As a regular commuter on Tokyo’s vast underground network, I’ve always been amazed at the seemingly never ending number of passengers getting on and off at any particular station at any particular time of day. Even those seemingly inconspicuous ones that deceptively make you think would be nice and quiet, regularly regurgitate hordes of human mass. After coming across a post on twitter showing a 1927 hand-drawn passenger density map for the underground network in Berlin, I immediately wondered what a similar map would look like for the vastly more immense Tokyo Metro system. After a quick, fruitless search online (apart from one being shown to me that was drawn in the 1950’s) I took it upon myself to make my own. Using data found on the official Metro website, I was able to create an infographic/illustration depicting the daily number of passengers (per thousand) using the layout of the map itself. Math isn’t my strong point so the final to-scale version is quite large, the diameter of the circles equate to 0.25mm = 1000 passengers. Unfortunately the only information I could find at the time applied to Metro stations only, not Toei, but this is something I plan to rectify in the near future. I always intended the piece to be an abstract illustration rather than an informative visualization; hence the station names are missing. In fact, an earlier version even had the lines themselves removed, but they were added back in as I ultimately liked the circuit board look they gave it. The final version with a legend was added for those unfamiliar with the Tokyo Metro system and as a compromise to prevent it becoming too abstract.