By pure serendipity I happened to stumble upon a documentary about the catchy little melodies that the train stations in Tokyo play when a train pulls in to a platform. This lucky find happened before I visited Tokyo, so I was a hypervigilant public transit listener when I arrived.
As you might expect, Japanese train enthusiasts have been recording these little tunes and archiving them for decades. But it took a data visualization designer from India to create a wonderful, and functional, website that brings together the melodies in one place,
Akash Wadhwani celebrates the compositions that accompany trains entering train stations across the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, which are sadly in the process of being phased out. Akash writes: “It’s a map of every train station in Tokyo where you can tap a station and hear its departure melody, 200 of them. One man wrote 170+ of these over 35 years, and they’re being retired as JR East moves to driver-only trains…the data work is mine (2,496 stations cross-checked from Japanese fan databases and open transit data), the melodies are the real recordings, and yes, AI helped me write the code.”
A man called Minoru Mukaiya wrote about 170 of the tunes in a little JR studio. I can’t find the original documentary about him that I saw, but here’s a short film about him from a few years ago.
NB: If the video doesn’t open in your browser, click HERE .
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