I was reminded recently of an event where people walk or jog around the Yamanote Line, visiting each of the stations in turn. I found a partial route online from someone who had cycled it, and I carefully reviewed and polished it.

The Yamanote Line is a loop service in Tokyo, operated by the East Japan Railway Company. It has 30 stations and covers a loop of 34.5km. It opened in March 1885. (Thank you, Wikipedia!)

I’d shared the route with Fearless Leader Joe, who expressed an immediate interest in the ride. He’d let me know that he’d be in Tokyo today, and so we planned on an 8 a.m. departure. Our route started from Shinjuku Station and continued counter-clockwise (uchimawari) around the line.

Remodeling of the Odakyu department store at Shinjuku meant there were no accessible signs for the JR Yamanote line. I took a quick snap of the Metro entrance and we decided to get a proper photo on the opposite side on our return. Our biggest challenge was negotiating Tokyo traffic along an unfamiliar route, but finding station signs ran a close second. Takanawa Gateway is still largely under construction (although the station is fully operational), and so we could only find small signs at the escalator entrance.

I had a small mishap just before reaching Takanawa Gateway when my shoe wouldn’t unclip as I came to a stop at a traffic light, and I fell on the sidewalk. I’ve just got a couple of scrapes and bruises, and I learned that the cleat had loosened from the shoe. A few turns of the wrench when we reached Shimbashi put everything right.

In some cases the route did not take us directly to the station entrance, and we had to divert from the route to get the photo. In the case of Osaki we had to enter the station, climbing a flight of stairs, to find a sign with the station name. Uguisudani and Tabata were two more stations where we had to backtrack to find the entrance.

The ride was more fun than I’d expected, but it’s not one I’ll be doing on a regular basis. It’s all traffic, and there’s not much in the way of sights. We could have spent more time and sought out the signature sights of many of the stations — Shinjuku Eye, Hachiko at Shibuya, the Shimbashi Steam Locomotive — but we were on a tight schedule.

We’d hoped to finish the ride in four hours and tried to keep our pace above 10km/h based on total elapsed time. In the end the route was longer than I’d thought, and we finished in a bit over five hours. Based on a moving time of 3:18:48 I averaged 14.7km/h, which is pretty much in line with expectations given the traffic conditions.