Disaster Report: MIRACLE TRAIN - WELCOME TO THE OEDO LINE

 Japan is famous worldwide for its ability to anthropomorphize anything for the sake of promotion.  People have written literal books on the subject, and the variety and specificity of their many, MANY mascots is a common subject of lighthearted ridicule online.  Not even anime is safe from this  phenomenon.  They’ve made anime about headphone mascots, pop cans, and the nations of the world, just to name a few.  There’s only one series that dares to give that sort of treatment to a Tokyo train line, though: 2009’s Miracle Train: Welcome to the Oedo Line.

The Toei Oedo Line was (at the time) a relatively recent addition to Tokyo’s subway lines.  It runs in a loop through central Tokyo with a side path into the Nerima district.  Thanks to its linear motor system, it’s smaller and more environmentally friendly than older subways.  It was also the most expensive subway project in Japanese history, so it’s not surprising that the Tokyo Metro would be looking for new and unconventional ways to promote its use and make some money to pay down its construction costs.  It also just so happened that the 2000s were a decade when both otome games and fujoshi culture were flourishing, a market full of working women with loads of disposable cash to spend on both public transportation and character goods featuring cute anime boys.  So why not combine the two for maximum profit?

Miracle Train came about in 2009 as part of a fast-paced multi-media campaign.  Within six months of its debut, there was a website, at least two different web manga and web novels.  The anime would follow shortly, airing in the fall of 2009.  It was produced by Yumeta Company, an animation studio mostly known at the time for producing mediocre adaptations of otome properties such as Haruka: Beyond the Stream of Time and the Angelique series.  Most of the staff involved were unremarkable, save for the director.   The show was directed by Kenichi Kasai, who was then making a name for himself as a director with quirky series like Honey and Clover and Nodame Cantabile and would continue to do so well into the 2010s.  I suspect that he was the one who decided to take this show and its blandly safe premise down a slightly different path.

The first half of Miracle Train follows a fairly rote formula.  Some young woman has a problem.  Maybe she’s lost her dog, or wants to quit their job, or just improve their luck – the reason doesn’t matter.  It will eventually lead her to the titular Miracle Train, a mystical place where a handful of Oedo Line stations take on the form of generically handsome ikemen (or “ekimen,” as the campaign dubbed them).  Along with their mysterious conductor, the tiny, squeaky guide girl Akari, and a talking miniature shiba, they uncover the emotional root of their passenger's problem through a combination of gentle encouragement, the occasional field trip, and random bits of trivia about the rules of the Oedo Line and the districts each station represents.  The show makes a point to highlight that last part with spangly pink pop-up windows, lest the viewer miss this vital information.

The station boys themselves fall into some of standard otome character archetypes, distinguished at most by some silly quirk (like being obsessed with historical dramas or making monjayaki) and the butler-esque costumes that reinforce the inherent fantasy in their servicing fair young women.  In fairness, the men of Miracle Train were never meant to be complex characters.  They’re merely a set of pretty, pointy-chinned faces attached to a popular seiyuu’s voice, ready to turn something as unsexy as a subway station into something that can be slapped onto a railcar or some promotional tchotchke ready to advertise a consumer’s boy of choice.  Character nuance would simply get in the way of making them broadly marketable.

After six episodes of safe pandering and gentle drama, the narrative of Miracle Train starts to come off the rails and that’s when things start to get interesting.  The formula starts to break down a little.  The station boys start to encounter strange phenomenon and question the very purpose of their existence.  There’s more variety in their clientele and they start to have more adventures outside of the train.  Eventually it culminates in a mystery involving Akari, a time loop, and a half-finished station that delivered in a fashion that’s both deadly serious and way too convoluted for its own good. 

Initially I wondered if Kasai and company had gotten away with such a narrative swerve on the sly, taking advantage of poor ratings and the growing disinterest of the producers to do whatever they wanted.  Upon rewatch, I realized that from the start there's a lot of good-natured lampshading of the show's premise scattered throughout the first half.  This means that the production staff were likely given creative leeway from the start and that the show’s build-up and breakdown of the formula is purposeful.  Kasai was never going to turn this premise into a masterpiece, but he was given enough liberty to turn this glorified commercial into something a little more strange and a lot more entertaining than it has any right to be.

Miracle Train’s run on TV Tokyo was met with little fanfare, and after its conclusion the entire promotion started to wind down.  Like a lot of fujoshi-friendly properties, it lingered on for a while through the release of audio dramas, stage shows, and a trickle of new merchandise that continues to this day (according to the show’s website, which is still active).  The show itself quickly faded into obscurity in Japan, save for the time it was licensed by a then up-and-coming streaming site called Crunchyroll.  It would linger on the site for twelve years, buried deep in its library, viewed only by a curious handful.  I wouldn’t have known about it myself if not for the fact that I had to watch and discuss it for a friend’s podcast in 2015. 

By the time you read this, Miracle Train will already be gone from Crunchyroll.  If they hadn’t made an announcement about its departure, I doubt anyone would have noticed.  It's almost certain to never be license rescued.  Why would any sensible company pay for a 13-episode advertisement from 2009 for a service most of its audience will never use?  Yet those are the very reasons that I wanted to write this particular Disaster Report.  Miracle Train is an artifact of a very particular time and place in anime history that has long since passed.  There are few physical or digital traces of it left, and without a legal stream anywhere it will likely fade so far into obscurity that it will be like it never existed.  As a former archaeology student, I couldn't let that stand.  I felt compelled to make a record of it for posterity so that future weebs would know about it.  Let this essay stand as an epitaph for Miracle Train, the little train show that could.