This country, where a 20-second delay leads to profuse apologies on the platforms and conductors bow to passengers as they enter the train car, has taken train nerd-dom to a new level.
Sure, there are the vanilla trainspotters who take photos of various trains around the country. They’re called tori-tetsu. (Tori means to take, and tetsu means train.)
But there are also nori-tetsu, people who enjoy traveling on trains; yomi-tetsu, those who love to read about trains, especially train schedules; oto-tetsu, the people who record the sound of trains; sharyo-tetsu, fans of train design; eki-tetsu, people who study stations; and even ekiben-tetsu, aficionados of the exquisite bento lunchboxes sold at stations. [...]
Take Tetsuya Suzuki, a 48-year-old yomi-tetsu who has more than 660 volumes of train timetable books dating back to April 1980. He uses the latest edition — yes, Japan still prints phone-book-size schedules — to map out imaginary journeys just for fun. [...]
In Japan, there are the famous bullet trains that whiz the length of the country in about the same time it takes Amtrak to get from the District to New York, and the slightly slower but perfectly punctual commuter trains. But there are the special trains: the retro, 1950s-style cars, the cars festooned with leaves in fall or cartoon characters like Hello Kitty and Pokémon, the trains with indoor playrooms or foot spas.
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