In Tokyo there’s one railway line which circumnavigates central Tokyo, visiting a lot of the largest cities which have built up around the huge stations which drive Tokyo’s multi-million person daily commute. It’s called the Yamanote line. I decided to walk around it. Here we go!

I started out there at 9:20 after a densely packed train ride. To make it official, I made a rule that I had to visit every station. The first was Shibuya.

Oh, also, this blog is long. If you like, just skim read and look at the pictures. There’s more interesting stuff at the end. No need to read it all.

Shibuya is famous for its main street crossing where a huge crowd of people gather to cross every time the lights change. It’s also home to a lot of shopping and dining.

Shibuya in the morning

First, breakfast. Or at least walking under, around, and through the massive Shibuya Station looking for the right way to go. And then breakfast.

Wrong way! There are 6 major road directions and it's hard to work out which way the station points

I think I've mentioned it before, but green tea lattes

Harajuku is a more laid back and stylish district backed by a large area of park. It has a lot of specialty shops for cosplay and fringe clothing styles. It’s pretty close to Shibuya, hardly worth calling a walk. I wandered about a bit, found the bubble tea shop was closed : (, and carried on.

Harajuku Station

Harajuku's fashion road

Behind Harajuku are two large areas of green, Yoyogi Park and the Meiji-jingu Shrine. Yoyogi Park is very open and spacious and has amazing cherry blossoms in early spring. I only had time to take a photo of the front. I wandered through Meiji-jingu and bought an omamori with bells (for luck, I think, they also come in various different flavors such as prevention against traffic accidents).

Yoyogi Koen

Yoyogi Park cherry blossoms, taken earlier, in April

The next station was supposed to be Yoyogi, but in the end I couldn’t find the station from the main road and before I knew it I was in Shinjuku. Time of arrival: 11:02.

Shinjuku Station South Entry

Shinjuku is centered around one of the largest stations in Tokyo, it is home to a large number of government departments and offices as well as a huge sprawl of shopping complexes. For all that, it’s quite hard to get around because the interesting things are rarely at street level. Actually, it’s often hard to tell where street level is.

Shinjuku wandering

After a painfully slow trek through traffic lights and crowded stairways I made it to the next station, Shin-okubo. This is the first of a series of nondescript residential stations between two big hubs of Tokyo’s commerce. I bought a newspaper, which was actually interesting because I could read quite a bit more than last time I tried.

You can probably guess what the front page was about

Shin-okubo Station

Next station after a long but mercifully straight walk alongside the tracks was Takadanobaba (translates to something like Highfield racecourse).

Takadanobaba Station

From here the road diverged from the track, I took a wrong turn and was pushed further and further away around a university until it became impractical to visit the next station, Meijiro. Two failures already -_-. The road was filled with shops that were still closed, I assume because some people don’t want to get up before mid-day on a Friday.

Meijiro is vaguely visible down this road

Next station, Ikebukuro. Ikebukuro is a district I quite like, it doesn’t really specialize in anything but it’s easy to get around, not too crowded, and it has pretty much everything easily accessible. The hedges on the footpaths are very recognizable. It’s another major station, like Shinjuku and Shibuya, with tracks departing for the outer suburbs.

Ikebukuro Station

An Ike street

I did some shopping here, which slowed me down a bit. The Yamanote line out of Ikebukuro is very hard to follow on foot, I tried to go in one direction but ended up in a part of town that was, um, not that way. Fortunately it was in the actual right direction. I think I’m doomed to get lost in ‘bukuro.

Actually iced coffee, not that great really

From there I got turned around constantly and started to run into issues with my navigation device, my iPhone – the compass was fairly unreliable and although I’d preloaded the right map it was hard to find roads that went in the right direction. The Maps app is not well designed for roaming without data. It constantly annoys you with messages about having no global roaming, and it forgets locations and ignores caches often unless you find the right scale again.

Some roads

More roads, twisty (this goes backwards, little did I know)

The result was that it took me 40 minutes from the closest side of Ikebukuro to Otsuka, by which time it was almost 2pm. That meant I’d been walking for well over 4 hours and gone maybe a quarter of the distance. Around then I realized I’d probably have to stop looking around and just keep going if I wanted to make it the whole way.

Otsuka Station

Getting to the next station, Sugamo, was also a bit of a pain at first because the roads were on a different grid to the tracks and you never know when they’re going to end on you. I made it to a bit where there was a road next to the track, and just kept taking that until Komagome.

Sugamo station

From Sugamo station, small shopping street in a residential area

Komagome station

The road to Tabata was another difficult one because it’s not possible to follow the tracks. I made it to the road with the station, and stopped to look at a small temple and the shrine next to it.

Temple entrance

Shoes

Shrine entrance

Tabata station, actually quite a long way down the road, across the tracks, and down stairs which I had to climb again

The next part of the walk I wanted to take the southern side, which as I’d seen from the train before is filled with greenery, shrines, and temples all the way to Ueno. This also means that it’s hard to get through to all the stations, but I wasn’t prepared to give up just yet.

Shrine entrance

Just beyond this was a room full of people performing or practicing some kind of ceremony, probably not a good idea to disturb them

Road

Nishinippori station

Nippori station

Uguisudani is a peculiar little station, I could see it from Nippori and judging by the maps I didn’t think I could get through on the south side because it doesn’t connect. I crossed over, put up with the boring commercial road instead of the temple strewn south side, and found the north part of the station. I then walked a bit further and discovered that the south entrance is a considerable distance along, perched on the cliff just touching the far end of the platform. Oh well!

Uguisudani, north entrance

Uguisudani, south entrance

The tracks

Next I passed through Ueno Park, which is a large and pretty park filled with trees, roads, and public buildings. By this time my feet were covered in blisters, and I stopped long enough to work out that there wasn’t much I could do.

