KITAMI EKI

Gaze through a window in the platform back wall (Shinjuku direction) and there is a plaque advertising a wondrous private clinic. Namely Brain Treatment System. Couple of visits should have you thinking more clearly.

KYODO EKI

Nothing like a good dental ad. Not least as you gaze from the Kyodo platform to a wall poster calling you to Sarurai Dentalpia. Could be a tooth-convention, even a deviant tooth-tendency.

SANGUBASHI EKI

Couple of stops from Shinjuku and there is an invitation to step into time as much as place. A platform sign reads – ‘Please get off at this station for Meiji Jingu’. The original shrine was built to commemorate Emperor Meiji and Empress Shō ken, destroyed in World War II bombing, and then re-created in 1958. Historic modernity several times over.

MINAMI SHINJUKU EKI

Essential facilities. Clearest word-and-picture indication, men and women, of where to go when you have got to go.

SETAGAYA-DAITA

One of several temporary plastic wall-coverings as the Odakyū-sen engineering work proceeds. Full of tile-like pattern. Small blocks colour-squares. With a small effort of imagination it puts you in mind of Mondrian or Miro. Japanese station cubism with a dash of Europe?

SWITCH TO GINZA LINE

LET's KIOSK, WHY NOT?

Newspapers

Sweets/Candy

Pens

Cigarettes

Magazines

Knick Knacks

Day in, day out you get on the train at Mukōgaoka-yūen. But only this Friday did I notice the outside sign on the local ‘personal hygiene’ emporium. A store selling shampoos and handsoap, toothpaste and make-up, house-cleaning tackle and medicines. The sign, however, reads WEL PARK. Having consulted the local street directory, I find it belongs to a drug-store chain called Welcia Kanto Company. Even so, the urge is now on me to spiderman up the wall and add what to my own eye is a missing ‘L’. Thoughts of Lshaped rooms flood in, not to say long-ago school geometry lessons and those squares and oblongs measurement exercises.

Rooftop vistas. Setagaya Daita and Soshigaya-Okura. Both have yet more ‘mansions’, moderate high-rises at once shoeboxes and in tiers, and with balconies of reach-out-and-touch train proximity. How do people living inside them manage – passing train noise, the near presence of huge metal transportation within arm's length of where your head may be resting? Then there is the laundry. Pegged and hanging out for immediate passing inspections are shirts, sheets, undies, an array of towels. Rail-track dormitory. Odakyū lifecubicles.

Today I found myself sitting opposite a male passenger, not so much a salaryman as a sports jacket and cords type. I was just about settling in for my vertical read of The Japan Times when, like some junkie readying for his fix, he rolled up his left sleeve and with his right hand reached into bag for…a pair of tweezers. Without a byyour-leave he then started tweezering out hairs from his arm and on it went for some time. Not something to make you feel good about breakfast. And there was a whole other arm to go. But then an unusual bit of drama. An older woman, breaking with all rules of non-interference, gender status, and seated on my side of the carriage, suddenly shouted at him – ‘not here, not here’. Startled he got his tweezers back into the bag, rolled down his sleeve, and virtually jumped out at the next station. Quite a thing.

Last Train

HAIRDRESSERS

LE PETIT RAPPORT. ETIM. HATI – COLLECTION HAIR. ART RUSH. WISH. REMIX. FAVORITE HAIR – Ids. MINX. LA CACHETTE – Hair Suprese. BEAUTRIUM. RICK. CLIC. MINX. ASH. ZEST. ZAIZA. 1/8 (eight and half). ROMANTIC. FAIRLADY – Hair & Make. KAN-JE – Hair Design. PRIS FIXE.

HAIR ZONE – Belle Jouvence. REGALO, BEE-1, AIR SPIRITUS.

The Odakyū Line, my stretch of it at least, for most of the year has been widening itself. Adding extra track, and with it extra platforms and (over the Tamagawa) a new bridge. Massive, intricate engineering. A near-miracle to watch. City-loads of concrete. Whole snakes of insulated tubing. Earth-movers, fork-lifts, cranes, a cornucopia of vehicles and machinery. Concrete and wooden sleepers. Gravel and pylons. Ready to lay down new rail-tracks. There has been local resident-complaint as old streets get co-opted and demands for underground as against above-ground development, especially near Shimo-Kitazawa. But one feature of the whole operation abides. If you are on an early-morning train, 7.30 a.m. or so, you get a sight of well-ordered files of hard-hat workmen doing… group-stretching. Kind of railway Tai-chi. Or Pilates. Or old-fashioned Calisthenics. Another kind of track (track-suit?) work.

