As an archivist at heart (and in practice), I find value in recording & logging things, and at some point (namely, the end of 2024) I figured it’d be cool to start tracking all the railways I’d ridden in Japan. Luckily I’d already been saving my IC card history by scanning it with the Suikakeibo app – and between this, my record-keeping of my IC card and eki-stamp collections, a lot of cross-referencing stuff with my phone camera roll, and some difficult memory-digging, I was able to accurately document pretty much all of the train rides (with dates!) I’d taken in the country. At that point, I realized I was pretty close to 10,000 unique km of rail ridden across Japan, so I made it a goal to hit that mark, which I successfully did the following month in January 2025. Now I’m not vying after any specific number, just to have as many experiences on as many new railways and lines as possible, and I’ll often go out of my way to ride them along certain routes just for the adventure.
Below is my “noritsubushi” map, which I record on a Japanese site of the same name, and then export to Illustrator to visualize. The word 乗り nori is the stem for the verb “to ride”, and つぶし tsubushi is a way to say “to kill time”, so this is a visual representation of the habit of riding transit around to while away time: as a way to explore, to get the experience of seeing a new route and new scenery on a new vehicle and in a new place.1And for those people that are able to – presumably after many years, and after spending a lot of money – ride every route across a whole system, achieving 100% completion of having passed over all railway tracks in a certain place, that’s called 完乗 kanjo. Literally: a complete ride. At its heart, it’s about exploring – one of my favorite things to do in the world!
