Eki · 駅
150 years of Japan, drawn in stations.
On a June morning in 1872, Japan’s entire railway was a single line between Shimbashi and Yokohama. A century and a half later the map carries more than nine thousand stations. Press play and watch the country fill in — one opening at a time.
1872 — Japan's first railway. Shimbashi to Yokohama opens — 29 km of British-built track. The country's entire network begins as a single line.
Play with the map
Pick a kanji and the map repaints: every station carrying that character lights up. Japan’s rail map is secretly a map of rice paddies, rivers and mountains.
How to read it
One dot, one station
Every dot is a railway station, placed where it stands and lit at the year it opened. Drag the slider or press play to move through time; the counter and the chart below the map keep pace. The tall bars are the building booms — and the shape of Japan emerges not from a coastline but from the stations themselves.
The boom
A country laid down in forty years
The first decades are sparse: a spine up the Pacific coast, a few lines around Osaka. Then, between roughly 1900 and 1930, the map erupts. Private railways race the state to every valley and suburb, and Tokyo and Osaka thicken into the dense knots you can still see today. By the time the boom cools, the skeleton of modern Japan is already on the ground.
Source & method
Stations, coordinates and opening dates come from Wikidata (CC0): every item that is a railway station in Japan with coordinates and a date of official opening, taking the earliest opening year per station. A station blooms at its opening year and is never removed, so closed and relocated stations remain on the map. Of the source set, 96 stations were left off for a missing or unusable opening date, or coordinates outside Japan. The coastline is a simplified Natural Earth outline.
Words for the rails
You just watched 150 years of stations appear. These are the words you’d use to ride them today — from the 駅 you start at to the 乗り換え in the middle.
You just watched Japan’s rail map grow for 150 years — and the kanji riding on it are closer than they look:
JIVX turns a fascination like this into real Japanese: short daily sessions of whole sentences, graded the way a teacher would — not flashcards. Free to start, at your own level.
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