Toire. Toilets. Is there a more luminous name in this realm than TOTO – WC and Urinal? The Odakyū has its full share, station for station. A recent glance at the Toto catalogue brings word and sight of no less than forty-one domestic styles with control-panels worthy of a NASA space shuttle. Heated seats make for the least of it. Super-duper flush valves. High-chrome levers. Skirted bowls. Colours of ‘Colonial White’ and ‘Sedona Beige’. On the Odakyū Line we are talking about urinals which set the logo TOTO either at eye-level or as you look down to roughly crotch-level, together with one traditional ‘squat’ toilet (washiki) alongside the Western variety. Spousal report confirms that in the Ladies toilets also there are rarely paper towels or hot air blowers for after-duty hand-washing as is required form. But then passengers carry small cloth towels or handkerchiefs all the time, for brow-mopping in the summer humidity, for precisely toilet-washroom drying hands duty. Either way TOTO prevails. Odakyū station convenience to meet Nature's call.

Vignette. In the course of four Odakyū (and other Line) trips, a small sartorial gallery. First, a 12 or 13 year-old boy with a baseball cap saying FUNK YOU (did his parents know?).

Temporary Station-Repair Directions To All Lines

PLEASE USE ELEVATOR TO GO UP TO THE

UNDERGROUND

CONCOURSE

AIRPORT

South Wing

North Wing

Baggage pre-delivery offices

Leave your coat and collect it on return office

Counter

AIR SEAT

Watch safety video

Seat Belts

Trays in upright position

Baggage stowed

Switch off electronic devices

Taxi-ing

AIRLINE MAGAZINE READING

ITEMS FOR EVERY HOME

Solar Power Mole repeller – works day and night Life-size Chimpanzee Bust – ‘alive’. Latest in Hollywood animaltronics

Pet staircase – ‘designed for pets to 100lbs’. Skid resistant

Advanced large-capacity feline drinking fountain – ‘reduces the risk of urinary tract infection and kidney disease’. Bowl and reservoir are dishwasher safe

Hydro Foil Water Scooter. 17 mph.

Fungal Nail Relief ‘developed and tested by a leading university’

Bunion Sling

World-Class Pogo Jumpers

The Million Germ Eliminating Toothbrush Sanitizer

Brondell Swash High Tech Toilet Seat

Basho crouches in his mawashi. Cast in quality resin.

DUTY FREE

BE NICE OR LEAVE HANGING PENDANT

DIESEL MALE PERFUME: EVEL FOR LIFE

DAISY (Vera Wang). EUPHORIA (Calvin Klein). BIO

PERFORMANCE ADVANCED SUPER REVITALIZER

CREAM (Shiseido). SHIMMER BLACK EYE PALETTE

(Bobbi Brown), LASTING LIPS (Clinique). ABSOLUTE

SEDUCTION PALETTE (Lancôme). SKIN CAVIAR

CREAM (La Prairie). CUBA NECKLACE (Antica Murissima).

GREY GOOSE VODKA

ALL NIPPON AIRLINES (ANA)

SEAT INSTRUCTIONS FOR FIXING TABLE

Stow and latch controller for Taxi, Take Off and Landing

NARITA RETURN

The end of the walk is ahead. Please watch your step.

HEALTH CHECKS

This is the Health Consultation Room. If you have any health problems such as fever or diarrhoea please drop by the health consultation room.

It is generally known that there are many kind of serious infectious diseases abroad, which have not occurred in Japan. Even if you contracted such a disease, you wouldn't show any symptoms when entering Japan because of the incubation period.

Mid-afternoon journey aboard the Local. Standing. I lean forward and, to my astonished eyes, there's Sigourney Weaver battling an extra-planetary serpent. A bit more tactful leaning confirms a student-aged youth wearing fashionable Japanese long-toed winkle-picker shoes absorbed in watching Alien on his keitai. Just the thing. Double rows of razor teeth. Lethal saliva. Acid blood. Tentacle lashing. Nosferatu, more aptly Godzilla, next? Maybe a longer journey and he will be watching the whole five (or is it fifty-five) TV series of 24 with Kiefer Sutherland at the helm?

