The History and “Grand Plan” Behind Tokyo Monorail: Japan’s First Full-Scale Urban Transportation Monorail

“Tokyo Monorail” appeared as a full-fledged urban transportation monorail. Why was the straddle-type monorail, now representative of Japan, built here? I actually had a bigger plan.

Birth of Japan’s first full-scale urban monorail

In Japan, there are 8 monorail operators with a total length of 114.4km, making Japan the largest monorail country in the world. Among them, the Tokyo Monorail, which connects central Tokyo and Haneda Airport, is particularly popular. In fact, this line had many dramas unfolding behind the scenes along with the “grand plan” until it opened in 1964.

The monorail has a long history, and the oldest line in operation dates back to 1901 when the suspended monorail “Wuppertal Air Railway” opened in Wuppertal, western Germany. Inspired by this, in 1914 (Taisho 3) in Japan, a company called Elevated Single Track applied for a monorail connecting Ueno and Asakusa using the same “Eugen-Langen method” as the Wuppertal Sky Railway. In 1957 (Showa 32), the Tokyo Metropolitan Government opened Japan’s first monorail “Ueno Zoo Monorail” in this “oldest style”.

Monorails became popular in the 1950s after the development of the straddle-type monorail “Alweg type”, which runs on concrete girders with rubber tires, in West Germany. While the Eugen-Langen system used railway rails, the girders were cheap to build, the rubber tires were resistant to steep slopes, and they were quiet. It attracted attention as a next-generation urban transportation system.

Alveg is an acronym for its inventor, Swedish businessman Axel Lennart Wenner Gren. In the Taisho era, Venner Gren visited Japan when he traveled around the world on a yacht, and liked the Imperial Hotel where he stayed, so much so that he took a Japanese boy home with him. After the war, Venner Glenn sent a letter to Tetsuzo Inumaru, the president of the Imperial Hotel, to promote the monorail.

Inumaru took over Yoshisuke Ayukawa, the founder of Nissan Concern, which had Nissan Motor Co. and Hitachi Ltd. under its umbrella, and Hitachi obtained an Alvegue-style license and entered the monorail business.

Inumaru had an awareness of the problems unique to a hotel manager. In the 1950s, European and American airlines started flying to Haneda Airport one after another, and the number of foreigners entering the country was increasing. However, the road traffic is so bad that it takes 1.5 to 2 hours to travel about 13km from Haneda Airport to the Imperial Hotel in Shimbashi. It seems that there was an angry voice that the pamphlet said “40 minutes” was a lie.

In addition, the number of Japanese people using airplanes will increase in the future, and the number of users of Haneda Airport is expected to increase due to the fact that the Tokyo Olympics will be held. A new route between airports.”