The nineteenth century proliferation of railways necessitated the adaptation of society to new speeds. Rail initiated temporal and asymmetric reconfigurations of traditional centres, prompting commentators to describe the revolution as “the annihilation of space and time”. Though the physicalities of travel had always remolded physical space between historical cities, the more salient disruptions of rail were perhaps in the social dimensions of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch terms in The Railway Journey as the “industrial consciousness”1: rail represents increasing efficiency but also an increasing subjection of individual autonomy to greater urban ambitions. Marx’s observation that “production not only provides an object for the subject but also provides a subject for the object”2reveals how innovations in transportation technology produced also a passenger identity capable of being transported. The intrusion of the industrial into the urban remade the city in the image of the railway, a city which was tolerant of once distinct spatial identities, but had now become the birthplace for a generation of passengers who could reconcile the shock of new urban adjacencies.
Today in post-industrial Japan, this logic of accelerated circulation and commerce finds radical realization. In 2023, Japan’s railways carried approximately 22.61 billion passengers, despite the country’s population of 125 million people—equivalent to around 180 rail trips per person per year. The Shinkansen network alone recorded around 356 million passengers, exceeding the total number of passengers on all domestic flights.3 The speed, punctuality and safety record of its network has become a source for national pride. Japanese railway stations absorb the functions of the city itself, swallowing commerce, leisure, and social organization. Private railway companies built department stores, residential suburbs and commercial districts around their stations, producing a multi-nodal structure in which the station constitutes the city. Roland Barthes, observing Tokyo in Empire of Signs, recognized the railway station as the institution that “permits the city to signify, to be read.”4Japan’s fusion of railway infrastructure with commercial architecture produced a form of engineered sociality where the individual is perpetually in transit, moving through choreographed sequences of consumption, commuting, and controlled encounter. The Shinkansen’s disrupted registration of space produced a megalopolis with uniformity and character on the national level. Evidently, Japan adopted the logic of railway circulation with an intensity that surpassed its European origins.
But while Japan’s extraordinary railway-integrated urbanism constructed central cities identified by convenience, it also inadvertently produced an unprecedented form of passenger identity that presaged social challenges such as the spatial isolation of domestic life, depopulation of rural areas, ritualization of commute and the social paradox of anonymity that prompt us to reevaluate the narrative of modernization as liberation.
This analysis studies this identity in three parts: first, it briefly introduces the historical ideology of circulation by reconstructing Schivelbusch’s arguments on the machine ensemble, panoramic perception and continuous movement. Second, through the case study of Shinjuku Station, it examines how Japan’s private railway companies produced a form of station-centric urbanism that coalesced transit and commerce, which became a form of freedom from the workplace and domestic sphere. Third, it discusses the consequences of the resulting passenger identity in Japan, revealing the capacity of modernity to produce new forms of constraint within the architecture of movement itself.
I. Ideology of Circulation
For Wolfgang Schivelbusch, the introduction of the railroad fundamentally renegotiated between traveler and landscape. The pre-industrial journey was conducted within the space of terrain; the stagecoach fitted itself to contours of the land, and the traveler remained a participant in the environment through which they moved.5 The railroad interrupted this connection through what Shivelbusch terms the “machine ensemble”—the integrated system of rail, locomotive, telegraph, and scheduled operation. Early passengers reported feeling that they had entered a separate sphere, as excavations, tunnels, and embankments that accommodated the rail’s geometric requirements divided traveler and landscape.6 When velocity dissolved the foreground, the eye was redirected toward the middle distance and the horizon, where landscapes appeared to slide past as a series of tableaux. Jules Clarétie in Voyages d’un parisien (1865) characterized the railway view as an infinite panorama that showed only the outlines of a landscape, replacing intimate knowledge with an indiscriminate glance.7 Schivelbusch draws a parallel between Franz Reuleaux’s description of the progressive elimination of “play” between interlocking parts and Norbert Elias’s description of social development as the progressive regulation of individual behaviour.8 Through passenger pacification, the train compartment began what would soon define urban modernity.
