“…There is now a substantial body of scholarship that has rescued commuting from being understood solely as an isolating and enervating urban experience, to capture the wide array of social meanings that accrue to public transport in cities (Bissell, 2018; Chowdhury, 2021; Hansen, 2017; Shaw and Sidaway, 2011). Alongside this cluster of writings that has recuperated the complex social subjectivities entailed in shared movement through urban space, anthropologies of traffic in the non-West have interpreted road congestion as narratives of paralysis and relief in Jakarta (Lee, 2015), production of everyday moralities in the navigation of traffic in Istanbul (Nuhrat, 2020), the bottleneck as a metonym for shrinking opportunities of urban life in Dakar (Melly, 2017), the links between governance of traffic snarls and deepening urban divides in Beirut (Monroe, 2016) and the politics underpinning infrastructural projects to decongest roads in Bangalore (Gopakumar, 2015). In the analyses we offer of the micropolitics of commuter crowds in Tokyo, we shift emphasis from vehicular congestion to compression of commuters in shared transport and focus as much on the infrastructural body of the train carriage and rail station as on the passenger-body.…”