Everybody takes the train in Japan, it seems.

The Odakyu Odawara Line connects Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station, the busiest rail station in the world, with suburbs and outlying cities to the southwest. So on any given weekday morning, you can expect to see a lot of people on its northbound train commuting to work or school in the big city.

And if you happened to be on one particular train on Thursday morning, you’d have seen a dog too, and with its owner nowhere in sight.

▼ Make sure you watch until the CG reenactment.

“We have received word that there is a dog on the train” the conductor announced over the P.A. system of a train stopped at Tsurumaki Onsen Station a little before 7:30 a.m. Not that anyone in the same car as the pooch needed to be told, as they could hear it growling at the station employees who were trying to remove it from the vehicle.

Apparently the dog had slipped through a gap in the fence between the station and the street, and when a staff member saw it running around on the platform, he tried to chase it down. As the surreally hilarious CG reenactment in the above video shows, though, the dog wasn’t in the mood to be caught, and it just so happened that a train had come to a stop and its doors were open to let passengers get on or off. So the dog hopped right on, leading to a standstill as workers tried to coax it to leave and the dog growled back at them.

After a nine-minute battle of wits and wills, a station worker was able to grab the dog’s collar and carry it off the train, earning a round of applause for resolving the situation without any harm coming to the animals or passengers, although one worker did sustain bites to his thumb and index fingers.

For the record, Odakyu does allow dogs onboard, but they have to be 70 centimeters (27.6 inches) or less in length and inside a carrier. Oh, and also accompanied by a human. That’s the really important part.

And speaking of the dog’s collar, that was a tipoff that the animal wasn’t a stray. A worker took the dog the local police box, and shortly before that an elderly man who lives in the neighborhood had gone to a different police box to report that he’d been walking his dog when the leash detached from its collar and it ran off. Thankfully, the man and his pet have been reunited, though we can’t help but wonder if just maybe the dog was trying to go into downtown for a meeting with the tanuki that showed up at Shinjuku Station the other day.

Source: FNN Prime Online, Asashi Shimbun Digital, Odakyu
Top image: Wikipedia/MaedaAkihiko
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