Railway circulation also birthed an ideology of circulation which would persist into the age of the automobile and beyond, in the form of a continuous movement. The nineteenth century obsession with biological processes treated the flow of traffic, goods and people as analogous to the circulation of blood. French economist Jean Baptiste Say wrote that the social body would be healthier the more rapid and general the circulation of values; Haussmann declared his intention to ensure public tranquility through boulevards that allowed the circulation of air, light, and military units simultaneously.9 Movement became associated with urban health, and that which was detached from circulation “appeared diseased, medieval, subversive, threatening.” In Zola's department-store novel Au Bonheur des Dames, the small shops unable to sell their goods literally grow mold and decay in the shadow of the emporium.10 The railroad associated movement with life and stasis with death; it produced a city organized around the imperative of flow, and a consciousness that internalized it as unquestionable fact.
II. Station-Centric Urbanism and Liberation: Shinjuku
Tokyo Station, opened in December 1914, was constructed as the official entrance to the capital and became the largest terminal in Asia.11 Yet Tokyo’s predominant urban model began elsewhere, in suburban transfer points the city’s first mayor Goto Shinpei had warned would replace the centre. Within fifteen years of Tokyo Station’s opening, Goto's prediction was fulfilled: by 1925 Shinjuku had become the most used station in the city, a result assured by the distinctive structure of Japan's private railway companies.12 The 1906 partial nationalization of Japan's railroads absorbed trunk routes into the government while leaving suburban and regional networks to private enterprise.13Private railway companies, lacking the guaranteed revenues of trunk operations, developed a profit model that integrated transit, real estate, and retail. Thirteen private railways enlarged their routes between 1924 and 1925, linking new residential districts to terminals at Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Ikebukuro.14 Each major terminal could become its own centre, creating a city structured by the timetable rather than by centrality.
In 1929, the Hankyu Umeda Station in Osaka opened as an eight-storey building containing platforms and ticket gates on a single floor of a structure that was, in every other respect, a department store.15Its radical innovation was that, unlike earlier train station department stores such as “Keio Paradise” in Shinjuku which had been added later, the station was a single floor of a department store, and shoppers boarded the train for the express purpose of going to the store.16 Hankyu demonstrated for the railway company that by owning the land at the terminal, the residential subdivisions at the line’s end, and the train between the two, they could capture every yen the suburban household spent in the course of its daily existence: the morning fare, the lunch eaten at the terminal cafeteria, the goods purchased at the department store on the way home, and the rent on the house itself. The railway thus seamlessly transformed from a transport business to one inducing and capturing profit from consumption. By the early 1930s, more than 250,000 people from the suburbs entered Shinjuku on weekdays and over 780,000 on Sundays, the majority for shopping.17
Because the train platform and the sales floor occupied the same building, the panorama of the city from the train window and the panorama of goods in the department store became indistinguishable; commerce became a condition through which one passed. For the Hankyu Umeda commuter, the train ride to the store becomes as much part of the experience as the aimless browsing within the store. Schivelbusch identified this condition in the nineteenth century Parisian department store, as an interior realization of the panoramic perception generated by the railway: the customer “was kept in motion; he traveled through the department store as a train passenger traveled through the landscape,” encountering goods no longer as discrete objects evaluated through the sales dialogue but as “an ensemble of objects and price tags fused into a pointillistic overall view.”18 The department store enabled a society poised to eliminate space and time not just between cities, but within daily life. Schivelbusch argues that panoramic perception derived from two inseparable sources: the physical speed of the vehicle, but also the commodity character of the journey itself.19 The station introduced a subject of movement between cities but also one in the city itself, in the form of standardized and streamlined commerce. Rail reorganized the cognitive map of the city; a resident of 1930s Tokyo oriented themselves through the discontinuous archipelago of terminals rather than the continuous fabric of streets: Shinjuku for everyday goods, Ginza for luxury, Asakusa for traditional entertainments. Each station was functionally equivalent, just as the city names on European station buildings served, in Schivelbusch's reading, as price tags attached to commodities in the department store.20
These stations were also distinctively modern: Shinjuku station drew a predominantly young, salaried workforce whose daily passage through the terminal sustained an ecology of department stores, cafes, bookshops, and cinemas.21 As Funabashi Seiichi observed in 1931, “the station was no longer merely a place to catch a train, but was the site of business transactions, social interactions, aimless loitering, and, most of all, romantic trysts.”22 The famous chalk message board in Shinjuku’s main concourse, where young salaried workers left one another notes would have been unimaginable under the surveillance of the workplace or household. An Asahi reporter recorded a young woman in a red coat writing “Dear F, I waited, but now I’m leaving. ‘K’-ko”23 after thirty minutes of pacing, then disappearing into the crowd. The station’s grand circulatory project was the sum of millions of such small refusals, errands, partings, and purchases. A new generation of Japanese were participating in a form of selfhood that no other condition could accommodate. The Asahigraph survey of April 1932 found that, where Ginza’s afternoon crowds were four to six men for every woman, Shinjuku’s were almost evenly split, registering the entry of the suburban housewife into the daily life of the terminal.24 For her, Shinjuku Station offered a space in which her time was not entirely defined by the household.
