It's a rite of passage for newcomers and pretty much everyone's daily nightmare. Commuting on Tokyo's overcrowded trains and subways, that is.
Statistics recounting which lines are most over capacity between which stations, thus specifying which trains have the worst people-crush (we're looking at you, Tozai and Saikyo), are commonplace in the media, while the frequency of gropers warrants many transport companies to mark some carriages on rush hour trains as 'women only'. Tokyo trains may be mostly clean and punctual, but they sure are a lot of work in the morning.
To combat all this, the Tokyo metropolitan government has been cooking up plans for years now, with the most recent example being the 'Jisa-biz' and Telework Day projects, both trialled back in July.
Jisa-biz, a two-week trial period, saw extra trains added on several lines between 6am and 7am to relieve the sardine tin-esque chaos an hour later – research shows that over 50 percent of commuters are on a train between 8am and 9am. The metro government also let its employees choose when to arrive at work, with time slots between 7am and 11am offered during the trial.
Meanwhile, July 24 (24/7, yes – we wonder if there's a hidden message there) was Telework Day, which encouraged people to try working remotely. Apparently 927 companies participated in this campaign alone, but how effective it really was remains to be seen. We'd argue those extra trains meant extra work for some at least...
Other plans floated in the past include guaranteed seats on trains for those who buy extra seating tickets for specific rush hour trains, introducing more double-decker trains, and one very unofficial plea for male-only carriages in the morning (apparently more in the sense of 'equality for all' rather than decongestion).
So far, none of these schemes really seem to have alleviated the woes of commuting in Tokyo. A radical solution would be to abolish the current system under which employers pay for employees' commuter passes, ideally helping move companies out of the city centre.
What do you think about these ideas, and do you have a better one to combat Tokyo's rush hour crush? Let us know what your commute is like by leaving a comment below, hitting us up on Facebook or reaching out via Twitter.