names, the icon that indicates the stop is near an MRT station. Sometimes it’s better to have less information to work with as long as it’s the information you need. In Japan, I was thrilled to be hearing and seeing Japanese everywhere, many years after my limited study of the language. I loved feeling words and expressions coming back to me, and my eyes and brain greedily took in all the signs they could—there was just no way to shut off my craving to decipher it all. But that probably hampered my wayfinding rather than improving it.

And it’s true that Japanese train stations are almost inconceivably information-rich environments, so if you’re able to shut out what you don’t need and home in on what you do, you can probably navigate pretty well even as a foreigner with no experience there. For example, the chart below, posted on a column on a subway platform, shows you what important features each of the train’s eight cars will be closest to in each of the stations it stops at. So if you know you’re going to Roppongi, and you need a bathroom or an escalator, then you know that either car 2 or 8 will be closest to those amenities when you get there. 

There is, finally, something undeniably charming about the whole fiddly system. If you’re a casual tourist rather than a hardened commuter and you don’t own a plastic metro card, you get the pleasure of buying and using subway tickets one by one. That may sound sarcastic, but I’m being sincere. It is satisfying to pour handfuls of yen into the coin funnels on a ticket machine, hear them jangle down and wait while the machine counts what you’ve dropped in. It takes just long enough to build a tiny bit of anticipation, but never so long that you grow impatient or wonder if it’s stopped working. Your little ticket then pops out of a slot precisely its size with a pleasing mechanical sound that announces its arrival. I’m sure there is a way to describe that sound in Japanese, a language famously rich with onomatopoeia, but in English all I can say is: it’s just what you imagine a machine sounds like when it ejects a small paper ticket. Your change comes rattling down into a tray next to it. 

When you pass through the turnstile, you stick the ticket in the front slot and out it comes neatly punched on the other end, ready for you to feed it into the exit gate at the end of your journey. There’s nothing remarkable about this, I guess, but in a digital world of swipes and taps where things can seem unreal, the sensory experience and the retro-tech feel of it is refreshing.

In the next post I hope to explain from a historical perspective why spending so much of our time going back and forth between cities was the quintessential Japanese experience. 

*there are lots of foreigners who blend in better than we do, such as Taiwanese and Korean tourists.