If you have ever wanted to see what Japan's private railways looked like before the war, this book hands you the primary sources. It gathers railway route guide maps, topographic maps, timetables, picture postcards and photographs from the early Showa period, covering the Kanto region line by line, and lets you travel those routes as a passenger of roughly a century ago would have seen them.
The coverage is remarkably thorough across 224 pages. Chapter one takes on the major private railways — Tobu, Seibu, Tokyo Yokohama Electric Railway, Meguro Kamata Electric Railway, Ikegami Electric Railway, Tamagawa Electric Railway, Keihin Electric Railway, Shonan Electric Railway, Odakyu, Keio Electric Tramway, Teito Electric Railway and Keisei. From there the book moves prefecture by prefecture: the Tokyo Underground Railway and the Oji, Joto, Ome, Itsukaichi and Musashi Chuo lines in Tokyo; Joso, Tsukuba, Kashima Sangu, Mito and other lines in Ibaraki; Joshin, Jomo and Kusakaru in Gunma; Chichibu in Saitama; Sobu, Narita, Kominato, Choshi, Nanso and Kujukuri in Chiba; and Tsurumi Rinko, Jinchu, Sagami, Nambu, Enoden, Hakone Tozan and Daiyuzan in Kanagawa.
Many of these companies have since merged, been renamed or disappeared entirely, which makes the original route maps and ephemera collected here genuinely hard to find elsewhere. The colorful bird's-eye style sightseeing maps in particular show how each railway sold its own stretch of countryside, hot springs and seaside to weekend travelers.
The text is in Japanese, but the maps, timetables, postcards and photographs carry the book on their own and are easy to follow visually. Published by Photo Publishing. Brand new, 2025 publication.
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