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Fuyuko is buying a ticket for the subway. It's a very straightforward and logical procedure! Actually, this machine doesn't issue individual tickets but rather prepaid cards good for a number of trips. The ticket machine was a bit more comprehensible. A typical subway ride (one way) costs about ¥200 ($1.60) or more, depending on the distance.
These are the gates to the subway platforms. You pick an aisle to enter through (which hopefully someone from the other side hasn't picked to exit from at the exact same moment), and feed your ticket/card into the machine. It will stamp your ticket with the time and location of entry, and spit it out of its other end so that you can snatch it as you walk past. If the ticket is not valid for some reason, the little black gates you see in the picture will close just one instant before you try to walk past, and speaking from experience, walking full-tilt into those is not fun.
This isn't a particularly crowded subway train, and I can't think of anything interesting or notable to point out here. So getting back to the ticketing system: when you exit at your destination station, you'll walk through the ticket gates from the opposite side, and if you bought a one-ride ticket the machine will swallow the ticket. But what do these machines do for midnight snacks? They must get hungry, since the trains only run until midnight. I don't know what time subways begin service in the morning, and it doesn't matter either, as I would never get up that early anyway.
This is a "bullet train" arriving at the station. I put that in quotes because that's how it appears in every reference I recall seeing in Japan. Officially it's called a Shinkansen (the translation of which doesn't contain either of the words "bullet" or "train"), and there are different classes of Shinkansen. This one is (as of this writing) the fastest, the "Nozomi 500" line, and it is run as an express between Kyoto and Tokyo. The ride is very smooth and quiet, and looking out the window you don't immediately realize how fast you are going. Especially when the train is still parked in the station. See, this train is so fast that even when it's standing still, it's traveling at 180 MPH (300 km/h). (Well... relative to a person on another Shinkansen going by at full speed in the opposite direction.)
The "green cars" on trains in Japan are more expensive, but nicer. Servers come by with carts of food and drinks, which if you want you have to pay for. (Hey, what gives you the idea that anyone would conceivably push a card around offering the passengers free snacks and drinks??) It would have been interesting if the green cars were painted completely green inside (and housed lots of plants, for extra oxygen, hehe) but in case you were wondering, that's not the case.
I would have taken a picture of the train leaving out of the other end of the station to complete the series, but had to get on it, making that a bit of an impossibility.
I took this picture out the window of the train. Superman is flying alongside of us, see him in his red and blue cape, and externally-worn underwear? No? Um, well I guess he just wasn't fast enough to keep up...
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