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Station of despair: What to do if you get stuck at the end of Tokyo’s Chuo Rapid Line

Casey Baseel Dec 21, 2024
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More people spend the night in Otsuki than want to spend the night there.

In Japan, a handful of train stations are known as zetsubo no eki, or “stations of despair.” There’s nothing wrong with these stations themselves, though, and the towns they’re in aren’t dirty, dangerous, or otherwise anything to fear. So why the abandon-all-hope designation? Because they’re places where some people get stuck having to spend the night after the last train, but nobody really wants to.

To qualify as a station of despair, a station has to be the last stop on its line, in a remote area, but also on a line that has a major population center and entertainment district somewhere. Basically, if there’s a neighborhood where people are getting drunk, then trying to take the train line home but falling asleep and missing their stop, only to wake up at the end of the line in the middle of nowhere with no way to get home until the next morning, then that’s a station of despair.

For the Tokyo area, one of the more infamous stations of despair is Otsuki Station, in Yamanashi Prefecture. Otsuki is the last stop of the Chuo Line (Rapid), which starts in the east at Tokyo Station and runs through downtown drinking and dining districts such as Shinjuku, Ochanomizu, and Kichijoji before heading out into the suburbs west of downtown, and then into the rural environs of Yamanashi.

▼ From Tokyo Station to Otsuki Station takes a little less than two hours.

With Christmas parties and New Year’s celebrations coming up, our Japanese-language reporter Ahiruneko figures there’s a pretty good chance he might accidentally end up in Otsuki one of these nights, so to prepare for that eventuality he decided to go to Otsuki Station on purpose to see what the area is like late at night, arriving at about 9:40 p.m.

▼ While he didn’t get drunk before getting on the train, he did try to catch some Zs along the way, for a more realistic simulation.

Arriving at Otsuki, Ahiruneko stepped off the train and onto the platform, and his immediate thought was “Oh geeeeezzzz is it cold!”

Otsuki is closer to Mt. Fuji than it is to downtown Tokyo, and the increased elevation means much lower temperatures in winter, particularly after sundown. So while dressing warm is always a good idea when going out at this time of year, it’s especially important if you think you might end up at this station of despair.

▼ As another sign that you’re far from the big city, Otsuki Station has a woody, log cabin-type aesthetic going on.

Immediately wanting to get out of the cold, Ahiruneko has happy to spot a cozy-looking waiting room inside the station.

Inside are tables, benches, local tourism information, and a row of gacha capsule toy machines.

However, the waiting room is only open until midnight, so holing up there until the trains start running again in the morning isn’t an option if you’ve missed the last train home for the night. So it was time for Ahiruneko to hit the streets of late-night Otsuki, where he found…

…not a whole lot that was open.

Sure, Otsuki might be on the same train line as the bars and clubs of Shinjuku, where the party goes all-night long each and every night. In Otsuki, though, there’s a much stronger early-to-bed, early-to-rise sort of vibe.

Yeah, there are izakaya (pubs), but they tend to close earlier than they do in the big cities. The branch of chain Shoya (庄屋) near the station is never open past 11:30 p.m., and on some nights closes as early as 10, and the station area’s Uotami (魚民) closes at midnight, so neither one will work if you’re looking for a place to nurse a drink until the morning trains.

Since izakaya were out, Ahiruneko started looking for a 24-hour convenience store with an eat-in corner where he could kill time. Once again, though, convenience stores are fewer and farther between in Otsuki than the big city. Now freezing from the cold, Ahiruneko felt his spirits pick up when he spotted the familiar red-and-yellow signage of a Daily Yamazaki convenience store…

…only to have his heart broken when he found out that the space is actually occupied by a branch of mini gym Chocozap.

▼ The corner location and large windows really do make it look like this place was originally a convenience store, though.

Luckily, Ahiruneko was able to stumble across an actual convenience store when he found a Lawson branch.

▼ Here’s a map of the route to Lawson from Otsuki Station, so that you don’t have to rely on luck when you’re already unlucky enough to have ended up at a station of despair.

As further proof of how quiet Otsuki is at night, the Lawson’s parking lot was full of cars driven by people who needed to take a break from driving but had no other place to do it.

This Lawson does have an eat-in-counter, but with only three seats, you’re going to need to keep your fingers crossed if you’re hoping for a spot to camp out at until morning.

There is another convenience store close to the station, a 7-Eleven, but unfortunately without any sort of eat-in space. It is a pretty big store, though, so you can at least warm yourself up while browsing the aisles for a bit, and stock up on supplies for when you have to head back out into the night.

▼ Walking route from Otsuki Station to 7-Eleven

Probably the best option, without springing for a full-on hotel, that Ahiruneko came across was a branch of Big Echo.

▼ ビッグエコー = Big Echo

Big Echo is a karaoke parlor chain. Some of its more rural branches, instead of being tucked away inside a mixed-use commercial building, are instead little private karaoke shacks on the side of the road, and the ones in Otsuki are open all night, so you can rent one and just crash on its sofa without singing anything.

▼ Otsuki Station to Big Echo

Finally, if you’re resigned to just getting a hotel room in Otsuki while you wait for the train, there actually is a very large branch of budget hotel Toyoko Inn about a 10-minute walk from Otsuki Station, on the opposite side of the tracks from the places we’ve shown so far in this article.

Opened in 2022, the Otsuki Toyoko Inn is almost comically big, considering that the town itself only has about 20,000 people and isn’t a top-tier tourism destination. Rumor has it that Toyoko Inn built this branch at least in part to capitalize on potential business generated by the nearby station of despair.

We don’t have access to Toyoko Inn’s booking records, but if that rumor is true, it would imply that there’s high demand for its rooms during celebratory seasons like winter holidays, though, so it might be hard to find a vacancy at this time of year, and the prices might be inflated too.

In a magnanimous show of mercy, our boss didn’t actually make Ahiruneko spend the night on the streets of Otsuki, and his simulation/exploration was timed so that he’d still be able to catch a train home, though it wasn’t until he was back in his kitchen and scarfing down a bowl of piping hot noodles that he finally got the severe chill of the Otsuki night air out of his system.

All of which is to say that the best plan is to check your return train schedule before you hit the bars, drink within your limits, and avoid getting stuck at a station of despair this holiday season. If you do, though, hopefully the options Ahiruneko found will help get you through the night.

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