During a recent rush-hour commute, Tokyo’s Akasaka-mitsuke Station was packed to the brim.
Hordes of commuters quietly filed into neat lines on each side of the platform, patiently waiting for riders to exit the train. Once the doors opened, they filed in — but there wasn’t room for everyone.
Then, Tokyo Metro employees intervened. The workers, clad in blue mesh vests, ties and white gloves, pushed riders — carefully and neatly — into the train cars, trying to squeeze as many people into the train as possible before the doors closed.
When the next train arrived a couple of minutes later, the same scene played out again, with the oshiya, or “people pushers,” stepping in once more. Nobody in the crowds seemed to mind; they moved together as one.
This everyday scene in Tokyo starkly contrasts the US public transit norm, where ridership is sharply down post-pandemic, and systems are operating under massive deficits.
Tokyo Metro serves 6.52 million people daily, more than double those who use the New York City Subway. The company is just one of a dozen major rail operators in the Greater Tokyo region. Unlike in the US and many other countries around the globe, most of those rail operators are private.
For decades, the Tokyo Metro was owned by the Japanese government and the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. It was a holdout in a largely privatized system.
But in October, that changed when both governments sold off its majority ownership in Japan’s most successful IPO in years. The move will help Japan fund recovery efforts from a devastating earthquake that hit northeastern Japan in 2011. Internally, Tokyo Metro hopes privatization will increase efficiency and bolster profits.
“It will accelerate growth,” said Kon Takuma, a deputy manager at Tokyo Metro.
According to Takuma, the move will allow the company to expand beyond railways, developing real estate and businesses at and around train stations.
“We will create a virtuous cycle where the flow of people, the development of city planning and the appeal of Tokyo will increase.”
The country’s major rail operators previously operated as a single, government-run entity called Japan Railways (JR). In the 1980s, JR was privatized amid a cascade of financial and operational problems, splitting into four separate companies: JR East, JR West, JR Central and JR Kyushu.
“Privatization has been a good thing,” said Tomohiko Taniguchi, a professor at the University of Tsukubawas and former adviser to Shinzo Abe who twice served as Japan’s prime minister before he was assassinated in 2022.
Taniguchi has extensive experience taking and helping run trains, including a five-year stint with JR Central, one of the country’s biggest train companies.
“I belong to a generation that remembers vividly how unfriendly JR companies were,” he said. “If you went to the ticketing counter and asked for a ticket for your journey from Tokyo to Osaka, they just literally threw their tickets away from the ticketing counter to you.”
When the trains went private, Taniguchi said, customer service improved, train lines expanded, and company profits increased. The company also expanded beyond transit, developing real estate around its stations, including grocery and department stores, restaurants, hotels and hospitals.
Today, some 40 million people ride trains daily in Tokyo alone. The country’s railways are extensive, frequent and punctual. In the unlikely event that a train is late, riders are given special notes explaining their delay to work.
Japan’s success story raises questions about whether other systems around the world should consider privatization as well.
“It’s incredibly complicated,” said Taras Grescoe, a Canadian transit advocate and author of the book “Straphanger,” which compares different transportation systems around the world. “Japan is so particular. These are basically not transportation companies. They are property development companies.”
Grescoe cautioned that the lesson from Japanese transit should not be that all systems should go private. Globally, he said, the success of the country’s privatization is an anomaly.
“When you look around the world, the countries that are doing this best are the countries that have nationalized, publicly owned rail systems,” he said.“I’m thinking of Switzerland and the Netherlands. And in the exceptions to that rule, like the UK, privatization has been a disaster.”
Advocates have long argued that the privatization of transit in the United Kingdom in the 1980s and ’90s, led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her successors, led to major operational issues that hurt service and linger to this day.
In May, the issue will come to a head internationally, as Japan’s private system is put to the test and the newly privatized Tokyo Metro helps take over operation of the Elizabeth Line, a new rail service in London that has struggled with reliability since it opened in 2022.
Whether or not the Brits can expect professional people pushers is an open question.