The yellow sign overhead: choosing the right exit from a Japanese station

At Ikebukuro (池袋) on a Friday evening, two friends agree to meet “at the station exit” and then spend twenty minutes on the phone describing different department stores to each other. One is standing on the east side, the other on the west, and between them lie several railway companies’ worth of platforms and a tide of commuters. Neither is lost. They have simply left the same station into two different neighbourhoods.

A station is not one place

The large Japanese stations are better understood as districts with trains running through them. Shinjuku (新宿) has JR gates named for east, west, south and new south, plus others named after a road and an office tower, and the walk between the furthest of them is long enough to notice in summer. Tokyo Station (東京駅) splits cleanly in two: the Marunouchi (丸の内) side, where the red-brick facade faces the Imperial Palace grounds, and the Yaesu (八重洲) side, where the Shinkansen gates and the highway bus terminal are.

The side you leave from decides what you see first, and sometimes whether you find the place at all. At Kyoto Station (京都駅) the Karasuma side (烏丸口, Karasuma-guchi) opens north onto the city bus terminal and Kyoto Tower, while the Hachijō side (八条口, Hachijō-guchi) opens south, by the Shinkansen gates. A hotel that describes itself as a few minutes from the station means a few minutes from one of those doors, not both.

出口を一つ間違えると、同じ駅でも別の町に出る。

Gates first, exits second

Two words do most of the work. Kaisatsu (改札) is the ticket gate, where you tap your IC card and the fare is settled; deguchi (出口) is the exit, the stairway or door that puts you on the street. In a small station these are a few steps apart. In a large one, the gate chooses the side of the tracks and the exit chooses the corner of the block, and there can be a long corridor of shops between the two.

JR stations tend to name their gates by compass direction: higashi-guchi (東口) for east, nishi-guchi (西口) for west, minami-guchi (南口) for south, kita-guchi (北口) for north, and chūō-guchi (中央口) for a central one. The characters are worth learning as shapes, since those few will sort a great many stations. Subway exits work differently. Tokyo Metro and the Toei lines give them letter-and-number codes such as A3 or C7, and a single interchange like Ōtemachi (大手町) carries dozens.

Names can mislead. At Ikebukuro the Seibu Ikebukuro Line (西武池袋線), whose name contains the character for west, terminates on the east side, and the Tōbu Tōjō Line (東武東上線), with the character for east, sits on the west. In Osaka, JR Osaka Station (大阪駅) and the several stations called Umeda (梅田) form one tangle joined by underground malls such as Whity Umeda (ホワイティうめだ), and the JR gates there are named for a boulevard and a bridge — Midōsuji (御堂筋口) and Sakurabashi (桜橋口) — rather than for a compass point.

Reading the yellow boards

Exit information in Japanese stations is generally printed black on yellow, and that colour is the thing to look for when you step off the train. On the platform, before any stairs, there is usually a yellow board headed deguchi annai (出口案内) that lists nearby buildings, parks, museums and hotels against the exit that serves each one. At Ginza (銀座) on the Tokyo Metro Ginza Line (銀座線) it runs to several columns. Find your destination on the list, memorise the code, and only then choose a staircase.

Nearby, often on a pillar, a second chart draws the train as a row of numbered cars with the stairs, escalators and lifts marked above the cars they stand beside. Commuters use it to board at the door that will open opposite their exit. For a visitor it works in reverse: if you have stepped out at the wrong end of a long platform, it shows how far back the right staircase is.

Past the gates, look for the neighbourhood map, shūhen annai-zu (周辺案内図), usually mounted on a wall near the exit corridors. It is often drawn to match the direction you are facing rather than with north at the top, which unsettles people who expect otherwise. It marks the exits with the same codes as the signs overhead.

Where to meet, and where not to

“The station” is not a meeting place, and neither is “the east exit” at a terminal with several gates on its east side. Name a gate and an object. At Shibuya (渋谷) the Hachikō Gate (ハチ公改札) of the JR station lets out onto the square with the dog statue, which is crowded but unambiguous. At Tokyo Station, people arriving on different trains often meet at Gin no Suzu (銀の鈴), a large silver bell on the basement level inside the ticket gates, so that nobody has to tap out to find anybody.

That last detail matters more than it looks. Someone waiting inside the gates and someone waiting outside them can be ten metres apart and unable to reach each other until one of them passes through. If your companion is arriving on a different company’s line — a Keiō or Odakyū train into Shinjuku, say, rather than JR — agree on a spot outside the gates, in the concourse or on the street.

Getting it right on the day

Decide the exit before you board, not after you arrive. Map apps generally name the exit in their walking directions, and hotels, restaurants and museums usually print it in the access section of their own websites; a line such as “three minutes from exit B2” is the most useful sentence on the page. Write the code down with the station name. If a venue gives only a compass gate, check which railway it means, because the JR west gate and a private line’s west gate at the same station may be different doorways.

With luggage or a pushchair, read the pictograms as well as the codes. Lifts and escalators serve some exits and not others, and the step-free route can surface across a junction from the door you wanted; staff at the window beside the gate can point to it, and operators publish station maps on their official sites. Exits that pass through a department store or office basement may be shuttered when the building closes, so confirm late-night routes with the operator rather than assuming the way you used at noon. A first arrival at Shinjuku or Umeda is easier outside the weekday morning and evening peaks, when you can stand still at a board without being carried past it.

The mistake to avoid is climbing the nearest stairs to sort it out at street level. Above ground, a wide road, a rail viaduct or an elevated expressway can sit between you and the right corner, and the crossing may be a long walk away. Underground, the yellow signs will carry you most of the distance dry and in something close to a straight line. Stop at the board, find the code, then climb.