Overview

The Tozai Line (T) links Nakano and Nishi-funabashi over about 30.8 km and 23 stations, cutting straight across Tokyo from west to east — one of the busiest lines in the whole Metro network. Under its sky-blue livery, morning rush hour here is the stuff of legend.

The congestion is not folklore. For years the Kiba → Monzen-nakacho segment recorded the highest peak-hour loading of any line in Japan, and Tokyo Metro's response — express services, extra platforms, an entire additional station at Minami-sunamachi — has been an engineering project running for decades. If you have ever seen a photograph of station staff pushing passengers into a train, there is a good chance it was taken here.

Along the route

The line passes Waseda, Otemachi, and Nihombashi before reaching Nishi-funabashi out in Chiba Prefecture. The elevated stretch between Kasai and Urayasu is notorious for high winds, and service is sometimes suspended during typhoon season — a line commuters love to hate.

That windy stretch is also the prettiest part of the ride. East of Toyocho the line climbs out of the ground and runs on viaduct across the reclaimed flats toward the bay, past Urayasu — the station most visitors know as the way to Tokyo Disney Resort — with nothing but sky on both sides. It is the longest above-ground run of any Tokyo Metro line, and the reason the wind stops it so often.

Where the typing gets hard

Twenty-three stations, 221 keystrokes, an average of 9.6 per stop. There is not a single sokuon on the entire line — no doubled consonants anywhere — which makes it unusually clean to type and a good place to work on raw speed.

What it has instead is length in the eastern half. Monzen-nakacho (monzennnakachou, 15) and Minami-sunamachi (minamisunamachi, 15) are the longest, followed by Minami-gyotoku (minamigyoutoku, 14), Baraki-nakayama (barakinakayama, 14) and Nishi-funabashi (nishifunabashi, 14). Five names of fourteen-plus keystrokes, all in the last third of the run.

Monzen-nakacho is the one to watch: monzennnakachou runs three n's together where the ん meets the な, the same trap as Tameike-sanno on the Ginza Line. And Gyotoku / Minami-gyotoku arrive one after the other, so you type gyoutoku twice in a row with a prefix in between — easy to start the second one on autopilot and drop the minami.

The western half is the fast part: Nakano, Ochiai, Waseda, Kagurazaka, Kudanshita, Takebashi, and Kiba at just four keystrokes.

How to practise it

Run Nakano toward Nishi-funabashi. The short western names let you build rhythm for ten stops before the long eastern names arrive — and because there are no doubled consonants to break your flow, this is one of the best lines in the game for setting a personal CPM record.

Reverse it if you want the difficulty front-loaded. Starting from Nishi-funabashi means five long names in the first eight stops, which is a harsher test of accuracy under pressure.

At 23 stations end to end, a Tozai run is one of the longer Tokyo Metro courses in the game — pace yourself rather than sprinting the opening.

Why play it

A long cross-city run with a wide variety of station-name styles — finish this one and you've got a solid feel for typing on Tokyo's long east-west commuter lines.