Toranomon Hills, Zoshigaya and Five Wrong Readings: A Station Data Fix

Two players wrote in within days of each other, both pointing at the same kind of problem: station data in the game that did not match the real railway. One listed eight items, the other two. Every single one checked out against the operators' own station pages, and all of them have now been fixed.

This post is the record of what was wrong, what it is now, and why a station's reading — the kana, not the kanji — is the part that matters most in a typing game.

Why the reading is the thing that has to be right

On a Japanese line you are not typing the kanji. You are typing the reading. 鴨宮 appears on the station board, but what your fingers actually produce is kamonomiya, one keystroke at a time.

That makes a wrong reading worse here than it would be on a map or in a timetable. A map with a bad furigana is a small error you can look past. A typing game with a bad furigana is quietly drilling you on a word that does not exist. Every lap you run, you are rehearsing it. The station name is not decoration in this game — it is the exercise.

Which is why these reports are worth acting on quickly, and why the fix is never just "change the label".

The five readings that were wrong

Look at what these have in common: every one of them is a name where the kanji offers more than one honest possibility, and the wrong guess is the plausible one.

市場 is genuinely read いちば in ordinary Japanese — a street market is an いちば. But Tsukiji's was a 市場 in the institutional sense, a wholesale market, and that reading is しじょう. 本駒込 looks like もと (former) 駒込, which would be a perfectly normal way to name a neighbouring station; it is in fact ほん (main) 駒込. 忍 alone is おし in some place names and しのぶ in others, and here it is しのぶ.

These are exactly the readings a Japanese learner would get wrong — which is a good argument for having them right, and a good reason the game feeds the kana to everything downstream rather than letting anything guess from the characters.

Two stations that were simply missing

Toranomon Hills on the Hibiya Line. It opened in 2020, between Kamiyacho and Kasumigaseki — the line's first new station in decades, built to serve the tower complex above it. The game's data predated it.

Adding it back is not just one row. Toranomon Hills is H06, so every station east of it moves up a number: Kasumigaseki becomes H07, Ginza H09, and the northern terminus Kita-senju is now H22. The line is 22 stations, not 21. If you have an older Tokyo subway map on your wall, this is the difference you are looking at.

Zoshigaya on the Fukutoshin Line, between Ikebukuro and Nishi-waseda. Same knock-on effect: it takes F10, Nishi-waseda becomes F11, and Shibuya is now F16 at the end of a 16-station line.

One thing worth flagging, because it trips people up in real life too: Zoshigaya on the Fukutoshin Line (雑司が谷) is a different station from the Toden Arakawa Line's 都電雑司ヶ谷. Different stop, different tram, and even a different ヶ. Both are in the game, and they are not the same place.

The Yamatoji Line now runs all the way to Kamo

The Yamatoji Line was ending at Nara. That felt reasonable — Nara is the destination, the old capital, the obvious place for a journey to stop — but it is not where the line ends.

"Yamatoji Line" is a nickname JR West gave in 1988 to a specific stretch of the Kansai Main Line: the electrified section from Kamo to JR-Namba. The Kansai Main Line itself keeps going east from Kamo, eventually to Nagoya, but past Kamo the wires stop and so does the nickname. So the run now continues beyond Nara through Narayama and Kizu to Kamo — 22 stations instead of 19.

If you have run this line before, expect it to feel longer, because it is. Nara is now a landmark on the way rather than the finish.

The parts you do not see

Getting station data right means more than editing one field, because several things are generated from it.

The announcements were regenerated. Every station's spoken name is synthesised from the kana reading stored in the data, not from the kanji — that is deliberate, and it is exactly why these fixes matter. Change a reading and the old audio file becomes wrong, so the five corrected stations and the new ones got fresh audio, and the files keyed to the old readings were deleted. If you play with sound on, 築地市場 now says つきじしじょう.

The line articles were updated. Station counts, keystroke totals and the per-line difficulty notes all had to move with the data. The Hibiya Line article, for instance, used to call Naka-okachimachi the longest name on the line at 15 keystrokes. Toranomon Hills — toranomonhiruzu — ties it exactly, so that passage is now wrong in an interesting way rather than simply out of date, and it has been rewritten.

One honest caveat about the leaderboards. The Hibiya, Fukutoshin and Yamatoji runs are now longer than they were, but existing times were deliberately kept rather than wiped. That means older, shorter runs still sit on the same boards as new ones. Preserving people's records seemed the better trade, but it is worth knowing if you are looking at a Yamatoji time that seems impossible — it may be from the 19-station era.

Spotted something else?

The station and line facts in this game are public data, but public data still has to be transcribed by somebody, and somebody makes mistakes. Both of these reports came from players who noticed something was off mid-run and took the trouble to write it down — one of them a Japanese player who spotted the Toranomon Hills gap and the 鴨宮 reading in the same message.

If a reading looks wrong to you, or a station is missing, or a line stops somewhere it should not, please say so. You are more likely to notice than anyone else is, because you are the one typing it.

In the meantime, the route maps are the quickest way to see every line as it now stands, and if you want to read about how the announcements are produced, there is a post on that.