Ueno park

Ueno Station

I forgot about Okachimachi, which is hidden behind the buildings and has a busy market built inside and beside the raised railway platform for several hundred metres. I walked past and made it to Akiba. Akiba is full of electronics and anime/manga/game stores, it’s competitive with buying online for many things which is very difficult to pull off when there’s so much choice.

I did some shopping, searching for a magazine that a friend wanted (couldn’t find it), and I bought a Blu-ray of a recent anime that I liked. Anime Blu-rays are incredibly expensive, if you want to buy a full series new it will cost you hundreds of dollars. I’m not sure who exactly can afford that, but I guess most people just record them.

Akihabara Station

This is close to the half-way point by distance. It was also 5:00 pm by the time I was finished in Akiba. That was kind of worrying, although I’d covered the majority of the stations I knew were interesting, I would have literally no time to explore afterwards.

The last thing I’d planned to visit was a bookstore in Ginza with a large selection of children’s books, so I headed south as quickly as possible to try to get there before it closed.

Kanda Station

Ginza was quite a bit further than I expected, I walked along the main road, Nipponbashi (which has a more muted but similar feel) for ages without quite being sure if I had passed it or not. Similarly, it was constantly threatening to rain, without being quite clear if it would. Eventually I asked a friendly old businessman and found out that Ginza was still ahead, and it did rain.

If I’d planned ahead I wouldn’t have brought an umbrella so that I could buy one when required. But I didn’t, and already had one, so whatever.

I asked just up here

Ginza is one of Tokyo's most famous shopping districts, with a huge variety of upmarket fashion and similar shops. Best viewed when interested in fashion and when free time is abundant

Tokyo Station is that way

Yurakucho somewhere that way. You know those yellow tiles? They get pretty annoying to step on after the first thousand or so

Shinbashi Station

Shinbashi Station is the end of the Ginza style shopping, just past there I walked through a district full of busy, cheap restaurants. I was getting pretty hungry, because I hadn’t stopped for lunch and was just living off cans of drink and the odd pastry.

So the right thing to do was to stop and eat something. I should have done this. I didn’t because I felt I was later than I really was, and that I should find fast food or something I could eat while moving.

Unfortunately there was nothing of the kind on the major road which I took past the next two stations, which was longer than I care to describe. It was mostly tall office buildings devoid of people because the nine to five workers had all gone home.

Hamatsucho Station, I think ...

Tamachi Station, probably

Finally I got to Shinagawa, which is a major station and one of the two places where south-bound shinkansen (bullet trains) stop in central Tokyo.

Shinagawa Station

Outside there, I found, yay …

It didn't take me long to regret this

So I’d finally found something to eat, although I’m not sure if it counted as food. But I was pretty desperate. Shinagawa is maybe three quarters of the way around the track. It was 7:20 pm. Not looking so great. Of course, I could always just give up and take the train. But that’s not something I like doing.

From Shinagawa the track loops back around to Osaki and starts heading north after a long southern trek. This meant I could skip across some of the distance without missing a station. Unfortunately I didn’t take into account the huge network of non connecting roads, the river, and the lack of places to cross.

Normally, my iPhone would come to the rescue here and tell me which roads went somewhere. However, somewhere around Shinagawa I had accidentally opened the maps app while roaming data was still on (for twitter). This had two effects – it instantly wasted at least 5 megabytes of my very precious 10 mb per month roaming quota, and it cleared all of the existing map data so that I had exactly nothing to go on. I should just be thankful it wasn’t more data :/.

Osaki Station, I think - missing two images which I took but don't have handy, Gotanda and Meguro.

Anyway, after being pushed back onto the slow and obvious route I made it to Osaki. From here there was really nothing to do but walk, since the road follows the rails after getting past the river again.

And so I walked. I probably don’t need to mention that my legs and feet really hurt. But I could still keep going. These stations are, I think, a rather boring part of Tokyo although I didn’t stick around long enough or see enough to actually know. I took pictures of Gotanda and Meguro but don’t have them here to post.

Ebisu Station

At Ebisu there was a walkway or something.

Shibuya South Station

So I finally made it back to Shibuya! Time, 8:50 pm. But I wasn’t finished yet. Going in the south exit was not returning to where I started. In other words, I was destined to get lost one more time, and the massive Shibuya station was happy to oblige. I wandered around, over, and back through it before I found the entrance and photo I was looking for.

Passthrough

People

However, my journey was not over. I needed to get back to Yokohama, and the train ride is long at the best of times. But this was Friday night, and still a really busy time for people commuting home.

So the train looked like this

Once I somehow squeezed on, I worked out that this was a pretty big mistake. I’d been moving without stopping for several hours without enough to eat, and stopping suddenly in a train without any space to breathe had the effect of making me feel very sick. I had of course forgotten that I’d need to slowly wind down, and it took me several rather scary minutes before I remembered. Once I worked this out and got my legs moving back and forth I was pretty much okay except that I would really much rather be going to bed rather than on a train with a thousand other people.

After the 35 minute first train ride I boarded the much quieter and shorter second train, and then hobbled back to where I was staying, luckily very close.

Rain

So, as I was told afterwards by a friend, according to Japanese bloggers it’s not that unusual to walk around the line with similar conditions. Other people also got lost in Ikebukuro and had trouble with roads that don’t follow the rails. Usually it takes 12 hours, which makes my 11:40 with shopping sound ok : ).

The Yamanote line is 34.5 kilometers around. I’d estimate the actual walking distance required to get between all the stations at 40 km or more due to grid layouts, winding roads, stairs, places with no connecting roads, and stations which are accessed primarily from one side only. Now go try it next time you’re in Tokyo! Or … you can just take the train : ).

Purple