A scanned slide showing a section of a wall-mounted Tokyo Metro map at a station (possibly Tokyo, judging by the dirty finger marks concentrated there). The lines of the Tokyo Metro are rendered in thick, bold colours that match pretty well with the current designations – yellow/gold for the Ginza Line, red for the Marunouchi Line, and grey/silver for the Hibiya Line. The competing Toei Subway’s Asakusa Line is not rendered in its modern pink/rose colour, but as a thinner navy blue line: it’s simply labelled as “Tokyo Municipal Sub Way” on the legend (see this image that shows more of the map) as it was the only Toei line in operation at the time.
The map itself is pretty chaotic, with lines headed in just about every direction imaginable, but it has a kind of naive charm to it. In a way, the neat ring of the Yamanote Line (passing across the horizontal middle of this image) defines the shape of the map: because it’s rendered as a rounded rectangle, all the subway lines have to take erratic paths to fit!
It is interesting to note that the station names are set in Futura Bold inside a bold ring of the line’s colour – something that has become a major part of the wayfinding system for the subways in Tokyo today. Each line is designated a letter – “G” for Ginza, for example – that is always shown as Futura Bold inside a thick ring of that line’s colour. It’s definitely very interesting to see the start of that evolution here.