Japan's Station Buildings & Railway Architecture

About this book

Most railway books are about going. This one is about arriving — and about the buildings that receive the arrival.

Japan's Station Buildings & Railway Architecture is a complete guide to 200 stations, depots and rail landmarks, every entry in one uniform format: the building and its place, its design, structure and history, exactly what to look for on site, and honest practical notes that never pretend a timetable is eternal. Eight parts walk the whole architecture of Japanese railways: the great terminals — Tokyo's brick palace, Kyoto's glass valley, Kanazawa's wooden drum gate; the Meiji and Taisho survivors — Mojiko's Renaissance palace, Japan's oldest station house of 1882, a shrine that is a station at Taisha; wooden country stations, including a station built in the shape of a steam locomotive and two wooden stations of 1903 still at work; the contemporary gates by Ando, Ban and Isozaki; stations against mountains, snow and the underground — including the platform 486 steps down in a tunnel; stations on seas, lakes and bays; the depots and roundhouses where trains live; and the lost, moved and reborn stations that teach what Japan keeps.

It is the companion, not the double, of Japan by Train: that book rides the lines, this one reads the buildings. A four-pass method — facade, roof, plan, fabric — opens every entry, so that after this book any station in Japan, listed or not, becomes legible.

Build the trip around the buildings. Japan rewards it more than any country on earth.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.