About us
Who makes this guide, where every figure comes from, and what we leave out on purpose.
What this site is
tokyosubway.org is an independent guide to the Tokyo subway, written in English for people who do not live there: one page for each of the 13 lines, one for each of the 216 station complexes, plus a map, a timetable, fares, tickets and IC cards, airport access and a route planner that works from the operators’ published timetables. It is not run by Tokyo Metro Co., Ltd. or by the Bureau of Transportation of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government, it is not affiliated with either of them, and it does not speak for them.
It exists because the thing a visitor most needs to know about the Tokyo subway is the thing no single official page says: there are two companies. The map shows thirteen lines in thirteen colours and gives no hint that nine of them bill you separately from the other four. Your fare, your day pass and sometimes your route depend on that distinction, and the operators — reasonably enough — each describe their own half. We put both halves on one page and say which is which every time a number appears.
The second reason is station numbers. G09, M17, A13: Tokyo labels every station on every line, and it is the fastest way to navigate a system in a script you may not read. Plenty of English-language guides omit them. Every page here leads with them.
We are not in Tokyo and we claim no local knowledge we cannot show you the source for. What is here comes from published data and from checking work we are willing to describe.
Where every figure comes from
- Lines, stations, the order of the stations and the station numbers come from the Public Transportation Open Data Center (ODPT) API: the operators’ own railway and station records, Toei through the public endpoint and Tokyo Metro with a developer key. That is where the letter-and-number codes, the platform coordinates and the official transfer links between stations come from.
- First and last trains, running times and the route planner come from the two operators’ own GTFS timetables, published through the same open-data centre — the Toei feed and the Tokyo Metro feed, valid from March 14, 2026 to March 12, 2027. We use the GTFS and not the API’s own train timetable because the latter is returned truncated at 1,000 records and would have been silently incomplete. Every figure is then cross-checked against the operators’ per-station timetable records: 1,104 of 1,116 station/line/direction/day-type combinations agree exactly on the first train, the last train and the number of departures.
- Day types. Japan publishes two subway timetables, 平日 (weekdays) and 土休日 (Saturdays, Sundays and national holidays). We use those two and never invent a third. The national holidays and the December 30 – January 3 period follow the 土休日 timetable.
- Fares come from the operators’ own distance tables and from their per-station fare records in the open data, which match their GTFS on every subway pair. Both operators’ websites block automated requests, so the published tables were read from archived copies of the official pages, with the date of each copy recorded. The Tokyo Metro ↔ Toei connecting discount is not in any dataset — it exists only as a rule on the operators’ pages — so we apply the rule and show the arithmetic rather than pretending we looked the total up.
- Accessibility is the operators’ own statement and nothing else. Both block scripted access, so their per-station accessibility pages were rendered in a headless browser, one station at a time. Where a lift, an accessible toilet or an exit is not listed by the operator, we say “not listed”, not “no”.
- Passenger numbers are the operators’ own passenger surveys through the open data centre (daily average of entries plus exits; Tokyo Metro FY2025, Toei FY2024). 216 of the 216 complexes have one. A single Tokyo Metro survey can cover several lines at the same station, so these figures must never be added up per line, and we do not.
- Opening dates, Japanese names and readings, and the ward come from Wikipedia and Wikidata in Japanese and English. We use them for history and for cross-checking, never as the only source for service, fares or accessibility.
- Places near a station come from OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), from a regional extract of the Kanto area rather than live queries. We keep places within 400 m; 216 of the 216 complexes have at least one. The walking time beside each is an estimate from the straight-line distance, and every table says so.
- The subway map is not the operators’ map: theirs are copyrighted and cannot be republished. We use a free map from Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0, credited wherever it appears.
- The text about each station and line is written here from those sources. It is not reworded from the operators’ pages.
What we leave out on purpose
Filling a page with plausible-looking numbers is easy. A figure nobody can check is worse than no figure, because you cannot tell the two apart. So the following is missing deliberately:
- “Real time”. No live feed is connected to this site. The board on the home page compares the clock in Tokyo with the published timetable and says only whether a line is within its service hours. It does not know about delays, and it does not claim to.
- Transfer walking times as fact. Neither operator publishes them. Every walking figure here is our estimate from the distance between platforms, labelled as an estimate every time it appears, including inside the route planner.
- Times and fares on JR, Keisei, Keikyu and the monorail — including the airport trains. Subway trains run through onto several of those railways, but they are other companies with other fares and we do not hold their data. The airport page names the real connections and stops there.
