Bus stop (teiryujo)

A named point where buses pull up to let passengers on and off. It means the same as the everyday Japanese word basu-tei, and a single stop can contain several boarding points, split by direction and by route.

What a teiryujo is

A teiryujo is a named point where a bus pulls up to let passengers on and off. It carries the same meaning as basu-tei, the word people use in everyday conversation, while teiryujo is the term that appears in formal settings such as timetables and onboard announcements. Stops are named after stations and neighborhoods, in patterns like "[name] Sta." for a stop in front of a station or "[name]-Nichōme" for a numbered district, and route maps and timetables are built up with the stop name as their unit.

Stop names sometimes reflect the history of the ground they stand on. All over the city there are cases where a facility that vanished long ago, or an old district name, survives in the name of a stop, so simply reading down the names gives you a glimpse of how a place came to be. The stop nearest your destination may well have an unexpected name, so when a search by place name turns up nothing, checking the position on a map is the sure way.

A stop name is the name of a cluster of positions

The point worth knowing is that a stop name refers not to a single pole but to a cluster of positions. Even at one stop called "[name] Sta.", the boarding points for the inbound direction, the outbound direction and the individual routes are often scattered across both sides of the road or around different corners of a station plaza.

Know that, and you get into the habit of asking one further question after your app or the timetable tells you to "board at [name] Sta.": which boarding point? That small extra step heads off almost every case of waiting at the stop for the opposite direction, or of standing there puzzled as a bus seems to sail straight past you. Along major arterial roads in particular, the two directions face each other across a pedestrian crossing, so allow for the time it takes to cross and move over early to be safe. For a fuller guide to finding them, see our article on how to find bus stops and boarding points.

Telling stops, boarding points and poles apart

The three words point to slightly different things. A teiryujo is the named cluster of positions, a boarding point is the spot within it where you actually wait for the bus, and a hyochu is the information pole standing at that boarding point. The relationship comes out in a sentence like "the timetable is posted on the pole at boarding point 2 of [name] Sta. stop". Keep the distinction in mind as you read directions, and you will take in exactly what they say.