I made a similar flutter app (to test our main product) that plays the in-train announcement instead of the station melody.
https://github.com/tramlinehq/ueno – it's downloadable from both app stores.
I was just in Japan a few months ago. It was my fourth visit, but the first for my partner, who found the different departure melodies notable and a really nice, cute, joyful thing. We made a point to listen to them whenever we were taking a train somewhere (which was of course very often, multiple times per day). In a way it feels like a funny thing to have near top-of-mind when it comes to memories of a trip that was packed with so many fun activities.
Noticed the Okachimachi and Uguisudani (and several other) melodies are the same... is that correct, or is that a mistake on the site? I imagine it's hard to have a unique melody for every single station, so I expect there are some repeats throughout the transit system, but those two stations are so close together, it's a surprise that they'd be the same.
A couple of months ago, riding the subway through Ginza Station for the first time in a while, I noticed that the door-closing melody was from the 1949 song Ginza Kankan Musume [1, 2]. I’m normally not very familiar with Japanese pop music, but I happen to have the song on a playlist I listen to together with my five-year-old grandson. It brought a smile to my face, as it’s a cheerful, very slightly risqué song from the early postwar period, when Japanese popular culture was enjoying renewed freedom. It was fun to hear it in a subway station in 2025.
I don't know how to describe this, but Japanese enjoy putting a little bit of joy into every thing, like Ronald McDonald, but real.
I'm also a fan of the Yamanote Line.
I made a psychedelic AI audio-visual collage inspired by it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwUSzUvShqcaa
I made field recordings during my last stay in Tokyo. From those, I made a song for each station of the Yamanote line, using the Jingle in the prompt. The visuals were made similarly.
Used mainly Suno, Udio, Runway and Ableton Live.
I listen to them every day.
By the way, Ikebukuro’s melody isn’t this one anymore. Bic Camera, an electronics retailer, acquired Seibu, and now their song is played instead. https://youtu.be/9Emi-ZAnnlc?si=G8iazo945capvT5T&t=221
It’s fun, isn’t it?
Thia give me PTSD flashback. My first job out of high school was bic camera. Those melodies are fun at station because they only play it when train is coming, but full blasting it 24/7 (including rest room) makes your brain go numb.
I go in to a trance state of corporate drone mode with a 営業スマイル(sales smile) and bendy-hip when I hear that tune
I can imagine. I have the Yodobashi Camera jingle permenantly seared into my brain, and I am only a customer!
When I worked at a gym, they played the same 10 or so songs all day every day. My heartrate rises when I hear them.
Seibu had nothing to do with it. BicCamera started in Ikebukuro and was influential in building up the area. The jingle change is a campaign as BicCamera is doing a cooperation with the ward to build it out more. See [1]
Ah, my mistake — Bic Camera didn’t acquire Seibu’s site. Seibu Ikebukuro was actually sold to Fortress, and then the property was transferred to Yodobashi Holdings, which is now planning the redevelopment. Bic Camera started in Ikebukuro, so it’s influential locally, but it wasn’t part of the acquisition.
Sources:
Wikipedia – Sogo & Seibu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogo_%26_Seibu SBbit – Seibu Ikebukuro redevelopment: https://www.sbbit.jp/article/cont1/144891
My favourite, when I lived in Japan many years ago, was the Musashi-Koganei melody in Tokyo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cT2xTUPveCw
It stood very much in contrast with all the other jingles, and I simply loved it.
Is that a fancy dancy version of Sakura Sakura (probably the most famous Japanese folk song)?
It is.
There are possibly-recognizable tunes throughout the system. Vivaldi's Spring comes to mind. I think at Ooimachi.
Leaving Japan next week after living in Tokyo for 6 months. This website is going to hit different very soon.
ドアに注意下さい
Nit: if you scroll down a lot, the stations at the top disappear (and get appended at the bottom, which makes sense – it’s a circular line after all!), but the space remains, so when you scroll back there’s a ton of empty space. Maybe remove that empty space after the scrolling has stopped? (Would be nice if you could scroll backwards, too!)
And just to throw in a wild idea, it might be nice if the UI was a variation of the in-train display interface: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Series-E131-500_Insi...
Naturally, it’s not as clean and sleek, but incorporating some elements of it might make this site look more authentic. Maybe something like this? https://files.catbox.moe/8cpp76.png
What interesting is, the implementation is completely simple multi pages HTML5/CSS/Vanilla JavaScript. No framework. And it just, works.
Why...would this ever need a framework?
I haven't done any website design since the early 2010s, what would a webdev even pull from the modern frameworks to achieve what this site is doing?
Does it? On iPadOS 26 and even with Silent Mode disabled I still can't hear anything.
Works fine for me on iPadOS 26. Click on the station names?
good old days
I'll plug a youtuber who has played them live for fun:
https://youtu.be/4V6Q5l2S7Co?si=k1M5F6WD3y05wIN2
He also has done live reproductions of SNES music which are well worth a view
Very interesting! I made just yesterday a track with Yamanote's Shinagawa melody https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haV1O8hqaaE (using Suno)
Why don't I remember the Ueno station being an electronic office telephone ringtone...
