Bus Stops Enjoyed for Their Names - From a Hard-to-Read Quiz to the 45 Stops That Lose You at Shiritori

Bus stop names make good reading

The Toei Bus network has around 1,674 stops, and every single one carries a name. Normally we glance at those names only to check where a bus is going, but gather them all together and they turn into a quiz, an illustrated catalog, even a winning strategy at shiritori. This article takes its time over the names of bus stops and nothing else. Every reading follows the official furigana published by the Bureau of Transportation, including the cases where the reading in general use differs from the official one.

Hard-to-read stop quiz: how many can you get?

Let us start with a test of skill. Can you read the stop names below? Tap (or click) each question to open the answer, which is given in romanized form with the kana reading in parentheses.

The shortest name, and the longest

Like 雷 in the final question, the stops with a name just one character long are 岸・峰・雷, three in all, and every one of them is in the Ome area. Writing 雷 takes an instant, yet its reading, Ikazuchi, runs to four sounds. Shortest on paper and unexpectedly long out loud, which is exactly what makes it such a good name.

At the other extreme, the longest name has 16 characters: 「都立産業技術高専品川キャンパス前」, the stop for the Shinagawa campus of the Tokyo Metropolitan College of Industrial Technology. Fitting all of that onto the post at the stop cannot be easy. Look at how the lengths are distributed and the commonest names run to about five to seven characters, which shows that bus stop names have a length that simply feels right.

An animal catalog of names: 14 horses, and not one dog or cat

Count the animal characters that appear in stop names and the horse comes first, with the top of the table reading 馬 14・亀 13・鹿 6 (horse, turtle, deer). Yet the animals that ought to be closest to daily life, 犬・猫・狸・狐・兎・鼠・鶏 (dog, cat, tanuki, fox, rabbit, mouse and chicken), all score zero. Place names are products of history, so what survives is not the animals of the household but the ones that worked for a living, such as the horse and the ox, and the ones that bring good fortune, such as the turtle and the crane.

Among characters for colors, 青 37・白 22・赤 12 (blue, white, red) lead the way, while yellow, for whatever reason, appears 0 times. In the weather department, 晴 (fine) turns up at 10 stops, and rain manages 0. Spread out on the map of the Toei Bus network, then, is a world with no dogs, no cats and no rain.

The 45 stops that lose you the game of shiritori

45 stops have readings that end in ん (n), among them なぎさニュータウン・上野公園・二天門・京葉交差点・元八幡, and on it goes. In shiritori, the Japanese chain game in which each word has to start with the last kana of the word before it, saying a word ending in ん loses you the game on the spot. Play a round limited to bus stop names and these 45 are the ones that finish you off.

The other end of the syllabary has gaps in it. Not one stop name begins with へ・る・を・ん. Three more kana have exactly one stop each: only 抜弁天 (Nukebenten) begins with 「ぬ」, only 楽水橋 (らくすいばし) begins with 「ら」, only 鈴法寺跡 (Reihōji-Ato) begins with 「れ」. In a shiritori played with bus stop names, those three are your real trump cards.

The same name, read two different ways

Written identically, yet read as something else entirely. The prime example is 新宿一丁目. The stop in Shinjuku Ward is Shinjuku-Itchōme, while the stop in Katsushika Ward is Niijuku-Itchōme. The same characters on the sign carry different readings in the west and the east of Tokyo.

The reverse happens too: written differently, read the same. 江南中学校前 and 港南中学校前 are both read Kōnan-Chūgakkō, and they are about 14 km apart, with identical names in English as well. Mishear one for the other over the phone or in conversation and you will end up somewhere completely different. Checking your destination together with the route number is the safe habit.

The chōme pyramid: only two stops reach 9-chōme

Stops whose names include a chōme, the numbered block within a district, come to 524 in all. Count them by block number and they form a tidy pyramid, with 1-chōme the most numerous at 129 stops and the totals falling away neatly as the numbers rise.

At the summit, 9-chōme is reached by only two stops, 亀戸九丁目と東葛西九丁目. No stop is named 10-chōme at all. What is the highest chōme in your own neighborhood?

On the subject of how names are put together, 502 stops end in 前 (mae, in front of), roughly three in every ten. One of them, in Adachi Ward, never says what it stands in front of: its name is simply 公園前, Kōen-Mae, in front of the park.

Notice the names and the bus ride gets better

The unreadable 大下, the single-character 雷, an animal catalog with no dogs or cats, the 45 certain defeats at shiritori, and the two-way battle for the top of the chōme pyramid. Names alone give you all of this to play with, and that is the world of roughly 1,700 bus stops.

If a stop has caught your interest, search for its name on Busdoko. The place will appear on the map, together with the buses running near it right now.

The contents of this article are based on our own analysis of stop names and their official furigana as of August 2026.