Using your noodle in Tokyo’s rush hour

It is a familiar situation to anyone taking a train to work on a Monday morning: packed carriages, stuffy air and nowhere to sit down.

But a Japanese metro firm thinks it might have found the solution to commuter misery by offering a free bowl of noodles to workers who stop travelling at rush hour.

The Tokyo Metro company says it will ease over-crowding on carriages by giving a coupon for a bowl of soba noodles to every commuter who takes an earlier train for 10 consecutive days. “We hope the campaign will contribute to reducing congestion during peak hours as more people take trains at different times,” said Takahiro Yamaguchi, a spokesman for Tokyo Metro.

The scheme is being tested on the notoriously busy Tozai line, which between 7.50am and 8.50am carries up to 70,000 people — around 199 per cent of its loading capacity. In some cases, students and part-time workers are hired to push passengers into the carriages until they are packed together like sardines.

Commuters must sign up online and then use their travel card to swipe through the gates at a designated pre-rush hour time slot.

Tokyo Metro has said it will only launch the scheme if more than 2000 commuters sign up for the scheme. If more than 3000 do so, tempura will be added to the menu. A mobile phone app has also been launched which allows travellers to keep track of when the trains are overcrowded.

In Tokyo, eight million people commute on 47,000 trains.

Adding more trains is not seen as viable. In most stations a train already arrives every one or two minutes.

The most simple solution would be allowing employees to work from home or adopt more flexible shifts, but this would be hard to reconcile with the country’s notoriously rigorous work ethic.— Telegraph Group Ltd