The first Shinkansen went into service 50 years ago this October. The Japan News has a breezy and informative slide show about the history of the Shinkansen. And a virtual trip from Tokyo to Osaka.

Thirty years ago, I rode a 0 series Shinkansen (second from left) from Tokyo to Odawara. It was like flying on a 737 at ground level. The 0 series was in service from 1964-2008 (click to enlarge).

Courtesy Wikipedia Commons.

Labels: history, japan, shinkansen, technology, transportation

An interesting detail in the 1908 map I used to chart Ryô's escape from Sakai is the railroad running along the Kino River. A mere fifty years after Commodore Perry presented the Japanese government with a scale model steam train, rail lines covered all the routes of the Edo Period highways, including spurs reaching into relatively outlying areas such as the Kii Peninsula.

In the century since, train technology in Japan went from the model 2-4-0 tank locomotive:

Courtesy Tony Hisgett.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Japanese embraced the train as enthusiastically as Americans did the automobile. Even today, every roll-out of a new Shinkansen model is given the red carpet treatment. A big reason is that the population distribution, density, and geography are perfect fits for rail. A single north-south line neatly intersects every major city in Japan without a single detour.

Japan National Railways decommissioned the last steam engine at the Oiwake switching yard in Hokkaido on March 2, 1976. As in the U.S., steam engines still carry tourist on reserved routes.

Labels: history, japan, serpent notes, serpent of time, shinkansen

Japan is blanked by p-wave detectors. During an earthquake, the primary (pressure) waves propagate faster than the destructive secondary (shearing) s-waves. Depending on the distance from the fault, the lead time can be up to a minute. This early warning system stops Shinkansen trains and scrams nuclear reactors.

All of the reactors at Fukushima scrammed during the Sendai earthquake. It was the latent heat that caused all the problems when the backup generators powering the cooling system were wiped out by the tsunami. A nuclear reactor is basically a big stove, and it stays hot for a long time after the power is turned off.

Japan's earthquake detector network functions like Watches/Warnings alerts from the National Weather Service. When the triggering threshold is reached, a graphic pops up on your television screen, identifying the location of the quake. A few minutes later, a graphic or text scroll lists the magnitude and the affected areas.


There's a cell phone app for that too. And Yahoo Japan (and other sites, I'm sure) pops up a banner with similar information. The television graphic is accompanied by this sound. The first couple of days after the Sendai earthquake, it happened so often I started to feel like one of Pavlov's dogs.

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Sendai earthquake (1)
Sendai earthquake (2)
Sendai earthquake (3)

Labels: earthquake, geology, japan, science, shinkansen, tohoku earthquake

Bryan Caplan has come up with a good way of describing how communist regimes attempted to duplicate the economic success of capitalist countries by mimicking the results rather than the process that produced them. A classic "cargo cult."

And in the comments, Stephen Smith adds:

What is high-speed rail, after all, if not cargo cult urbanism? You're looking at countries that have been highly successful with market-based transportation and land use policies (Japan), and then taking the absolute apex of their achievement (Shinkansen) while ignoring all the quotidian things that make it really hum ([height-restricted] 15-story buildings [resulting in high-density, minimally-zoned suburbs] and regular elevated intracity train lines).

As Tino Sanandaji illustrates with this chart, in terms of population density, compared to train-friendly countries, the U.S. does not deviate from expected projections. But equally important is the history of viable economic alternatives.

The first Osaka-Tokyo Shinkansen route was completed in 1964, in time for the Tokyo Olympics. At the time, Japan had no national highway system. Its first expressway opened in 1963, was only 120 miles long, and connected Osaka and Nagoya (about a third of the way to Tokyo).

The population of Japan in 1964 was 97 million, and reached 100 million three years later. The current population of California, slightly bigger than Japan, is 37 million.

In other words, the Shinkansen was the highway system. There were no practical economic alternatives. Moreover, it connected well-established and profitable intracity subways and intercity commuter rail lines--faster in 1964 than any Amtrak train today--in a hub and spoke system.

This is still true today. The Meishin Expressway, the only main highway between Osaka and Kyoto (combined population: 4.2 million), has six total lanes. I-15 between Salt Lake County and Utah County (same distance, population: 1.5 million) has eight minimum.

