Overview

The Tozai Line (T) is Sapporo's east-west axis and the biggest line on the network by every measure: 19 stations, 20.1 km, the largest fleet, 35 minutes end to end. It opened in 1976 between Kotoni and Shiroishi, ran east to Shin Sapporo in 1982, and finally reached Miyanosawa in 1999. Unlike the Namboku Line it stays underground the entire way — and so does its depot, buried between Nijuyonken and Nishi nijuhatchome with a car park and a housing estate sitting on the roof. The Toho Line, which has no depot at all, stables its trains there too and runs them through Tozai tunnels to get them home.

Along the route

Miyanosawa is the walk-up station for Shiroi Koibito Park; Kotoni is a dense western sub-centre; Maruyama koen serves the park, the Hokkaido Shrine and the zoo, and is where you change for the bus up to the Okurayama ski jump. Nishi juhatchome and Nishi juitchome carry you through the government district into Odori, then Bus Center mae sits at the eastern end of the Aurora Town underground mall. East of Shiroishi the line strings itself out along Nango-dori, a corridor whose land the city had quietly assembled decades earlier for a railway that was never built, and finishes through Oyachi and Hibarigaoka at Shin Sapporo — the easternmost subway station in Japan, and the sub-centre with the aquarium, the science museum and JR's own Shin-Sapporo, which is exactly why the subway writes its version 新さっぽろ in hiragana.

Why play it

The three Nango stops are the trap, and they are consecutive. Nango nana chome, Nango jusan chome and Nango juhatchome are identical at both ends and differ only in the middle, so once the fingers have committed to なんごう they will happily finish the wrong station. Nijuyonken is worth learning early too: 24 here is にじゅうよん, not the よ that the Namboku Line uses for the same number. And Bus Center mae is the only katakana name on the line: ばすせんたーまえ, where the long-vowel bar is typed as a hyphen — the one non-letter key you will press in the whole run.