The founders of Nakamuraya, who had moved their Indian-curry restaurant from Hongo in 1907, found in the station an audience of “literary youths” and “Yamanote artists” whose patronage their original location could not have sustained; the founders of Kinokuniya opened their bookstore in 1927 within walking distance of the ticket gates because they understood that the commuter, having a few minutes between trains, would buy in a way that the dedicated bookshop customer of Jimbocho would not.25 The novelist Ryutanji Yu, who lived in Shinjuku for a year in 1930, described the surroundings of the station as an “orchestra” of “Shinjuku rhythms” composed of “dirt like dandruff, worn-out shoes, wooden billboards, mosaic glass, fruit mirrored in shop windows, copper streetcar wires, a railroad information office, left-wing theater posters, and the eyes of a taxi driver, full of extreme urban tension,” as well as “suburban housewives out shopping and plenty of literary youths with disheveled hair and dirty collars.”26
Postwar Shinjuku accreted new layers, above which rose dazzling department stores and the Kabuki-cho entertainment quarter. Sakariba—entertainment and commercial areas that formed around major terminals—captured the leisure time of workers before their commute home. Shinjuku’s sakariba offered inexpensive distractions such as curry restaurants, cinemas, bookshops and fruit parlours that constituted a commercial urbanism of leisure carried by the rhythm of the commute. By the early 1970s, two million passengers a day passed through Shinjuku station.27
In the 1973 A+U article “Shinjuku”, Peter Gluck and Henry Smith write that the modern Shinjuku station “is not a building, but rather an extremely complex three-dimensional network of transfer routes.”28 The authors identify the mutual constitution between station and market: “the station without the market would be machine-like and probably inhuman, while the market without the station would be impossible.”29 The station embodied a sense of mechanical efficiency but also simultaneously a sense of sublime spectacle. Shinjuku station had become, as Gluck and Smith write, a “daily-life fairyland”30, compensating for the cramped dwellings and standardized offices that bracketed the commute on either end.
The railway's capacity to extend the commutable radius of the city generated a form of social life in which communal function evacuates the domestic sphere. Friends and relatives met in public places—the entertainment districts and terminal department stores that surround the station—because the cramped suburban dwelling could not accommodate them. Yoshinobu Ashihara described Tokyo’s suburbs in 1989 as “bed towns”—settlements located hours from the city centre by train, where workers leave early and return late, spending time only for sleep. If each house is a private bedroom, then the city becomes a cluster of bedrooms interspersed with commercial and entertainment districts that serve the functions of the living room.31 Ashihara notes that despite Japan’s status as an economic superpower, the space in which individuals live remained cramped and lacking in cultural fulfilment; the tokonoma, the traditional alcove for displaying seasonal art, had vanished in the tide of urbanization.32 By enabling the “bed town”, these railway stations absorbed social life and simultaneously dispersed domestic life into Japan’s urban fabric.
These stations manifested what Siegfried Kracauer recognized as the inseparable relationship between work and play for the new middle classes: “the more monotony holds sway over the working day, the further away you must be transported once work ends. . . . The true counterstroke against the office machine, however, is the world vibrant with color. . . . A world every last corner of which is cleaned, as though with a vacuum cleaner, of the dust of everyday existence.”33 Hayashi Fusao noted while walking through Shinjuku Station in 1930: on weekdays the streaming lines of salaried workers leaving their offices were “always pale and gray” and moved “like clay dolls,” while on Sundays the same commuters walked leisurely and animated, “free of the burdens of work.”34 The spectacle of the Japanese station equated the ideology of circulation and leisure, associating urban movement with not just the Japanese worker’s commute but also with their time off. The rail network offered both entrenchment in and liberation from perverse conditions of the workplace and the household, a contrast facilitated by its ability to shuttle humans back and forth from institutionalized suppression and agglomerated expression.
