After just a few months, faces can become familiar, and senses can be tuned. Things are fast, relentless, and necessary.īut are those hundred thousand or half a million or, in the case of Tokyo’s Shinjuku station, 3.5 million people really acting individually? It may seem surprising, but even with those numbers, strangers from across cities can synch up on the same schedules, use the same doors, take one leg of the trip together every day before separating into different directions. And cutting across a river of determined commuters can be almost dangerous. In some stations, walking against the crowd can be a tedious, nearly impossible process. Throngs of people cluster in tight bottlenecks until they burst through corridors and stairways and tunnels to reach the next stage of their journey. Whether walking through main doors at a pace of a dozen people each second, or arriving by train hundreds at a time, the station can feel a bit like a balloon being pumped too full. Tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of strangers flow through with a singular purpose: to get where they need to go. A busy commuter train station might seem like a very individualized place.
