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Tokyo's
Iron
Rooster
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“The line is testimony that the institutional vandalism that eliminates public transportation from a living city can be stopped.” Tokyo Sights and Insights, Ryosuke Kami
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An aerial view of Tokyo taken thirty or forty years ago would have revealed a city thoroughly incised with tram car lines. Photographs taken as recently as the late 1960s show large sections of Shinjuku street crisscrossed with tracks and overhead power cables.
The use of trolley cars rose considerably after the war, reaching a peak of over six hundred thousand passengers a day in 1955. Tokyo’s first tram line appeared in 1903, linking Ueno and Shinagawa. The track which Line No. 1 as it was christened used, was the original narrow gauge rail used for the original, horse-drawn Shimbashi to Nihonbashi railway-carriage. The line ran until 1967. |
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The decline in the amount of new tracks being laid had begun a few years before, accelerating with the approach to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the city’s growing self-consciousness about the damage to its image of modernity that might be caused by “outmoded” forms of transport. Most of Tokyo’s remaining trolley buses disappeared in a final wave of decommissioning that took place between 1967 and 1972.
Some senior Tokyo residents still recall the days when it was possible for a group of friends to hire an entire vehicle for a private “streetcar party.” A decadent feature of the otherwise fairly austere Occupation era, streetcars would be suitably decked out with flowers and streamers, and a small bar with glasses, ice-buckets and bottles set up at one end, for what must have been a joyous moveable feast through the streets of downtown Tokyo.
Judging from the number of passengers using the Arakawa line, Tokyo’s last surviving tramcar complex, at any given time of the day, appears to be well supported, with a flat ticket rate for any destination still kept at ¥160. It might also be noted that although tram cars were purportedly phased out in order to make way for more efficient modes of transport, the Arakawa line completes its entire, 12-kilometer course from Waseda to Minowabashi in forty minutes flat, irrespective of rush-hour traffic and the inevitable delays cars and buses are subject to. |
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More akin to a river than a transport route in the way it fashions its own contours through central and eastern parts of the city, the line takes in parts of Shinjuku, Toshima, and Arakawa wards, providing convenient access to city sights within walking distance of its stations such as Kishibojin (Pomegranate Temple) in Zoshigaya, the Kyu-Furukawa Garden in Kita Ward and Jokan-ji Temple, a minute or two’s stroll from the line’s eastern terminus at Minowabashi. The streetcar is still fondly referred to by locals familiar with its green and cream colored carriages, as chin-chin-densha, an onomatopoeic rendering of the sound made by the tram’s starting bell. |
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Those who know the line well from frequent commuter use, claim that the most interesting stretch lies between Koshinzuka and Higashi-Ikebukuro, the backyard of old plebeian districts whose soaring land prices have failed to truly gentrify them. One of the joys of the tram is that it trundles along slowly enough, and close enough to the houses, cubby shops, alleys and pathways contiguous with its serpentine progress, to catch a considerable amount of the minutiae of daily life, taking in everything from futon-banging, family disputes to food deliveries, along its course. |
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“The house was nondescript in every detail except one,” the narrator of a short story set in Arakawa ward relates: “It was built in what seemed perilous proximity to a local Tokyo tramline which gave the narrow, rectilinear building the appearance of a signal box.” Even by space-depleted Tokyo standards, passengers on the Arakawa line sometimes feel that they are in oddly intimate proximity to the lives of those living along its tracks.
Despite passing through one of the city’s most cramped quarters, the building of the line has preserved space, removing in effect, one light-impeding wall from the houses that stand huddled beside it. Residents have been quick to take advantage of this open corridor of sunlight. Look closely and you will see south-facing persimmons, loquats, and modest trellises of vine and kiwi. |
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The tow-paths that run parallel with much of the line, linking one level-crossing or platform with another, or feeding the pedestrian back into the street as a tram slithers across a stretch of asphalt road, are surprisingly fertile, with miniature trees, shrubs and flowing window-boxes, an assertive green presence augmented with hedges, lumps of topiary, and flowering bushes like fragrant olive (kinmokusei). |
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Random beds of earth at the side of the line, narrow pinched, have been sown with gladiola, lupine and clumps of herbaceous growths, or simply left to run riot with wild grasses and weeds. Many residents have requisitioned the far side of the paths opposite their front gates for their potted plants, and the low, protective fencing beside the tracks as climbing frames for ivy or sweetpeas.
Passing trams are never loud or intrusive enough to spoil this revelry. Here is a line which interacts with its environment rather than disrupting it, a cell moving instinctively, unobtrusively, through the urban system. |
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