A RIDE ON THE YAMANOTE Chapter 2 (Pietro)

In the Greater Tokyo Area every day a miracle is performed: 80% of the population reach their workplace using the public transportation. The immediate consequence of this is a second miracle: in an area populated by 36 million people with one of the highest population densities in the world traffic becomes a marginal problem. If you live in a central area of Tokyo and you don’t hear much noise from the street, that’s rather normal. Many streets in Tokyo have no place for parking cars –in many areas of Tokyo you can live a comfortable life without a car.

In Tokyo there is an underground system with nine metro lines, but many Japanese people hardly know them. More than the underground, railways are used. Many companies offer railway services in Tokyo. The most important is JR (an easy name also for the Westerners who do not speak any Japanese –it is written in letters and not in Japanese characters). JR operates tenths of lines, the most important of which is the Yamanote circle line. In every station you will see the map of the JR lines, among which a light green circle with 29 dots is particularly visible. Six of these dots are bigger as they represent the six main stations: Ueno, Ikebukuro, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Shinagawa and Tokyo. This latter one is tricky: as we said, Tokyo is not a city but a fusion of cities and wards. None of these is called Tokyo, but inside one of them there is an area named Tokyo –the one around the Tokyo station –an area full of modern buildings and skyscrapers populated by businessmen. We will talk about the characteristics of these places later, now let’s have a look inside the train

In a city where four fifths of the population reach their workplace with the public transportation, trains make everyone somehow alike. On the trains in Tokyo you will see students, workers, businessmen, working class, young girls in miniskirts and a lot of make-up, old women in kimono, Japanese housewives, foreign tourists frantically looking at their maps, foreign residents, young people in kimono, old people watching tv on their mobile phones. Everybody next to each other.

Tokyo is a city of commuters and spending a long time on the train every day is very normal. Although many lines have trains every 2 to 3 minutes, seats are never enough and reading while standing, watching tv on your mobile phone, playing on a small playstation is very common to let time pass on the train. On all Japanese trains it is strictly frobidden to speak on the phone: in general the atmosphere is very relaxed and silent. That is because on the trains in Japan the most sacred occupation is sleeping. Using long commuting times to gain some more sleep is very common to all commuters who are used to wake up as soon as the registered voice announces their station.