A city rebuilt by rail
In 1945, much of Tokyo lay in ruins, and so did its railways. Within a decade, the city had one of the busiest commuter rail networks in the world. Dr. Kaito Fujimoto, professor of history at the Tokyo Campus, has spent 12 years trying to understand how.
His new book, published this month by a university press, tells that story through the people who ran the trains. Fujimoto and his students recorded interviews with 60 former station staff, drivers and track workers, most of them in their 80s and 90s, before their memories were lost.
The book also draws on railway company archives and newspaper photographs from the period.
Some interviews ran for more than six hours.
Everyone knows about the bullet train. I wanted to write about the station master who swept the platform every morning in 1946 because he believed people would come back.
Students as historians
More than 40 Tokyo Campus students helped with the interviews over the years, many as part of Fujimoto's oral history course. The recordings, with transcripts in Japanese and English, are now held in the campus library's archive and are available to researchers.
Fujimoto will spend his upcoming sabbatical year at the Main Campus, teaching a seminar on cities and infrastructure and working on a follow-up book about Tokyo's postwar bus system. A book talk is scheduled at the Tokyo Campus library on July 24. Details are on the Tokyo Campus events page.
An English translation of the book is planned for 2027.
