What a Bus Fan Is
A bus fan — also called a bus maniac, or in English-language usage a bus spotter — is an enthusiast who takes up buses as a hobby. The subject matter runs across the whole field: route buses, highway coaches, charter buses, shuttle buses, privately owned buses. Anything that touches buses is fair game.
The hobby sits close to railfanning, since both take everyday public transport as their object, and the resemblance is strongest in the route-bus sector. At the same time, a bus is a form of automobile, so bus fandom is also a genre within car enthusiasm, and its vocabulary borrows heavily from automotive terms. Because the same diesel manufacturers build both, the overlap with truck-spotting is particularly deep. The result is a pursuit that carries traits of both railfanning and car fandom while fitting neatly into neither.
The Scope of the Term
Japanese sources name the practitioners バスファン (basu fan) and バスマニア (basu mania), with the English equivalents given as bus spotter and bus fan. The label covers people whose interest lies in vehicles, in routes, in stops and terminals, in memorabilia, in recordings, in models, or in actually driving and owning buses — categories that in practice overlap constantly, since a single enthusiast may photograph a fleet by day, chase a discontinued route on a day off, and keep a shelf of die-cast models at home.
The First Bus Research Group
On an April day in 1976, a group of enthusiasts formed the Japan Bus Research Society, the country’s first bus hobby organization. Two months later, in June, it launched a members’ journal titled Bus Fan, copies of which reached non-members through a handful of miniature-car shops. Splits and mergers followed; today the society is dormant.
The founding of the Japan Bus Friends Association came in 1980. Between those two dates, bus fans in Japan had acquired something they had previously done without: institutions of their own.
Buses in Railfan Publications
Evidence that individuals were photographing buses for pleasure long predates any organization. Buses had been ordinary public transport from the beginning, as familiar as trains, and rail enthusiasts treated them as a subsidiary interest.
The Keikyu Train Fan Club, formed on June 1, 1977, ran bus information in its monthly bulletin Keikyu Fan, issued on the fifth of each month, from the years when Keikyu Bus was still operated directly by Keikyu Electric Railway. Its November 5, 1986 issue covered the Mitsubishi Fuso Aero Star prototype non-step bus, car H5670, a P-MP218M modification, delivered to the Keikyu Bus Haneda depot — announced as the first non-step bus in the Kanto region.
Then came Railway Journal, a magazine that ranged well beyond railways into public transport generally. Its November 1980 issue, number 165, ran a feature titled “Railways and Automobiles.” Inside it was writing on long-distance buses, including a passage on bus fandom by Yoshio Wada, later head of Port Publishing and editor-in-chief of Busrama International. The same issue carried a round-table discussion, “Coexistence Is How Railways and Buses Survive,” and articles spanning both the trains and the buses of Nagano Electric Railway.
From 1984, Railway Journal ran a standing bus section called “BUS CORNER,” typically three pages, built from detailed on-the-ground reporting. Its editor was Fumihiko Suzuki, himself a member of the Japan Bus Friends Association; he wrote on buses for many publications and produced books on the subject.
1985 brought Bus Media, the first magazine devoted specifically to the bus hobby, published in a doujinshi-style format and sold at bookstores including Shosen Grande. In an era when neither the internet nor, for most people, personal-computer networks existed, its pages carried the exchanges between bus fans that would later move online.
April 1986 saw the founding of the Bus Japan Publishing Association, now BJ Editors, and with it the quarterly Bus Japan. The magazine ceased publication in 1992. From 1993 the group issued the Bus Japan Handbook Series in book form, a series still in print.
Television arrived at the same subject by a different road. TBS’s Soko ga Shiritai ran “Japan’s Local Route Buses, Station by Station,” a series segment broadcast from 1985, and it became a popular program — the first of the route-bus travel shows that later successors such as “Local Route Bus Relay Travel” would follow. A book followed the broadcast, and both the program and the volume pointed viewers toward hobbyist trivia about the vehicles.
Busrama International and After
Yoshio Wada left Motor Vehicle, a commercial-vehicle magazine, and founded Port Publishing independently in 1990. That same year it launched Busrama International, still the oldest bus magazine in current publication.
A book review in Busrama International issue 57, the January 2000 number, records Wada’s phrase for the period: “the twenty years in which Japan’s bus fan base obtained citizenship.” The reading offered there is that bus fans gained standing from the 1980s onward. Useful information for the hobby, then, became broadly available through print and broadcast mainly from that decade.