Yeah I'm not sure about some of these. Some are duplicates too, is that accurate?
Here is the correct Ueno melody: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGaCcvBcDQc
According to someone in the comments, the ringing thing did actually exist, but was replaced by this new tune in 2021.
When you get this, I believe the actual song is missing
Other lines have some bangers too - used to live in Koenji and Asagaya, love those.
The first time I got off at and heard Komagome's tune I mistakenly thought it was some halloween special because it was late October at the time, and the song felt so distinct and unique.
This is up there with the Hard Off in store music. Magnificent!
Ebisu has the "Harry Lime" theme from "The Third Man"? Wasn't expecting to recognise any... I wonder who was a fan of that film.
Yes, it's that song.
The station is named after a beer company that operates there, and they used their beer CM song for the station chime as well.
And the brewery got the name from Ebisu, a god who is believed to protect fishermen.
Yeah that's him you see on the Ebisu beer cans
They changed the melodies for a lot of the stations recently, I’ve noticed.
I'm playing JR EAST Train Simulator with the Yamanote Line DLC and I need these station melodies asap as a mod somehow! So good
Unfortunately JR East has phasing out the custom melodies and have been standardizing the Yamanote line to always play the same tune. They are saying labor shortages are the reason since they need to press a physical button in the station in order to play the melody.
I think it's pretty obvious that the goal is to get rid of the conductor position entirely. 50% less employees per train. Someone who sits at a desk all day definitely gets promoted for that one.
Huh.
https://kaisercougarconnection.com/2784/news/musical-trains-...
My impression is that all of the Yamanote line stations are above ground -- I'd have expected it to be possible to have "one button plays the right sound at each station" if you used a standard phone's GPS to figure out which station you were at.
Its most likely not worth it to JR East to support it anymore since they have had a labor shortage recently.
> GPS
Kids these days...
Not only you don't need a GNSS to determine a fixed in place railroad station but actually you don't want to use a GNSS to do that.
A simple radio beacon working on ~400MHz is more than enough to solve this difficult technical obstacle.
Of course, this is totally ignoring what the trains do already know where they are because they need to display the current/next stations on the passenger information displays.
Huh? What does that even mean? The train already announces the train station name, so why does it need a specific button for the specific jingle? Does not sound right.
Its not an automated operation, the train jingles play a few seconds before the conductor closes the door. Its played at different times depending on congestion on the train platform.
Takadanobaba has always been my favorite. The Tetsuwan Atom theme song.
How do I get them as ringtones?
Awww. I hadn't been to Tokyo since Covid and the tunes I remember have all changed. Used to like the Shibuya one.
I honestly need to pop up there to some Rust meetups. I always wind up discounting Tokyo, but I've met some smart people at the wrong times.
There used to be an OS X widget that had all the station melodies… It’s been a while.
Another one: https://yamanote.app/
Interestingly this one seems it is from before 高輪ゲートウェイ (Takanawa Gateway) station which opened in 2020, but the numbering shows the gap (JY 25 -> JY 27). That led me to looking it up, and turns out that they introduced the numbering in 2016, and that already came pre-planned with the gap ready [1].
In the street where I grew up they had to renumber most of the houses one year because a row of new buildings were built, so everyone that was further down the street than the new houses had to have their numbers increased so that the new houses could be given numbers that were in order with where along the street they were built.
I wonder if that sort of renumbering is common or not, and if Japan is better at planning that sort of thing also.
I was too young at the time to know if this lead to any mail delivery issues, and I imagine the postal delivery service was made aware of the change. But I would think that even if they were notified it would sometimes be the case that if your house used to be say number 53 and now it’s 73 that mail that was intended for you ends up in the mail box of the house that used to be 33 and is now 53.
Even if not at first then at least like 3 years later when some random company still has your old address on file and most other mail for everyone in the street is usually addressed to updated numbers.
I'd assume most countries don't bother remapping when it comes to Street numbers ?
France has a suffix system, so you if a buildings are added between 24 and 25 you'll get 24 bis, 24 ter etc.
Japan doesn't care about the ordering in the first place, so a block added between 24 and 25 and 26 will be 32 without any issue.
In Japan house numbers are based on construction date rather than position along the street.
How are these audio tracks not copyright violations?
Good question. The composer and artist of most of them in Japan is Minoru Mukaiya.[1] He's also the CEO of Ongakukan, which builds train simulators for both games and training.
He's done over a hundred original station jingles.[2] Many of the Yamanote Line jingles are classics, though.
Seems like he has nothing to do with the Yamanote line melodies though.
You Wouldn't Download a Train Station
There is some joke involving audio tracks in here.
Pffft, this is fair use
I know "fair use" gets bandied about quite frequently on youtube uploads, but offering full verbatim downloads of any work is highly unlikely to be considered fair use if a court were to rule on it. The only reason such sites are still up is that the rights holders don't care enough to sue.
not the same under Japanese's copyright law.