Which brings one on to reading. Today, same journey, I count about seven people book-reading in the carriage. Both seated and standing. The Odakyū as Open University library-branch. When bookstores sell a book they usually give you a book-cover – in part to advertise but also, one has to suspect, in anticipation of trainreading or the like. And this, for fellow-passengers like me, causes a frustration. I can't be alone in wanting to know what's being read – all you see is the brown cover. MARUZEN, KINOKUNIYA, TAKASHIMAYA, REGULUS are typical, not to mention ODAKYŪ BOOKMATES and one simply labelled BOOKS. But what is inside? Sheer none-of-my-business carriage curiosity.

It may or may not be Buddhist writ, a sense of the world appointed as it is and in necessary equipoise. But that does not help the gaijin passenger when an empty can starts rolling across the always meticulously clean carriage floor. Its tinny back-and-forth clang with each sway of the train, the clash against a metal seat fitting or even a passenger's foot, brings no corrective action. This is Odakyū Japan as something like train-karmic, the rolling drink-can as the sound of universe. As we head into Kyodo, no passenger will disturb the comment c’est. No reach-down. No recycling as it were. However ear-grating. My own instinct is to kick the hell out of the thing or boot it out of the door. Grab it and crunch it. But I want to be the good train guest.

Hair-care. This past decade tonsorial attention to my thinning pate has been in the hands and scissors of yet another husbandand-wife pair. And no more than a stone's throw from Mukōgaokayūen station. They run the ground-floor barbers of a small corner house, the door emblazoned with the English word ‘Enter’. You know when they are in business (no Mondays) as they have one of those old-fashioned revolving red, white and blue barber's poles. They speak no English and my own Japanese can in no way stretch even close to ‘please trim the eyebrows’ or ‘I’d rather not have any spray thank you’ – though I can say mijikai (‘short’). Hair style with a side parting, too, I have learned is known in Japanese as a 7:3. From the opening konnichiwa to the closing arigatō , and by gestures, smiles and pointing, we have managed to ease ourselves into a fond translinguistic client and professional routine. It is a full hour, whatever your own paucity of thatch, a ceremonial interlude of aprons and shampoo, razors and massage. Worthy of a small verse epic, a BBC or PBS documentary. Never mind Hair, the 1960s hippie-musical. What about Hair, the Japanese operetta, the Japanese tanka? It bears observation that, round the corner, a rival establishment is called simply BAR BER, the coincidental middle-spacing you have to feel just as it should be. Drinks and a trim?

In you go, mutual bows, coat on hanger, a barber-seat if free – otherwise a small corner seat with either TV to watch or radio talk-show to remind you that this truly is Nihon and not London or New York. On one occasion, and almost on cue, a local came in wearing a baseball cap inscribed with the words ‘Wall paper for the corner’. Your turn, next, and once seated in the operating-chair, it is all systems go, hands-on. Cut and trim, wash and dry, shave and after-shave. Yours, the whole shebang, for ¥4000. So into a nearby small pot go spectacles and off we launch.

En route to Mukōgaoka-yūen, walking along the road one tier down from the arterial main road, or dori (Fuchu-Kaido), that runs parallel and also crosses over the Odakyū rail-track. Cross-over bridge steps just ahead. There suddenly heaves into view a truck carrying a section of aircraft fusillage. Square passenger windows. Nose-cone. Wing fixtures. Something of a rare, certainly unexpected, sight. But it fits perfectly into an Odakyū travel-frame – foot passenger, train, track, bicycle (as stored under Fuchu Kaido) and plane. A day later some kind of refrigeration-truck comes with the words ‘Fixed temperature circulation system of the highest refreshment’. Quite.

Cam o’n. The Vietnamese for ‘Thank You’ would not necessarily first come to mind in connection with the Odakyū . But a visit to the Vietnamese Consulate in Yoyogi-Hachiman for a brief trip to Ho Chi Minh City led to overhearing the phrase at the station. Which, in turn, connects to other overheard bits of Odakyū foreign language. Hellos mainly. Nih hao from a group of Chinese students. Sawasdee from a Thai businessman. Namaste from a Nepali chef (in whitesmock embroidered with cooking pot). Once a Frenchman asked ‘C’est la ligne Chuo?’ ‘Non, Monsieur’, I came back, proprietary to a fault, ‘C’est la ligne Odakyū’. Ma ligne I might have added. Tokyo, however international in an evident sense, is actually not quite as international as New York, London or Paris. But it is a great city in which to be international.