III. The Passenger Identity
Japan’s unique urban conditions developed a new social role, continuous from morning commute to evening sakariba, which became coextensive with urban life. This passenger identity is inherently contradictory—on one hand, it is a someone whose daily life is structured by the interval between trains, bounded between fixed and suppressive destinations, on the other, it is someone with total freedom able to travel conveniently and quickly to anywhere they wish.
Gluck and Smith note that Shinjuku’s underground passage offers a labyrinthine disorientation in which, “precisely because one is ‘nowhere,’ it becomes possible to be ‘anywhere.’”35 Freedom of the passenger identity exists through the suspension of the identities (householder, worker, family member) that limit it. The passenger is free as in Simmel’s metropolitan: at the price of becoming interchangeable with the crowd around them. In Simmel’s terms, the station enacts a freedom of movement that is simultaneously a freedom from “the de-individualizing small town.” Simmel observes that the metropolis grants the individual a field of unique development because its size loosens the rigidity of the “original demarcation against others.”36 The station’s crowd offers an anonymity in contrast with the conformity enforced through the proximity of the village or hierarchy of the workplace. The individual gains mobility, access to commodified pleasures, and release from the surveillance of village life. Yet the commuter is simultaneously subjected to a disciplinary regime of scheduled movement, physical compression and perceptual overload. The bed town isolates the domestic sphere, the terminal station equates leisure with consumption and the passenger car enforces an anonymous proximity. Ashihara terms Japan’s urbanism as a “hidden order”—an organic, parts-oriented urbanism that tolerates randomness and responds to change through constant self-reformation.37 But this is also an order of constraint: the freedom of the parts is provided by the standardization of the whole. Each node of the railway network replicates a similar configuration of platform, department store, and residential district.
There are also further consequences of Japan’s simultaneously liberating and stifling adoption of rail travel. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, Georg Simmel writes that the psychological intensification of stimulation in the urban experience was first experienced systematically on the railway, through its crowding of rapidly changing discontinuous images.38 Simmel observes that public transportation created an unprecedented condition of prolonged mutual visual contact between strangers without conversation, a situation that produced embarrassment, reserve, and eventually the blasé attitude characteristic of metropolitan consciousness.39 The train compartment, as Freedman argues, became the first space in Japanese history in which strangers of different classes and genders were forced into prolonged visual proximity without introduction, a condition Simmel identified as the metropolitan reserve.40 Freedman views the Tokyo commuter car as a Foucaultian heterotopia, a “temporary world in transit” in which social roles are rehearsed and redefined.41 The carriage suspended hierarchy: the salaryman, the schoolgirl, the labourer and the bureaucrat occupied the same space under Simmel’s regime of the blasé glance. The gaze in the Japanese passenger car enabled encounters with no idiom of address, across strata impossible in the larger society.42 Undeniably, the railway had altered the social relation between individuals and the city, but also between individuals themselves.
At the same time, the imperative of movement produced the quotidian violence of rush hour. Tokyo’s “commuter hell” reached its height in the 1960s and 1970s, when popular lines ran at over two hundred percent capacity and white-gloved oshiya were employed to physically press passengers into the cars.43 Romit Chowdhury and Colin McFarlane, in their fieldwork on Shinjuku commuters, recorded the testimony of one such passenger, Ahmya, a local government officer in her mid-thirties who passed through the station every day. Asked her strategy for boarding a rush-hour train, she described: become part of the crowd as the carriage arrives, rather than fighting toward the front; once aboard, push inside to a handrail but remain within a few steps of a door that will open near the platform stairs; do not resist sudden speed changes but yield and move with the crowd, because “movement is what keeps you steady.” Even after years of practice, she accounts that: “I feel apprehensive and sometimes scared,” and that “I can’t escape.”44 Ahmya’s account discloses that the freedom of station-centric urbanism is exercised, in practice, through negotiations in increments of inches and seconds.
