THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING

Any Odakyū station or train-train-window opens a mosaic of blue to you. It is a colour that weaves into the very texture of Japanese life – sky or river reflection to be sure, but also things, objects, materials. Nothing if not one of the Line's primary colours. Wallace Stevens's poem, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, supplies the perfect conjugation.

• 1. Almost all buildings under construction or being repaired are covered in blue tarpaulin, It is as though it were skin. Currently under blue are a bank near Kyodo, a post office near Seijo, road work near Shin-Yurigaōka, and various housing complexes alongside the track (of the kind first built in the 1950s and known as danchi).

• 2. Crossing the Tamagawa Bridge in summer, weekends especially, the eye alights on the picnickers – seated on or standing by their blue tarpaulin spreads. Almost invariably there is a hibachi, a round or square iron grill, with chicken or meat sizzling.

• 3. Odakyū Line carriages, Local or Express, have their own horizontal blue strip mid-position against the rest in cream or silver. They could easily serve as a kind of railway bar-code, the type seen on books or store items. Each, too, has the painted-on white Odakyū logo.

• 4. No station would be fully dressed if it did not have a drinks machine, SUNTORY (which has Tommy Lee Jones sponsoring BOSS coffee), ITO EN, POKKA, DYDO, YAKULT, KIRIN and ASAHI among others. The last, in the shape of an upturned cereal-packet, is a metal shell with library shelves of vitamin drinks, sodas, water, tea and coffee. And painted in blue. Drinks blue.

• 5. Approach a ticket gate on the Odakyū and you have four features in blue: a blue square as decoration, a blue surround on the IC small screen where the ticket is placed, a pair of blue rubberized turnstile-panels that snap open when you use your ticket and a white-on-blue circle with the instruction in Japanese and English ‘Please walk slowly’. Add to these the blue ticket-machines themselves.