Midday Express to Shinjuku, spot of shopping, then on to the Keio Line bound for Shimo-Takaido. Train pauses at Sasazuka-eki and, like a team of green-clad and bandanna’d foragers, there board the poster-men. Eight no less. They dismantle all hanging posters and clip on their successors (from huge mail-bags) at the speed of nano-robots. New posters flicked into straightness, lofted, fixed, and occasionally lightly slapped like new-born infants to test viability. Down carriage. Up carriage. Next carriage. The posters themselves bring into view new kanji, new images, new commercial eye-fluff. Kind of pre-industrial assembly line. Pure dispatch.

Time for a small literary trip. Odakyūout of Mukōgaoka-yūen down to Yoyogi-Uehara. Change to the Chiyoda Line. And on through first to Nezu-eki, and then, Sendagi-eki.

Ogai Mori, or in transliterated Japanese, Mori Ōgai. Real name was Mori Rintarō (1862-1922). Hugely important Meiji-era notable, a physician who rose to become Surgeon-General of the Japanese Army, a major medical presence sent to Manchuria in the Sino-Japanese (1894) and the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905). Trained in Confucian classics, and across a four-year stay at various universities in Europe, mainly Germany. Learned both German and Dutch. Above all, an author to rank with Natsume Sōseki. Novels, stories, histories, essays.

In March 1889, he married Akamatsu Toshiko, daughter of an Admiral, and moved into her family house – a house still standing but now maintained as part of the Suigetsu Hotel Ohgaisu (the latter phrase also Ogai-sou or Ogai residence/homestead). He there wrote, or began, his classic story Maihime (1890), usually translated The Dancing Girl, set in Germany and with its ill-starred drama of damaged love. The abandonment of the dancer of the title who carries her child by Toyotarō Ota: he opts to return to Japan without her. The work has lasted. Mori's marriage did not. Less than a year and he and Toshiko-san were divorced. Ars longa, vita brevis kind of comes to mind.

Few later works of fiction better confirm Mori's imaginative grace than Gan (first published serially in twelve parts 1911-1913) and translated into English as The Wild Geese. Lovely, affecting novella of a woman who allows herself to become the mistress of a moneylender in order to help her ailing father but who falls for a medical student, the very object of desire. Around this triangle Mori creates a busy, circumstantial word of late Edo becoming Meiji Japan. For his last two or so decades Mori lived in Sendagi, in a house which served as a salon that included the novelists Natsume Sōseki and Kafu Nagai and the poets Takuboku Ishikawa and Mokichi Saito. That house was demolished, a successor built. But what remains is the original wall with the kanji for View, Tide, Tower, an assumed reference to the possibility of being able to see the Tokyo Bay in the distance.

Herein a sorry business. Groping. Frotteurism. Men behaving badly – though there was recent reported case of a woman alleged to have been shoving and rubbing. But the statistics speak – 4000 men a year arrested nationally, 17% of women travelling by train say they have been molested. The Ministry of Labour receives about 10,000 complaints annually. In 1999, the Keio Line began women-only carriages with the Odakyū Line and others soon thereafter following suit. On the Odakyū there are the two carriages usually, one near to the driver's cabin, one near to the guard’s. These are so time-tabled for two or two-and-a-half hours each morning and evening. There will always be dangers of false accusation but no-one seriously doubts the problem, not least given packed rushhour trains. Apart from standard gropes, instances have been reported of men biting women's hair. Kind of trichological-dental ‘rush’ as it were? There are even oddball spin-offs, a Groper's Brotherhood operating as tomo-no-kai and a club called ime-kura.

Is it deliberate that the notices for these women-only morning and evening carriages are given a pink background? Odakyū in the pink, in lavender, as it were. A ‘soft’ female image to play against a mean masculine offence?

Allowed into these carriages, however, are ‘men with a physical handicap’ and ‘men who are care attendants’. More phrasing to get you thinking.

