The Japanese government developed Notification .56 on March 30, 1925, which was a railway urban development plan for the Tokyo Area . It was inspired in part by businessman Noritsugu Hayakawa’s, vision for a high speed underground railway network similar to London’s underground, which had already been operation for 52 years by that time.

Line 1 was 16.7 km long a partially resemble the Ginza Line
Line 2 was 16.1 km long and closely resembles the Hibiya Line
Line 3 was 15.4 km long and closely resembles the Toei Mita Line
Line 4 was 20.0 KM long and closely resembles the Marunouchi Line
Line 5 was 14.2 km long and closely resembles the Tozai Line

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13 Comments

  1. Coming From Hellbourne I find it mind boggling that they were able to set up something so complicated 95 years ago.
    We still run trams on the streets over there.

  2. Another very cool and informative video. They planned 5 lines and now have 13 lines built of which 10 allow through running(One of the biggest innovation of the Tokyo metro.

    Through running with suburban commuter lines is big enabler of convenient travel within Tokyo. Unfortunately only Seoul have emulated the practice on lines 1 & 4.

  3. Great video Once again Mike! Love seeing how the network could have evolved. Didn’t know what would have become the Marunochi Line was considered to serve Tsukiji, which the Hibiya Line serves

  4. I can really appreciate how challenging it must be to do all the comprehensive research that you do for these videos if Japanese is not your native language!

  5. Hi Mike, you are at your best when you do these on trains (although I do enjoy watching the other videos too). As other said, great job!

  6. Really interesting to see the Tozai Line expand into the small western area of chiba and going all the way to Nishi-Funabashi. Same with the Toei Shinjuku line, Going all the way to Moto-Yawata expanding out of tokyo. Thats pretty interesting due to the fact that Tokyo metro was supposed to be in tokyo, But it was able to expand to western chiba barely.

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