I have never been to Tokyo, unfortunately. I had a trip planned there in 2011, but the earthquake and nuclear meltdown that year intervened. My condolences to everyone who lost loved ones or was otherwise directly impacted by that event, and I am not suggesting the minor disruption to my vacation plans that year was comparatively important.

Anyway, I was looking forward to seeing Tokyo firsthand and I didn’t get to. But I guess pictures are the next best thing. This article has some nice pictures of railway stations. Now, I spent some time in Singapore recently, and the railway stations there are pretty new and very modern looking. The first thing that strikes me about these Tokyo stations is they are not brand new, and they look pretty similar to older train stations here in the U.S. But the comparison ends there, because they are clean, well maintained, the service is reliable and the population is proud of their public transportation system. I also note that these older stations have been successfully retrofit with barriers so that people can’t fall/be pushed/intentionally jump onto the tracks and die. In the United States, at least here in my home city of Philadelphia, we “can’t afford” these barriers. Meaning of course that human life is not worth enough to us to make this a priority compared to other things we spend enormous amounts of money on, like highways and bombs.