Kodansha’s car magazine Best Car published The BUS and The Route Bus in 2001 as special issues. These grew into Bus Magazine, a regularly published title. More bus hobby magazines followed, and some remain in print.
Railfans Who Crossed Over
Some rail fans become bus fans. Busrama International issue 13, page 46, describes a person who turned toward buses in reaction to the crowds of casual fans the SL boom brought into rail enthusiasm. Naoki Tanemura, writing in the “Railway Review” column of Railway Journal, analyzed the shift as passion that had once pointed at local rail lines turning instead toward local buses. Boredom with standardized railways, or distaste for knowledge contests among enthusiasts, moves some people in the same direction.
Tanemura and Shunzo Miyawaki, both writers rooted in railways, ran essays on local buses in magazines, collected as To the Terminus of the Local Bus, from Nihon Kotsu Kosha Publishing, and Bus Travel: Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter, from Chuo Shoin. Travel writing with buses as its central subject was multiplying.
Tanemura’s contributions went beyond magazines. The Bus Japan Handbook Series carried his travel pieces: “Got On and Got Off the Tomei Liner” in Bus Japan Handbook 14: JR Tokai Bus, and “Lake Hamana Circuit Bus Journey” in Bus Japan New Handbook 40: Entetsu Railway.
With the fan population growing, bus operators began holding events aimed at bus fans.
Bus Companies Founded by Fans
The 2000s produced something new: bus fans starting bus companies themselves.
Busway, in Kiyose, Tokyo, was founded by drivers from a major operator who had met through Bus Media. Galaxy Express, in Higashimurayama in the northern Tama area of Tokyo, was founded by a local bus fan arriving from an unrelated industry, and entered scheduled bus operation by contract to run community buses. Kaifu Kanko in Tokushima Prefecture, likewise established by a driver who was a bus fan, drew favorable notice for the luxury-specification highway coaches it put into service.
Z Staff, a staffing company in Komaki, Aichi Prefecture, had a president who privately owned a Volvo Asteroe; the company entered charter bus operation under the trade name Owari Nobunaga Kanko Bus, an extension of that hobby. Kokusai Suisan Kyuko, a transport firm in Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture, kept a Mitsubishi Fuso Aero King as a private bus and set up Chichibu Kokusai Bus, described as a bus company whose entire fleet is saloon buses.
Deregulation made entry into the bus business easier. Fans also began seeking work as bus drivers in numbers, some of them taking the wheel with their hobby turned into a job.
Fleet Rosters and Manufacturer Loyalties
What railfans call rolling-stock research has its bus counterpart in the study of vehicles as vehicles, and because a bus is an automobile, the automotive side runs deep. Bus fans compile depot-by-depot rosters — which models, how many of each, where they sit — along with lists of retired vehicles and the variations in body configuration. Operators’ proprietary specifications and engineering choices become subjects in themselves. The equivalent figure in aviation enthusiasm is the spotter.
Some bus fans go further into the joint-operation problem of highway coaches, working out which company covers which day, and personal websites exist that publish the resulting duty tables. Others fix on a single manufacturer, choosing among Hino, Isuzu, Mitsubishi Fuso, and Nissan Diesel, now UD Trucks. Hometown loyalties and the dominant model of the local operator shape these preferences, and some photographers travel the country shooting a favored model wherever it was purchased. The same model wears different liveries and specifications at different operators, which is the point. Vehicles retired from a home operator and transferred to the provinces get tracked to their new homes.
Bodies add a second layer, since coachbuilders sit apart from chassis makers. Fuji Heavy Industries, now SUBARU, Nishi-Nippon Shatai Kogyo, and Kitamura Manufacturing produce bus bodies that enthusiasts follow across the operators that bought them.
Riding, Riding Out, and Riding Through
Riding as a passenger to assess ride quality is its own pursuit. The front row, with the clearest view of the road and the driver’s seat, is preferred by many; others want the rear seats where the engine is loudest, and still others are checking interior quiet. Seat layout and construction, destination displays, air conditioning, fare boxes, and stop-request buttons all attract attention that varies from fan to fan.
