Tokyo Metro's 'Find my Tokyo': ten years of selling doorways, not trains

Tokyo Metro's brand series, creative-directed by Michihiko Yanai since 2007, treats 9 lines and 180 stations as doorways into the city. The 2016 relaunch made celebrity 'challenge' videos — a star actually experiencing a neighborhood's shops, food and temples — the campaign's engine

Stop selling the train; sell the doorway: have a celebrity 'challenge' real micro-culture finds per station, so every exit becomes an episode of your own Tokyo

From 1 April 2016 the campaign focused one area per quarter (Monzen-nakacho–Kiba–Kiyosumi-shirakawa first), with Satomi Ishihara's challenge videos on in-train screens, 60-second web-only films at findmy.tokyo, a year of tie-up songs produced by Takeshi Kobayashi, and a '#あなたもチャレンジ' Twitter contest for riders' own 'find' attempts

The platform outlasted a decade: launched FY2015, restructured in 2016, and still running in 2025-26 — renewed with a new face (Kasumi Arimura) and new areas, having grown into a station-indexed discovery catalog with TV, in-train, web and UGC formats

Tokyo Metro's corporate ad series, under creative director Michihiko Yanai since 2007, has run through 'TOKYO HEART', 'TOKYO WONDER GROUND', 'We are the Tokyo Navigator' and finally 'Find my Tokyo.'. Its premise: the metro is not a faster way across town, it is the way into town — 9 lines and 180 stations, each exit opening onto a different slice of the city, presented through the eyes of actresses from Aoi Miyazaki and Yui Aragaki to Satomi Ishihara.

The 2016 relaunch made the premise a format. Starting 1 April 2016, the campaign focused on one area per three months — first Monzen-nakacho, Kiba and Kiyosumi-shirakawa — and built everything around 'challenges': show a spot, then have the image character actually experience it in short films, from eating taiyaki at a shop founded about 100 years earlier to trying zazen or peering into a one-million-yen kaleidoscope at Azabu-Juban. The films ran on in-train screens, TV and findmy.tokyo, alongside 60-second web-only versions updated monthly and tie-up songs produced by Takeshi Kobayashi.

The loop closed with the audience: the '#あなたもチャレンジ Find my Tokyo.' Twitter contest asked riders to post their own challenge attempts for prizes, proving the campaign's core claim — everyone has their own Tokyo — with real posts. The website grew into a searchable catalog of 'Find experiences' indexed by station and area, so the campaign was never a single film but an ever-extending map of things to do.

A decade later the engine still runs: in October 2025 Tokyo Metro relaunched Find my Tokyo with Kasumi Arimura as image character and new districts (Ueno as 'everything is art'), using the same challenge format on the same platform — where most ad campaigns end after one flight, this one became a template for a transit brand that sells the city instead of the carriage.

It sold the reason to ride, not the ride: by showing the micro-culture behind specific exits, it turned a transport network into a wishlist of places — demand lives in the doorway, not the line

The per-quarter format gave every neighborhood a whole campaign, so locals felt recognized and visitors received a real itinerary instead of a poster

The challenge videos were proof, not claims: watching a celebrity actually eat century-old taiyaki or sit zazen generates 'I want to try that' — exactly the intent a metro needs to convert

UGC closed the loop: when riders posted their own finds, the campaign's thesis was demonstrated by the audience itself, making the 'my Tokyo' concept self-evidently true

Infrastructure with many doors should advertise what is behind the doors: a per-station 'challenge' catalog turns a transport network into an endless content series — and a reason to ride

Tokyo Metro kept the platform running without interruption: the findmy.tokyo site and in-train challenge videos continued through the 2020s, and on 1 October 2025 the campaign relaunched with Kasumi Arimura, introducing areas such as Ueno through the same challenge engine. What began in FY2015 as a corporate ad film series has become one of the longest-running campaigns in Japanese advertising — a transit operator spending a decade marketing the city its trains unlock, rather than the trains themselves.