How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

Posted by ddrmaxgt37 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by Pooge 5 hours ago

For those of you planning to go to Japan, please make sure you actually calculate how much JR train trips would cost you. They upped the price a few years ago and, since then, it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets.

For one of my recent trips, I was actually more better served with a local pass (Kansai Wide Pass) than the JR Pass.

Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...

Comment by tumdum_ 41 minutes ago

No only that, but to ride the fastest Shinkansen you still need to pay additional fee on top of JR Pass.

Comment by decimalenough 29 minutes ago

Pedantic note: the fastest Shinkansen is the 320 km/h Hayabusa service from Tokyo to Hokkaido, which you can ride for free with a JR Pass.

The fastest service on the Tokyo-Osaka corridor, Nozomi, maxes out at 300 km/h but is indeed not included in the pass.

Comment by euroderf 4 hours ago

> Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...

Considering the environmental woes & collapses coming down the pike, I'd like to see a trans-border effort to drive down the price of mass transit _everywhere_. Put it on the G7 agenda, the OECD agenda, the UN General Assembly agenda, ...

Comment by decimalenough 1 hour ago

The JR Pass has never been (and still is not) aimed at locals, who are not even allowed to buy it. It's for tourists only.

Comment by Pooge 6 minutes ago

Yes, I was talking about tourists. Regional passes are available for locals as well but are more expensive.

Comment by lukan 2 hours ago

This is exactly the reason why in germany we have now a broad ticket for short distance trains. Government realized they fail to meet EU regulations in reducing CO2, so they rushed to implement a cheap german wide ticket. Initially just 10€, now 60€ a month.

Still a bargain, you can go anywhere as mich forth and back as you want (just not the dedicated long distance trains, so going through all of germany takes a bit longer).

Comment by jojomodding 1 hour ago

You can tell this is a true success in Germany because 95% of local passengers now use it. It also caused a significant increase in ridership, putting the already overloaded rail system under a lot more pressure while taking away income from the rail companies (after making it cheaper).

Comment by lukan 1 hour ago

Well yes, the idea is to have more people use the trains, so yes also more trains are needed(and more investment and replacement of the Bahn management) in general, but as far as I know there is no income taken away, as it is subsidized and compensated on the federal level.

Comment by Pooge 4 hours ago

Trains can use renewable energy.

Comment by Pooge 2 hours ago

I just realized I interpreted your comment the opposite way you intended... Apologies

Comment by warumdarum 1 hour ago

So when we get riots due to mass unemployment and societal destabilization can iredirect them to you. Im so tired of call for actions without even an attempt to discuss the fallout.

Comment by iso1631 2 hours ago

Making it cheaper for people to fly across an ocean to travel around on mass transit is the last place the price needs to go down.

Comment by Liftyee 9 hours ago

A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company but in Japan it helped make all these efficient and meticulous changes possible, and avoids issues of privatisation like neglecting maintenance / short term profit maximisation.

Comment by jmspring 8 hours ago

In the west the employee / employer social contract died sometime in the 80s. It's rare, especially in tech, to have employees with decades of tenure. You see Microsoft trying to buyout older employees recently.

Comment by linguae 8 hours ago

Pre-Carly Fiorina Hewlett-Packard was a great example of an old-school Silicon Valley company, long before the era of “move fast and break things” and of Zuck, Elon, and Altman. I used to work for a Japanese company until I left a few years ago to teach, and when I read about the HP Way, it reminds me in many ways of life at my former employer:

https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/publications/me...

Comment by jmspring 8 hours ago

While in college, my advisor / professor I worked for took me to HP Labs off Page Mill. I recall entering and seeing a sea of cubicles. That said, I enjoyed hearing the stories of those that worked there.

Comment by captainbland 2 hours ago

The short term profit maximisation thing comes from leadership culture rather than employees per se

Comment by DANmode 7 hours ago

> A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company

Diminishingly few.

It is a feedback loop.

Comment by sandworm101 8 hours ago

And the concept of company families, of client corporations beholden to larger/older ones. They dont work together because of financial incentives or contractual obligation. The work together because they are fraternal organizations.

Comment by tedd4u 8 hours ago

Here a link to the best recent HN-featured long-form article on Japan rail network. Probably spent more time with this than any other item posted here in months.

“Why Japan has such good railways”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815395

Comment by currydove 8 hours ago

Here's another slightly related topic I wrote on a while ago. Not my best writing but I'm fascinated by this kind of history -

https://culturecompiled.com/p/strong-state-capacity-is-a-pro...

