Shinagawa Station

We are staying a few blocks from the Shinagawa station on the main circular Tokyo line called the Yamanote. The stations are real hubs within the city--not buried underground, like in New York, but whole elaborate complexes. On the Yamonote line, there are probably a dozen stops that are like Grand Central station, with multi-story malls, corridors with restaurants, sometimes huge skyscrapers of office buildings attached. Shinagawa is a huge station for connections with other rail lines, but it's mostly a residential and working area--not as much shopping as other stations--and in the morning, the flow of people out of the station is amazing. Last week we arrived at the station at 8:30 in the morning, and found ourselves fighting the flow of tens of thousands of people, all silently heading to work. It was one of the most unusual experiences I've ever had, and I went back this morning to take some pictures.

They don't really capture the number of people, but you can get some sense of the traffic. Here's the main corridor, as photographed from a second-story Starbucks overlooking it. This picture was taken at about 7:45 am...not many people.

By 8:00, the stream was steady, but still not at its peak (which was around 8:40, for the 9:00 workday). But you can see that the flow is almost entirely in one direction.
Here you can see one poor foreigner trying to cross the traffic. The yellow lines you see in the pictures are actually grooves to help the blind move through the station; you can see this on almost every street, either grooved for canes, or rippled so you can feel where you are with your feet.
It was just a steady flow from about 8:00 until 9:15, when it began to die down to mere hundreds per minute. There are a few chime tones going off every second or so, and every few minutes a train announcement in the distance, but there's almost no talking, so you hear ambient noise and the sounds of thousands of footsteps.

Here, closer to the east exit (there's a west exit with just as much traffic), you can make out two people, I think, trying to move in the opposite direction.