Japan: Subway worker creates art from ticket fragments

The image has been shared thousands of times by Japanese Twitter users

A Japanese railway worker has created a striking image of a train using only fragments of paper punched out of tickets by station barriers, it's been reported.

The image, currently on display at Nishi-Umeda station in Osaka, shows one of the trains operated by the city's municipal subway, and was created using 153,600 fragments of passenger tickets, the Japan Times says. Ticket machines punch out a small "chad" which is black on one side and white on the other, and the 46-year-old worker, who wishes to remain nameless, spent some 300 hours creating the picture in the station office in his own time over three months.

According to the Japan Times, the picture might have remained a local curiosity were it not for a university student from Kyoto uploading a photograph of it onto his Twitter timeline, from where it was retweeted over 40,000 times. While Osaka Municipal Subway officials praised the artwork, it was a labour of love too far for the anonymous artist. "I won't do it again," he said, stating that the long hours he put into it created stress and put paid to his social life.

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