Asakusa Station subway entrance. Opening day of the first Tokyo subway, 1927.

See also:
Constructing Tokyo’s first subway, 1925-1927.

Dignitaries riding the Chikatetsu, Tokyo, December 1927, including the system’s founder, Hayakawa Noritsugu (second on the right, seated). Hayakawa founded the Tokyo Underground Railway Company [Tokyo chikatetsu] in 1920. Construction of the original subway route between Asakusa and Shimbashi was delayed by the post-1923 Great Kanto Earthquake recession and did not begin until 1925. The initial Asakusa-Ueno leg was completed in 1927.

“For the first time in Japan, the underground electric railway was opened between Ueno and Asakusa, Tokyo, a distance of one mile and 28 chains, on December 30, last year [1927], by Tokyo Chika Tetsudo Kabushiki Kaisha, or the Tokyo Underground Railway Company.

“… There are four station, namely, Ueno, Inaricho, Tawaramachi, and Asakusa. The one striking feature of these stations is that they are equipped with the automatic turnstile instead of ordinary wicket. The fare is a uniform rate of 10 sen.

“Going down from 23 to 24 steps, one alights upon the platform which is about 180 feet long, and there is a car, which is about 53 feet long. There are three each of doors on both sides of the car, which are electrically operated from inside by the conductor. One of the characteristic novelties of the car is that it is lighted indirectly; there are 34 lights each on both sides of the upper end of the windows and they are unseen. Another feature is that the car has no poles.

“Officially, the capacity of accommodating passengers is limited to 120, but, it was proved, when students of the Iwakura Railway School had a trial ride, that, at a pinch, each car could easily accommodate 250 passengers. Six of these cars may be connected in a train, but at present only single cars are now being operated at every three minutes.”

– “The Underground Electric Railway of Tokyo: The First of Its Kind in Japan”, by Eissburo Kusano, The Far East Economic Review, March 1928

Exterior of a subway carriage, Ginza Line, 1927. The Type 1000 was modeled after New York City subway rolling stock, fabricated of steel and largely fireproof with other safety-oriented features incorporated into its design. To prevent collisions, the rail beds were equipped with the ‘trip cock’ Automatic Train Stop system (ATS), an electro-pneumatic device that halted a train if it tried to run a red signal. The technology was considered so indispensable that it was still being used on the Ginza Line as recently as 1993 and on the postwar-constructed Marunouchi Line until 1998.

“The Showa reign was a year and five days old when, late in 1927, the first Tokyo subway line began service. It was the first in the land, and in Asia. The route was a short one, less than a mile and a half long, between Ueno and Asakusa. Four companies had franchises to dig; only one started digging. The same company extended the line to Shimbashi in 1934.

Map: Tokyo Chikatetsu (in red), 1939, running between Shibuya and Asakusa, overlaying a map displaying a pre-earthquake mass transit proposal that also included “high speed” elevated rail service into the city from Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Otsuka, and two additional subway routes. The segments colored purple were not built even though each included one of the two originally intended terminals, Shinagawa and Minami-senju. The first opened segment between Asakusa and Ueno was completed in 1927. The extension from Ueno to Shimbashi opened in 1934. A separate company began building its own subway from Shibuya to Shimbashi ca. 1935 which was completed in 1939. The two operations were merged into one in 1941 as the municipally-owned Teito Rapid Transit Authority and given the moniker “Ginza Line”. [Base map source: The Trans-Pacific, August 1922]

“[An] entrepreneur who owned all the land around Shibuya and brought the private commuter into it saw his opportunity. Shimbashi must not remain the terminus. So he started digging from Shibuya, and his line was opened to Shimbashi in 1939. There were [now] two Shimbashi stations, without free transfer between them.

“The two companies were brought together, and the stations united, in 1941, under a public corporation capitalized by the Imperial Government Railways and Tokyo prefecture.

“The two halves of the Ginza line, as it is now called, show a certain difference in spirit. The northern half, from Shimbashi to Asakusa, was dug by a company specializing in transportation and interested in pleasing its customers. Some of the stations are rather charming, in Art Deco and traditional styles.

“… [But] the stations south and west of Shimbashi [to Shibuya] are uniformly drab and boxlike, the product of an entrepreneur whose chief interest was getting hordes of people as rapidly as possible into the Toyoko department store [today’s Tokyu department store at Shibuya], on the third floor of which it ends. So we might say that the Ginza line symbolizes transition. The northern half belongs to the past, the southern half to the emerging future.”

– Tokyo Rising: The City Since the Great Earthquake, Edward Seidensticker, 1990

Automatic ticket gate, Tokyo Chikatetsu c. 1927. The first automatic ticketing gates (using 10-sen coins) in Japan were installed along this first four-station segment of the Ginza Line.