A vehicle nearing retirement, or one visible only at a particular company or depot, can justify chartering a bus jointly with fellow fans for a day trip. Driving is the branch that rail enthusiasm cannot match. A rail event might offer a “driving experience” over a short stretch of non-main track, but a bus fan can hold the license, take the wheel, and drive on public roads — which some describe as the greatest attraction of the hobby. Bus magazine editors have held heavy-vehicle licenses, and driver’s-seat reports appear in print; Busrama International has often carried them. Fans bring privately owned buses to car events of the dekotora variety. Rental agencies usually stop at minibuses, to prevent illegal operation of so-called white buses, though some rent small charter buses such as the Hino Melpha 7 and the Mitsubishi Fuso Aero Midi MJ, and fans rent and drive them.
Owning the Vehicle
Buying a retired bus outright is the next step, and some individuals own several full-size coaches. Storage is the hard part. Keeping a large vehicle roadworthy means parts, maintenance, inspection, weight tax, automobile tax, insurance, and fuel, with tighter rules applying to large buses for the same white-bus reasons. Because the burden exceeds what one person can carry, hobby groups share vehicles, and the Japan Bus Friends Association is one organization that has taken in retired buses for storage. Groups have also acquired retired vehicles to run shuttle buses on their own initiative, as Akiba Express once did; that group has since disbanded. Preserved vehicles appear at bus events on request, and a privately owned Mitsubishi Fuso Aero King was displayed at JR Bus Kanto’s 30th anniversary event for the Tomei Highway Bus.
Route Research
Route study overlaps with what railfans call riding the network, and it includes armchair work on routes, diagrams, and fares. When Japan National Railways was wound down and JR took over, many remote local lines were abolished, and the replacement buses that took over their duties preserved enough of the atmosphere of a remote line to make them worthwhile rides.
Riding every route of a single operator is a long project. Bus networks are denser than rail networks, routes with extremely few daily runs — depot-return trips and so-called license-maintenance routes — are not rare, and routes are added and dropped frequently, so completing even one company takes years. Route-setting research asks what roads a route uses and why: which facilities it connects, which passengers it targets, how it relates to other routes. Documentation from before the 1970s is scarce, so some fans stay with the present rather than push into history. Push past the present entirely and the work becomes fictional-route research, drawing invented networks on maps, with some practitioners driving the ground themselves, building diagrams, and calculating fare revenue.
History and discontinued-route research reconstructs operator history, depot openings and closures, and abolished routes, down to individual discontinued stops. Company histories, municipal histories, and residential maps do the heavy lifting. Compared with tracing an abandoned railway, the surviving documentation for an abandoned bus route is extremely thin, and the difficulty is correspondingly high.
Poles, Recordings, and Parts
Stop and facility research covers the poles and waiting shelters at bus stops, and it began to spread around 2005 as personal websites became easy to launch and blogs easy to update. Some photograph amusingly named stops; some shoot every pole belonging to one operator; some shoot bus stop poles across the country, at which point the pursuit resembles a stamp rally or the travel-savings pastime of visiting every post office in Japan. Large bus terminals get studied as facilities, and the food at their shops and cafeterias invites the kind of comparison that rail enthusiasts apply to station soba.
Collecting takes in timetables, route maps, and other handouts, bus cards, tickets including hard tickets, related merchandise, and parts. Retired-vehicle parts and stop destination panels are sold at bus events, and rolled destination curtains sell well. Operators have responded by auctioning parts themselves; Iwate Kenkotsu set up a “Bus Fan Plaza” section on its own website and ran parts auctions there.
Advance recordings and rollsign images are the bus equivalent of railfan sound recording. Fans record onboard announcements themselves, or buy retired 8-track tapes and play the announcements at home. Photographing and cataloging destination curtains from many routes is another branch, and some sites recreate them with image-editing software.
Models get collected and modified. Bus models such as the Bus Collection series appear as structures on model railways, and fans repaint them, make decals, and apply them. Die-cast miniatures at roughly HO scale and radio-controlled buses get repainted too, and some run them on the roads of fixed HO layouts.
The main model and miniature lines are the Diapet Scale Bus Series, among the earliest bus miniatures; Adwing, a specialist maker of full-fledged bus models; Trane, with Pocket Bus and Faceful Bus; Takara Tomy, whose Tomica, Choro-Q, and Q-Steer lines include bus miniatures; Tommytec, with Bus Collection and Bus Musume figures of bus conductors and guides; Bandai, with a Working Vehicle minibus edition; Kyosho, with radio-controlled and die-cast bus series; and Good Smile Company, with a route bus miniature series.