One episode that adds its own quirk to the already quirky. TV, and different kinds of consumer event, regularly vaunt the MINISUKA POLICE IDOL GROUP. Essentially this is a dozen-plus attractive young Japanese women dressed in Mother Mary blue rubber or pvc tight mini-outfits – slit skirts (minisuka is romaji for miniskirt) and caps. Police-themed. Part of their publicity says ‘Be arrested by the Minisuka Police’. Not a few men would mind. A combination of Baby Doll, Dominatrix, and Strip-Club Mascot. Frequently referred to as the MINISUKA PORICE. Newspaper for July 2009 report that one of their number, Yukiko Hachisuka, boarded the Odakyū-sen at Shimo-Kitazawa, travelled the line a number of stops, and found herself subject to groping by a 43-year-old salaryman.

Not the least part of Odakyū travel has to be the Fare Adjustment Machine. Seisan ki. You underpaid for your ticket – the upshot is that if you put it in the automatic gate the warning-ping goes off with a small red light flashing. So, a quick sidestep to the FAM (as it might be called). In goes your ticket. Excess price shows up on the screen. Due money is inserted. Out comes another ticket which will do the trick. You then exit from the station, un-troubled, un-guilty, and with quite none of the grief that can follow with a Western ticket office or inspector. Every station in the world should have one. Every home should have one.

Roof-top vistas en route from Mukōgaoka-yūen. The train rides high, and through the window or door window-panel, you get to see upper-level Kanagawa housing. Four items. First, just after Chitose-Funabashi, there's HORIZON CHAPEL in bold green lettering. Heaven's Gate Odakyū? Second, near Kyodo, DOVER HOTEL. Is it a love-hotel, a business hotel, even a left-over sign a la Gatsby? Third, KONAMI SPORTS CLUB just before Shimo-Kitazawa, with a swimming pool as main feature. There you are on the crowded morning train, barely awake, eyes half-open, and you see someone mid-air doing the likes of an Olympic double-twist. Fourth, the JAMII MOSQUE, within hailing distance of Shinjuku, high white minaret and dome golden in the light – nice contrast with each Buddhist or Shinto temple spire. Built, I discover, by Turkish Muslims in the 1930s, demolished in 1986, and handsomely rebuilt and opened in 2000. It is early morning and the mind wanders. Can this still be Odakyū Japan?

Sweet sight. School-aged couple, both in school uniform, sharing white ear-plugs for an iPod, an MP3 player. They look like they are joined by some Y-shaped umbilical stethoscope. You can just about hear it is J-pop (or even, as of late, J-hop), and not least as they both make a slight sway to the rhythm. Lots of eye-gazing. Obviously early passion, love. Discreet. Japanese-style. Off they get at Noborito, ear-to-ear and one white wire for each.

There is nothing if not a language-poetry to the Odakyū stationsigns, especially at larger stops like Yoyogi-Uehara, Noborito and Machida. The names themselves exude a winning phonetics, a syllabic bonne bouche. Yoyogi-Uehara does perfect duty with two signs, one for the Odakyū Line, the other for the Chiyoda Line. The former is oblong, white in background, and with an Odakyū blue line running through it. The name is given in Japanese (kanji and kana), in English (or more accurately romaji) AND in Korean. It tells you that one station back is Higashi-Kitazawa, and the station ahead Yoyogi-Hachiman. Its Chiyoda-Line cousin, alongside and in parallel, has the Chiyoda green line running through it, its own three-language name, and Higashi-Kitazawa and Yoyogi-kōen given as respectively previous and next stations. Train semantics in small. Design in multiples. Place-names in best clarity and colour. The perfect rebuke to an outsider who thinks Tokyo, Japan, ‘impenetrable’.

Today's Express trip has me sitting next to a salaryman who, reaching into his plastic bag, brings out a dozen or so CDs, each in its see-through plastic case. He then produces a handkerchief and, like some demented night-cleaner, starts polishing the cases. Furiously. Non-stop between Seijo and Shinjuku. You reach for a touch of Freud or thoughts of the anal-compulsive. But it does not really hit the mark. There he is, almost an Odakyū diamond-polisher, the Odakyū guardsman-marine-commuter doing his parade boots. Each CD and case he holds to the light for artisan inspection. Then, all goes back into the plastic bag and off he marches. The man with the cleanest CD collection in Tokyo.