Every major holiday in Japan, the traffic jams back up for tens of miles out of every major city. Despite high car ownership rates, passenger rail is economically viable because the alternatives are deliberately made inconvenient and expensive, starting with $5/gallon gasoline.

Car inspection and registration can cost over ten times as much as in the U.S., becoming so expensive for older vehicles it is often cheaper to buy a new car. Getting a driver's license is no less onerous. Forty percent of Japanese 18 to 29 haven't bothered to get a driver's license.

California alone has 2.3 million miles of paved roads versus 740,000 miles for all of Japan. If you really want high-speed rail like in Japan, just lay the tracks over the existing roads. Hey, right-of-way NIMBY problem solved too!

Labels: economics, japan, politics, shinkansen

Orson Scott Card takes a trip to Tokyo and loves it. He gushes, to be sure (the Japan Tourist Board should hire him), but in a couple of hundred words he describes the experience better than most "correspondents." Dave Barry did a good job too (Dave Barry Does Japan). Journalism needs more sharp-eyed writers and fewer reporters.

Card (rightly) rhapsodizes about the trains in Japan, but (wisely) notes that

If we had stations in the same proportion to the population, they would be so far from most of us that we would never walk to them; and if we had stations in the same proportion to the area, there would only be a relative handful of riders per station.

Sorry, if you build a Shinkansen here, they will not come unless you can do something magically overnight about population density. Right now, my niece is in Numazu on her mission, a "little" town out in the sticks with a population of 205,000 and a population density of 1,100/square km.

Salt Lake City has about the same population, and even with expansion checked by the Wasatch Mountains and the Great Salt Lake, a population density half that. As Card points out, "America won't benefit from urban railways until we create neighborhoods that cluster rather than sprawl."

One way to do that is to peg the price of gasoline at $5.00/gallon (and adjust for inflation). But both sides of the political aisle hate the idea, which means that outside a small number of urban corridors (where zoning and eminent domain present other problems), high-speed rail in particular is a wasteful pipedream.

Expensive gasoline doesn't discourage driving in Japan as much as exorbitant tolls and taxes, and literally having no place to park in the big cities. Out in the 'burbs, cars are very popular, but Japanese car makers aren't rushing to sell electric cars in their domestic market. They can't compete with small displacement gasoline engines.

Pretending for a moment I'm not a running dog libertarian capitalist, the best "exotic" solution is a multi-fuel turbine/electric powerplant that would provide the energy densities that batteries can't by themselves. But I'll bet that improvements in conventional technologies will outpace abracadabra solutions for decades to come.

When it comes to mass transit in the U.S., alas, the biggest obstacles are geography and the stubborn laws of thermodynamics. All those CAFE standards and Volt-style subsidies will only exacerbate the so-called "problem"--the dream of a home in the suburbs--and won't make Mother Nature change her mind.

Labels: japan, shinkansen, social studies, technology

No, this is not a futuristic prototype. It's the JR 500 Nozomi ("Hope"), the fastest (cruising speed: 186 MPH) Shinkansen, in service now for a decade. (Photograph below by Fukusaburo Hamada.)

Labels: japan, shinkansen, technology

Hirohito, the Showa Emperor, died on 7 January 1989, shortly after I arrived in Osaka.

A morbid media deathwatch had been going on for months. I think most people were relieved when the end finally came. Midori no Hi (April 29) was the Emperor's birthday back then. Now it's called "Green Day," like Earth Day. It's the first day of Golden Week, the Japanese equivalent of Spring Break.

One morning when I was living in Odawara thirty years ago, the train station was swarming with police officers. The Emperor was returning to Tokyo after a stay at Hakone, the Imperial Household's version of Camp David. Odawara is the closest Shinkansen stop to Hakone.

A small, respectful crowd gathered at the station. The motorcade drove up. The Emperor got out. He was a small man wearing a navy-blue suit. He tipped his hat to the crowd, we politely clapped (I took the picture), and he went into the station. Nobody kowtowed or anything.

The Emperor's train arrived. It was two cars long, the Shinkansen version of a corporate jet. The Shinkansen left Odawara and everything went back to normal.

Labels: day in the life, history, japan, shinkansen, showa period