- A separate Sunday timetable. There isn’t one.
- Which carriage to board, how crowded a train will be, and where the shops are. Useful, and not published per station in a form we can stand behind.
- A number of exits where the operator does not give one. Tokyo Metro publishes an exit list per station and Toei publishes elevator counts; neither publishes the same fields as the other, and we do not fill the gap by guessing.
- Any claim that an airport is on the subway. Neither Narita nor Haneda is.
Known gaps and contradictions
- 216 stations, and why that is not 286. Count the stations on each line and you get 291 line-stations; Tokyo Metro publishes 180 stations and Toei 106, a combined 286. Those are counts per line, and the three stations the Namboku and Mita lines share are counted by both companies. Our 216 is the number of physical complexes you can walk into, 56 of which are interchanges and 27 of which are served by both operators. Both figures are right; they answer different questions, and we publish the operators’ own numbers as theirs rather than deriving them.
- Tokyo Metro’s 180. Adding up its lines gives 185, or 179 once the six stations the Yurakucho and Fukutoshin lines share are counted once. The last unit of difference turns on whether Kokkai-gijidomae and Tameike-sanno count as one station or two, and we could not establish it from a source we trust. We print the official 180 as published and do not try to reconstruct it.
- Shinjuku. The operators’ data does not link the Tokyo Metro station with the two Toei ones, although they are 464 m apart and connected underground. We treat them as one complex because a traveller does, and record the discrepancy.
- One fare the open data has not caught up with. The Ayase – Kita-senju special fare rose in March 2026; the operators’ datasets still carry the old figure. We override it with the published one and say so on the fares page.
- Two Toei transfers are charged as two journeys, not one — changing at Kuramae between the Asakusa and Oedo lines, and the walk between Higashi-nihombashi and Bakuro-yokoyama. The fare data has no entry for that pair at all. The route planner applies the operator’s rule instead of quietly merging the two sections.
- Opening dates. English Wikipedia, Japanese Wikipedia and Wikidata disagreed for 11 stations. We took the Japanese article each time, because it is the one that cites the operator. Where a page makes a date the point of a sentence, treat it as worth checking.
- Twelve timetable entries out of 1,116 differ between the GTFS and the operators’ per-station records by one to four departures — reserved-seat services on the Chiyoda, Yurakucho and Fukutoshin lines. The first and last trains agree in every case. Where the GTFS lets you board a reserved-seat train that the station timetable does not offer, we remove that boarding rather than plan you onto a train you cannot get on without a separate ticket.
- The timetable has an end date. The operators’ feeds run to March 12, 2027. On the March timetable change every time on this site is recalculated from the new data; we do not carry old figures forward.
Corrections and contact
If something here is wrong — a fare that has changed, a last train that has moved, a station with work going on — write to us or email [email protected]. We check it against the source and fix it; the site is generated from data, so one correction takes effect everywhere the figure appears.
Fares and timetables in Tokyo change on a fixed date most years, in March. That is why every figure here carries its source and the date it was checked instead of presenting itself as permanent. Before you travel it is worth looking at Tokyo Metro and Toei — and for lost property, refunds and complaints they are the only ones who can help, not us.
How the site is paid for
The site is free and is funded by advertising shown alongside the content. The advertising has no influence on what is written: we do not sell sponsored posts, we take no money to feature a business, a station or an attraction, and we run no affiliate programmes for tickets or travel. If paid content ever appears it will be labelled as advertising. Which cookies the advertising sets is in the cookie policy.
Who is behind this site
This site is made by the team at GoRandom, a small group in the Basque Country who do two things that fit together better than they sound: travel, and build websites. The publisher is David Franco Aguirre under the GoRandom name; the address is in the legal notice.
Tokyo is not yet one of the cities we have been to — we are around twenty and moving slowly. We would rather say that than imply otherwise: what you read here does not come from our memory, it comes from what the two operators publish and from checking we can show you.
The other half of what we do is web development, and this site is the excuse to put the two together. We do not leave it to rot: every fare and every train time carries its source and the date it was checked, and they get redone when something changes. During the build in October 2026 the work that took the longest was the part nobody sees — reconciling 216 station complexes against two operators who count their own stations differently, and getting the two-company fare right.
He decides what gets published, checks the data before it does, and answers the email. If you find a fare that has gone up or a last train that has moved, there is a specific person to tell.