Education Odakyū . Amid the profusion of posters for electronics, clothes, trips, this or that deal (with plenty of swimsuit shots and proffered limbs and cleavages in view), there are panels advertising High Schools and universities (some with relevant Odakyū station indicated). The universities, mainly private, come over as Pick Your Own academic fruit-and-vegetables – Seijo, Meiji, Senshu, Obirin, Tama, Nihon, Kanagawa, Tokai. Each has its picture of a beckoning Gate or Building.

TARO OKAMOTO (1911-1996)

Mukōgaoka-yūen's own. Well almost. Japan's Picasso as often called. Painter. Sculptor. One of the nation's best known artmoderns. The offspring of celebrated parents – his mother, Okamoto Kanoko, the tanka-writer and novelist of The Dying Crane/ Tsuri ha Yamiki (1931) and Portrait of an Old Geisha/Rogistō (1938) and his father, Ippei Okamoto, admired manga cartoonist. Born in Kawasakishi, raised in Tokyo's Aoyama District, these parents took him to both Europe and America – even as he launched himself as an oilpainter. Why Mukogaōka-yuen? Because not a township mile from the station in parkland is the Taro Okamoto Museum. ‘Art is explosion’, ‘Art is magic’, became Okamoto's manifestos. Both track back into his modernist-surrealist apprentice years. Fellow-expatriate Parisian alongside Picasso lui-meme, Mondrian and Kandinsky, and drawn to the sway of Gaudi, Breton, Max Ernst, Louis Aragon. Japan-returnee in 1941 on account of the war, his work proliferates, ever the vital presence – and in 1991 he gives 352 pieces of his brilliantly coloured paint and sculpture creations to Kawasaki-shi. Hence the creation of the Museum, and in Mukōgaoka-yuen. Within walking distance of the Odakyū Line, hence Okamoto's Mukōgaoka-yūen.

Fame most came his way with the iconic Tower of the Sun, the dish-like solar face and outspread wings which became the signature of Osaka's Expo 1970, the first world fair held in Asia. It compares with the octopus-legged figure in the Mukōgaoka park, another sculptural upright with raised white wing-arms, or the street-side sunflower faces in up-market Omotesandō (Chiyoda Line from the Odakyū). But no train-connection now better serves than Okamoto's ‘Myth of Tomorrow’ (Asu no Shinwa), his huge apocalyptic mural first painted in Mexico in 1967 in the style of Diego Rivera and the other great Mexican muralistas and as of November 2008 installed in Shibuya Station. An exploding human body at its centre with footfalls of Hiroshima/Nagasaki, if not all warfare. Splinters of colour. A raptor bird head. Rivulets of blood red. A memorial. A warning.

THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING

Any Odakyū station or train-train-window opens a mosaic of blue to you. It is a colour that weaves into the very texture of Japanese life – sky or river reflection to be sure, but also things, objects, materials. Nothing if not one of the Line's primary colours. Wallace Stevens's poem, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, supplies the perfect conjugation.

• 1. Almost all buildings under construction or being repaired are covered in blue tarpaulin, It is as though it were skin. Currently under blue are a bank near Kyodo, a post office near Seijo, road work near Shin-Yurigaōka, and various housing complexes alongside the track (of the kind first built in the 1950s and known as danchi).

• 2. Crossing the Tamagawa Bridge in summer, weekends especially, the eye alights on the picnickers – seated on or standing by their blue tarpaulin spreads. Almost invariably there is a hibachi, a round or square iron grill, with chicken or meat sizzling.

• 3. Odakyū Line carriages, Local or Express, have their own horizontal blue strip mid-position against the rest in cream or silver. They could easily serve as a kind of railway bar-code, the type seen on books or store items. Each, too, has the painted-on white Odakyū logo.

• 4. No station would be fully dressed if it did not have a drinks machine, SUNTORY (which has Tommy Lee Jones sponsoring BOSS coffee), ITO EN, POKKA, DYDO, YAKULT, KIRIN and ASAHI among others. The last, in the shape of an upturned cereal-packet, is a metal shell with library shelves of vitamin drinks, sodas, water, tea and coffee. And painted in blue. Drinks blue.

