Probably the article was accurate in 1977, but not any more. You don’t see two-door subway cars these days. Even 3-door cars aren’t very common; 4-door cars tend to be the norm, and there are some cars with up to six doors per side. One reason for this is to accommodate the crowding–more doors means fewer seats and more space for people to stand, and easier access for large numbers of people.
As for the pushers, you hear of them working during the peak rush hours, but I have never actually seen them; they may no longer exist as a specific position, or may just work for specific subway lines at those peak hours.
There are, however, usually two station employees working the platform for most train lines in Tokyo, but their chief job is not to push people on the train; rather, they signal to the conductor that all is clear and no one is stuck in doors or is otherwise in danger before the train begins to depart the station. I have on rare occasion seen these workers help cram people in when things are in a crunch, but most of the time, when trains are overcrowded, the passengers themselves do a fairly good job of stuffing themselves into the trains as the doors close.
A friend of mine in the Boston area lived in Tokyo for a few years from about the mid-1990s to early this century. He did encounter them at that time. Told me the trick was, if you saw one coming, to position yourself in front of some young cutie so you could get squashed up against her.
I visited Tokyo for a week in 2004 (I was living in a much smaller town in Japan at the time) and did not see any pushers. There wouldn’t have been any need for them, as the subways were not packed to full capacity. But this was during the O-Bon holidays when the city isn’t as busy as it usually is, I don’t know what it would have been like during rush hour on a regular weekday.
These days the crowd helps to push itself in. You’ll see lots of people facing backwards to go in so that they can lean back and have leverage to push people in.
Unlike Cecil’s claim that pushers are often former sumo rikishi (which might have been the case back then), to work the platform it’s far more important that you can run up and down to help people who have their elbow or briefcase still stuck in the door, all within the 30-60 seconds that the train is supposed to be stopped. The trains can be over 200m long and there are usually at most only 2 or 3 platform staff at a time.
Being big and intimidating is completely unnecessary. They’re not trying to bull unruly prisoners into a cell, after all; the passengers actually want to get in the train and just need help from someone who has the leverage advantage of being outside. Big and tough might possibly be an advantage during the evening shift, when the crowds are lighter but the drunks are more frequent.
First aid knowledge appears to be a must, though, since I’ve seen a lot of people collapse on the platforms for a variety of reasons. Many are just drunk, but when the trains are really packed, it can be enough to make you feel seriously light-headed when you finally get out.
The Tokyo-based university where I did me my learnin’ (within the past few years) hired a few irascible old men who did nothing but yell at students to get on the bus, push them if they had trouble fitting, and say, over and over again, “You can fit 2, 3 more kids in there, easy! Now go!”
I didn’t commute by that particular line, but for about a year I had an hour-long ride on one just as crowded (the Den-en Toshi Line for those keeping score), and it was pretty miserable. As the train speeds up, slows down, or turns, you just get pulled by the weight of the crowd. If you’re up against a wall, you can really get crushed (a good survival strategy was to try to get the nook between the door and the side of the bench, since it gave you more leverage).
I went through it for just a year as a healthy 26-year-old, but thinking about the ones who face it every day for their entire lives, it becomes a lot less surprising when somebody decides to just step off the platform in front of an oncoming train.
