News Dead passenger travels 12 hours and 650km around Kanto

This story is a bit bizarre: a passenger who travelled on the Shonan Shinjuku Line passed away and was only found after the train pulled into Odawara Station after its last haul.

When a JR East train arrived at Odawara Station on 11 May around 19:35, a station worker noticed a man sitting motionless in a two-person bench seat, even though everyone else had disembarked. The train was set to head to the depot for the night but couldn't do so with a passenger still onboard. The worker called out to the man but received no response. Upon closer inspection, the man was completely still and not breathing. The worker checked for a pulse and found none. Attempts to resuscitate him with a defibrillator were unsuccessful, as the man was already dead. The man had died while on the train, unnoticed by other passengers who likely thought he was sleeping. Shockingly, he had been on the train for nearly 12 hours, travelling back and forth on the line after his death.

A subsequent investigation revealed that the man boarded the Shonan Shinjuku line train at Shibuya Station in Tokyo at 8:02 AM. The train travelled north to Utsunomiya Station in Tochigi Prefecture, then switched to the Ueno Tokyo Line, heading south to Hiratsuka Station in Kanagawa Prefecture. This round trip took about three hours. The train then returned to Utsunomiya and made another trip to Hiratsuka, ending in Odawara. The man spent 11 hours and 32 minutes on the train, covering 652.7 kilometres. Police ruled out foul play, noting no visible injuries and that the man likely appeared to be sleeping.

It's not that surprising. There are so many people sleeping on the train in Japan, and some quite deeply, that it would be easy to assume he was just sleeping.

Maciamo said:

It's not that surprising. There are so many people sleeping on the train in Japan, and some quite deeply, that it would be easy to assume he was just sleeping.

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It's just scary to think how many people must have sat next to a corpse.

thomas said:

It's just scary to think how many people must have sat next to a corpse.

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Probably not many. He was on a two-person seat and the train was probably not super crowded although he passed through Tokyo station twice so I suppose there is some possibility.

Asahi has some more information on the case.

Live each day as if it were your last, and never leave your home in anger.

The widow said she saw her husband off at the door every day, believing each farewell could be their last moment together in this disaster-prone country. However, she was too sick to see him off on May 11. She heard him say, "I am going," at 7:40 a.m. The wife sent her husband a message on the Line app at 8:36 a.m. But the post remained unread. The man was supposed to meet a friend at 10 a.m. near Oyama Station in Tochigi Prefecture. He didn't make it to the meeting place after the train arrived around 9:30 a.m. The widow heard from her father-in-law shortly after noon that her husband did not show up for the meeting. She repeatedly tried to phone him through Line. He never answered. She considered calling the police but then felt it might be inappropriate to bother them just because she couldn't get in touch with her spouse. When night came, Kanagawa prefectural police contacted her. She was shocked by his death because he appeared to be in good health. She regretted failing to see him off that morning.

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