Conceptual illustration — not to scale.
How I ended up walking it
About five years ago, in spring, I walked a full loop of Tokyo's Yamanote Line. I didn't plan that from the start. I'd already ridden the loop once on a bicycle, which took me about four hours. That was my own time on my own route, not a benchmark for anyone else, but it left me curious about how other people had done it.
So I went looking online for write-ups of cycling the loop. Somewhere in that reading I found an account by someone who had walked it instead. My first thought was simple: maybe I could do that too. On a separate day, I tried.
Setting off
I started at Nishi-Nippori and went clockwise, on my own. The plan was just to follow the line: stay near the tracks, keep the loop on one side, and come back around to where I started.
For a while that works. Then it stops working.
What the route length doesn't tell you
On a map the Yamanote Line is a tidy closed ring, and the loop has a single published length you can look up. On foot it is not tidy. The road that runs alongside the tracks keeps ending. You reach a point where it just does not continue, and you have to find another way around, which is always longer than the gap you are trying to close.
(It isn't only my impression: some people who have walked the full loop report routes extending into the 40-kilometre range — well past the line's own length. The road, not the map, decides how far you actually go.)
Those detours are the real cost of the walk. Not the loop's distance, but the number of times you have to leave the line and work your way back to it.
At one of those points the road ran out and I had to go back the way I had come to reach a bigger road. By then my legs were already very tired, and that stretch back, over ground I had just covered, was one of the hardest parts of the day.
Nearly giving up
Around Ikebukuro I came close to stopping. I had been walking for hours, I still had a long way to go, and for a while I did not think I would finish. I kept going, but it was close.
The long stretch
The section from Shimbashi to Shinagawa was the other hard part. The stations there felt far apart: you walk, and walk, and the next one still is not near. I am not going to put a distance on it, because I do not have a real figure and my sense of it while tired is not one. It just felt long.
I stopped and rested at one point, then carried on.
Finishing
I made it back around. The whole walk took me about nine hours, again my own time and not a target.
The honest verdict is that I am glad I did it once. Giving a whole day to a loop I normally treat as a train ride was worth doing; it did not feel like an ordinary day, and — like a lot of getting around Japan — it was not quite what I had pictured. But once was enough, and I do not want to repeat it.
The one thing that still tempts me is going the other way. Same loop, counter-clockwise. I cannot say why that appeals, but it does.
If this kind of self-set physical test appeals to you, two other Why Japan pieces cover different versions of it: climbing Mount Fuji from the fifth station took about 11 hours round trip, and climbing Tokyo Tower's roughly 600 outdoor steps instead of taking the elevator is a much shorter version of the same idea.
If you are thinking about trying it
I am not going to write this up as a recommended route, because I did it once and in one direction only. But a few things I wish I had understood first:
- Following the line on foot is not the same as the line. Expect the road to end, more than once, and expect to lose time getting back to the tracks.
- The backtracking is worse than the walking. Retracing ground you have already done, late in the day, is where it wears you down.
- Plan for it to take far longer than the loop's length on a map suggests. Mine was about nine hours on foot; yours will be its own number, but it will not be short.
- Decide in advance where you will let yourself stop. I nearly used mine near Ikebukuro.
If none of that puts you off, you will probably be fine. And if you have already cycled it, that is roughly how I ended up walking it.