Crowded subway in Tokyo
June 1st, 2008 Peter Korkala Posted in General |
Why don’t they just increase the train capacity in some way? Add more vehicles or trains? Or is it impossible without expanding the rail-network? Click on the image to see a video on YouTube where they are pushing people into the subway train.
The people hired to push people into the train is called Oshiya in Japanese. In what other cities are there people hired to push people?
June 8th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Looks like an old video to me. With the increase in the number of trains and decrease in the population, it doesn’t happen as often as it used to
June 12th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Yes, it may be an old video, I don’t know. But anyhow it’s an interesting phenomena.
And I thought the population of Tokyo are increasing, in opposit to the total population in Japan?
July 5th, 2008 at 1:57 am
While I live in a smaller city, I haven’t had to go through this often. I have a few times though in Nagoya in peek hour. It’s a really horrible and odd sensation. I had a business man behind me, pushing me because he was being pushed by the professional pusher. It took all my strength not to turn around to him and tell him to f*&^ off. On the trains that day, I had my face squashed against a man’s and my feet were hardly touching the ground. I almost cried.
I think increasing the number of trains would be hard, they often go about every 2 or 3 minutes at that time of the day. They are also really quite long, so I don’t know if they could increase the capacity. Maybe the city could look at getting companies to stagger working start and finish times or something though.
July 5th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Hi Melanie!
What a horrible experience!! I can imagine that it has to be even more horrible to a Gaijin compared to native Japanese. I never want to experience that!
I understand there are no easy solutions to this problem, otherwise it would already been solved.
Thank you for sharing your experience with us, Melanie. Although I’m not jealous on this particular situation, I find it very interesting to actually “meet” someone who has been a part of this for real – not just on YouTube!
August 25th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
A bit late on this, but I saw a Tokyo tag…
I also lived in Nagoya for awhile (most of 2007). I only saw a professional pusher once… However, that was at Nagoya station, and I wasn’t there very often.
I worked in the Sakae district. A very busy part of the city, but it didn’t get quite the same volume of subway traffic. I got very used to overcrowded trains (especially Fridays) and I had a couple of similar experience of barely touching the floor. Which is odd since I’m a guy, but you get too many people in a small space and every time the crowd leans you loose a little of the ground.