The passenger, unable to withdraw physically from the crowd, withdraws psychologically. Simmel’s metropolitan “latent antipathy,” or the sense of a preparatory aversion, describes the daily commute of millions of Japanese.45 The intensified mutual visibility is managed in Tokyo by indifference—averted eyes, closed books and sleeping postures. Journalists of the 1900s studied the tired faces of commuters as diagnostic evidence of modernization's toll on the body, dividing salaryman expressions into categories of contentment and fatigue, interpreting stomach disorders and psychological depression from the way a man held his jaw on the morning train.46 Michael Fisch, in his ethnography of the Tokyo commuter network, details the testimony of a commuter: “You are packed into the train so tight that you feel as if your internal organs are going to be crushed. By the time I arrive at work, I’m exhausted and too tired to do anything. I would do anything not to have to ride the packed train but there is no choice [shoga nai].” The phrase shoga nai, “it cannot be helped,” recurs throughout Fisch’s interviews and reveals that passengers participate in the system not with enthusiasm but as a daily ratification of its inevitability. Fisch observes that the redesign of Tokyo’s commuter system around what the industry terms “operation beyond capacity”—trains routinely carrying loads at which not all passengers can sit or even reach a hanging strap—has been so successful that station architecture itself has been redesigned around continuous bodily flow rather than waiting; the waiting room, once a defining feature of the rail terminal, receded as the station became a structure for moving compressed bodies through itself with minimum interruption.
Finally, the Shinkansen extended a passenger identity from the urban to the national. The postwar high-speed network created a station-centric urbanism on the scale of the archipelago, producing a uniform experience of national space. Hiraku Shimoda argues that the Shinkansen was from the outset an instrument of self-representation, a way for postwar Japan to advertise its technological modernity to itself and to the world; the NHK documentary series Project X: Challengers, airing from 2000 to 2005, consistently returned to the bullet train, the automated turnstile, and the computerized reservation system as emblems of a national capability for circulation.47 A country which defines its modernity by its capacity to move its citizens on schedule inherits the ideology of circulation that Schivelbusch traces from Say and Haussmann. Shimoda describes elderly engineers reminiscing in the closing moments of the Shinkansen episode that the Bullet Train “is like a commuter train now.”48 In its success, the train that compressed the nation into a single accessible space had rendered itself ordinary. The extraordinary had been absorbed into the passenger’s daily routine.
IV. Conclusion
Schivelbusch detailed the emergence of a subject produced by the technology of movement: the passenger’s perception, sociality, and sense of time were remade in the image of the machine ensemble. It is clear that as a product of its eager adoption of rail travel and an urbanism defined by railway stations, Japan adopted a subject of travel at the same time. The private railway company integrates transit, residence and retail into a single typology: the sakariba absorbed leisure, the department store absorbed commerce, and the bed town absorbed domesticity. In this arrangement the passenger is no longer an occasional role; for both commute and leisure, Japan is constantly in motion. Undoubtedly, this has been an extraordinary achievement and has produced a city of remarkable convenience. But at the same time, it has also produced its own pathologies: regulation of life by the railway network, social anonymity and isolation, rural depopulation and the ritualization of the commute.
The Japanese railway did liberate in many ways: it gave women and workers access to the centre of the city, it connected the suburbs to the metropolis and the archipelago to itself, and it made possible forms of encounter that the Edo city had denied. But it also enrolled its passengers into an inescapable identity—to live in the city is to be a passenger. They must accept the bounded endpoints of travel as well as the commercial panoramas provided on the way. The question Ashihara raised, whether a country of such prosperity could accept dwellings so cramped that its citizens were forced to conduct their social lives in railway terminals, remains relevant today. The station, which had once provided access to the city has become the city’s substance. The liberation of modernity provided also a subtle form of constraint: the freedom to circulate, on the condition of never stopping.
Notes
Ashihara, Yoshinobu. The Hidden Order: Tokyo through the Twentieth Century. Translated by Lynne E. Riggs. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1989.
Barthes, Roland. Empire of Signs. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.
Chowdhury, Romit, and Colin McFarlane. “The Crowd and Citylife: Materiality, Negotiation and Inclusivity at Tokyo’s Train Stations.” Urban Studies 59, no. 7 (May 2022): 1353–1371.
Fisch, Michael. An Anthropology of the Machine: Tokyo’s Commuter Train Network. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Fraser, Benjamin, and Steven D. Spalding, eds. Trains, Culture, and Mobility: Riding the Rails. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012.
Freedman, Alisa. Tokyo in Transit: Japanese Culture on the Rails and Road. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.
Gluck, Peter, and Henry Smith. “Shinjuku.” A+U (Kenchiku to toshi), August 1973.
Jinnai, Hidenobu. Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology. Translated by Kimiko Nishimura. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, edited by Kurt Wolff, 409–24. New York: Free Press, 1950.
Sorensen, André. The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century. London: Routledge, 2002.
Statista. “Number of Railway Passengers in Japan.” Accessed April 11, 2026. https://www.statista.com/statistics/627136/japan-number-railway-passengers/.