• 5. Approach a ticket gate on the Odakyū and you have four features in blue: a blue square as decoration, a blue surround on the IC small screen where the ticket is placed, a pair of blue rubberized turnstile-panels that snap open when you use your ticket and a white-on-blue circle with the instruction in Japanese and English ‘Please walk slowly’. Add to these the blue ticket-machines themselves.

Air conditioning. The Odakyū has two levels. Soft and Normal. The second carriage from the front, the second carriage from the back. So you have to make the big decision – step from outdoor heat-humidity into cold or moderately cold air conditioning. Either way it can be welcome. But also a sure-and-certain route into summer colds. Round the clock sniffing, sniffling. And it is not done to blow your nose in public. In theory, the sniffing, the sniffling, has to be delicate. In fact there are some pretty big sniffs, not to say sniffles.

Cool Biz. Under the LDP government regime of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi (2001-2006) and ‘to fight global warming’ men were urged to forego ties and pitch for the open-necked shirt and short sleeves. This was the Koizumi of Post Office Privatization, Koizumi the aficionado of Elvis and Wagner. Salarymen thus abandoned years of sartorial practice, be-knottedness. ‘Special’ open-necked shirts were advertised. Those still reluctant to forego old habits kept their ties but stylized their loosening – tie-pin in place with the tie a good 100+ millimetres open and at an angle. Just as Koizumi's ample, winged hair (for which, and his politics, he became known as ‘Lionheart’), became his personal insignia, so his espousal of men's cool-biz shirts remains one of his legacies. Visible daily aboard the summer Odakyū Line.

Full Odakyū Apache. The phrase echoes Takayuki Tatsumi's Full Metal Apache: Transactions Between Cyperpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (2006) with its wide-ranging take on East-West cultural inter-image. It comes to mind during today's Express trip from Mukōgaoka-yūen to Machida. Normally you see salarymen in regulation black, grey or blue suits, or uniformed school-goers (Prussian-military for boys, sailor-style for girls), or a range of normally kitted other commuters. But today, maybe because it is Summer and a Sunday, a sight of rainbow exuberance. Student-aged woman. Yellow shoes. White inset sock. Tights with different-coloured spiral pattern. White frilly skirt. Russet jacket.

World Wide Love – Red paper carrier bag

Mysty Woman – White paper with black string handles

Armani-Ginza Tower – Black shiny paper bag

Love Drug Store/LDS – White and orange plastic

Sportiff – White carrier bag

Hey, The Medium Dreamed – Standard Journal – Brown paper

Mono Comme Ca, A Simple Lifestyle Are What We Suggest

– White/black canvas

Authent – Shiny black plastic

Fareg, Scappe Uomo – Pleated black paper

Freak's store – Brown canvas

Womb – Green plastic

Tokyo College of Music – Grey canvas with blue stripes

Né-Net – Plain brown

Winter Party Diamond – Red cloth with gold letters

Snoopy Studios – Black canvas

Mochi Cream – White and grey paper

Mars – Zebra striped bag with pink string handles

No Music, No Life, Tower records – Small yellow bag

Pornograffiti – Blue plastic

Death – Black leather sports bag

Super Hakka – White paper carrier bag

Liz-Lisa – Lilac paper bag

Espace-Hiroko-Koshino – White plasticised paper

Scapa – Brown with dark-brown string handles

Spirited – Pink cloth bag

Brownie bee… – Black paper with red lettering

Afternoon Tea – Brown plastic in yellow and blue capital letters

Spinns – White and purple plastic

Ingni – White plastic

Café do Brasil (e um producto da athletica. s.a) – Black bag

with arm-strap

Milk – Black canvas Jeanasis – Black paper

Lowry's Farm – Blue plaid bag

Tama Plaza 20 – Tawny Canvas bag, blue lettering

Silent Lumy – Green plastic

Kaldi Coffee Farm – Orange-brown paper

Optical 88 – Black paper, white letters

Emily Temple Cute – Red and white square paisley, plastic

Daydream – High gloss white

George's Christmas – White and red (plus holly) paper

Comme Ca ism – White paper

Naked – White paper, red lettering

Napoli – Purple gloss

Ego – Black and yellow plastic

Quoi? Quoi? – Light purple paper

Santa Cree Hair Make Team – Black and white plastic

Omnibus Japan – White Plastic