Green light, let’s go

I was walking with two huge suitcases around Shinjuku station. Google Maps told me that my hotel was only a four minute walk away, yet I had been wandering around for half an hour and was still incredibly lost. “I probably came out from the wrong exit,” I thought to myself, “but why on Earth did they have to design this place to be a maze?”

I decided to ask for help.

After asking five different people for directions, I eventually arrived at the hotel over an hour later. I was tired, but also intrigued by Tokyo’s transportation. How do people deal with these huge train stations and the endless crowd? Why do they move so fast yet all seem to know exactly where they are going?

I justified my confusion by the lack of public transportation in my home city. I spent my childhood years in Zhengzhou, a small developing city in the center of China. At that time, subways didn’t exist, and bus lines were limited and inconvenient. Transportation to me meant driving. My parents drove me everywhere in the city, and travelling time never exceeded one hour.

Thus, my first week in Tokyo I experienced culture shock. Firstly, trains are ubiquitous and extremely convenient. Walking on the streets, you can find at least one station every 15 minutes, and the trains can take you anywhere: not only to every corner in Tokyo, but also to nearby cities, such as Yokohama and Chiba. Secondly, my foreigner friend and I seemed to be the only ones excited to ride public transportation. Most Japanese passengers remained silent and avoided eye contact throughout the ride, looking down at a phone or a book. Meanwhile, we foreigners conversed loudly, busy expressing our excitement over this metropolis.

As I spent more time using Tokyo’s public transportation system, I started to understand it more and more. The reason behind people’s lifeless expressions is that the same group of people, mostly salarymen and schoolchildren, take the same exact route to work or school every day. According to my Japanese friend who lives in Yokohama, it takes him at least an hour and a half to go to school in Shinjuku-ku, making it a three hour round trip every day. He said that he finishes most of his academic reading on the train to kill time.

-“Then do you ever notice your surroundings? Different people who ride with you, the different activities they do to kill time, the scenery along your way…?”
-“えっ?あまり全然見ない…”(I don’t really look at all…)

These pictures were taken while I was lost around Shinjuku station. There was a girl in school uniform, looking down at her phone while waiting for the light to turn green. It represents the daily life of the population who use Tokyo’s public transportation, who spend a great amount of time traveling in and out of the metropolis.

 

Echo Zhang is currently a sophomore pursuing a major in Economics and a possible minor in Studio Art. Originally from Zhengzhou, China, she has been studying abroad in the U.S since age 14, and hopes to go to Japan next year to study urban economics and photography. In her free time, she enjoys videochatting her family, walking under the sun, and exploring the world through her lens. Her ultimate goal in life is to travel around the world with her family.

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