Comment by TazeTSchnitzel 8 hours ago

I've always thought the JR logo looked like 駅, the kanji for “train station”, and assumed it was deliberate. Perhaps that was a factor in them settling on the JR name?

Comment by razorbeamz 6 hours ago

I think that's just coincidental. I've mentioned it to Japanese people before and they can't see the connection at all.

Comment by tonyhart7 5 hours ago

well because they see kanji and "english" differently

Comment by queenkjuul 5 hours ago

So a Japanese designer probably didn't consider it?

Comment by decimalenough 1 hour ago

If you're interested in a deep dive into all this, Substack Bahn has a series on the history of JR:

https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-ye... (and note the links to the earlier pieces at the beginning)

Comment by socalgal2 7 hours ago

It's always frustrating to read anything by most foreigners about Japanese trains.

There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong.

The title, "How Japan's railways stayed one" is just false. They were never one, they are still not one.

Take Tokyo, off the top of my head there is Toei, Tobu, Odakyu, Keio, Seibu, Tokyu, Keikyu, Tokyo Metro, ... and JR

If you're in Shibuya. You can take JR (4 lines: Yamanote, Saikyo, Shinjuku-Shonan, N-EX), Keio (1 line: Inokashira), Eiden (3 lines: Ginza, Hanzomon, Fukutoshin), Toyku (2 lines: Den-en-toshi, Toyoko)

Or Osaka, there's Hanshin, Hankyu, Kentetsu, Nankai, ... and JR

Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private. Even JR's 7 are now private and they were originally private, there was a middle period where the government took them over. It was the period where they nearly went bankrupt, had extremely bad performance.

Comment by lmm 6 hours ago

> There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong.

JR is a whole lot more than 7% of trains (downthread you claim 38% of passengers, but even that understates things; over 60% of passenger-km are with JR).

> Eiden

Not what it's called lol.

> Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private.

Yes and no. Other operators are structured as private companies but often have significant public ownership, and even those that are notionally 100% privately owned often have strong ties with the political system via the keiretsu system, and always collaborate very closely with local and national governments in practice. E.g. fares are regulated, not simply set at "what the market will bear" levels; conversely the government provides a lot of legal support and subsidy for building new lines.

Comment by pibaker 7 hours ago

This article is about the JR branding and design, not train operations. The title may be overstating the case, but the content is definitely not drawing over generalized conclusions about railroads in Japan.

Not to mention the idea that JR is only 7% of Japanese railroad makes little sense in real life. JR carries a majority of rail passengers in Japan. The long tail of non JR railroad companies in Japan are small, regional operators owning maybe one or two lines with infrequent services. Many of them are also private only in the sense that they are incorporated in the same way as private companies. But if you dig a little around you will find out they are actually owned by local governments.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-sector_railway

Comment by socalgal2 7 hours ago

JR is big, but 62% of passenger volume is not JR and that remaining 38% is split by 7 companies

Further, in the big metro areas, the private trains do just fine.

JR East is #1, Tokyo Metro is #2, JR West is #3, Tokyu is #4, ... the next JR, JR Central is down at #9 with #5 #6 #7 #8 all private. Tokyo Metro is private, Toei (is the city run subway, it has 4 lines as is far down the list).

Comment by queenkjuul 5 hours ago

At least where i live, subways and railways aren't really considered to be the same thing

Comment by bobthepanda 5 hours ago

Japan operates a kind of hybrid system where the subway (at least in Tokyo) mostly consists of tracks that connect to private operators on either end, and a train will just run through from the private parts of the track to the subway parts with no interruption whatsoever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_through_trains_in_Japa...

Comment by klausa 3 hours ago

The line gets really blurry in some places in Tokyo.

Asakusa (one of "my" lines!) line, is definitely a subway inside central Tokyo, but you can stay on the same physical train going all the way from Narita to Haneda (think RER in Paris?) — I think it would be qualified as "light rail" anywhere else in the world.

Comment by gryson 7 hours ago

What does any of that have to do with the article, which is about the branding and logo of JR?

Comment by razorbeamz 6 hours ago

Yeah, it's always obvious when this kind of thing is written by someone who has only ever been to Japan as a tourist, if they have at all.

Just a deep fundamental misunderstanding of how things work.

Comment by nihonde 6 hours ago

> "Hanshin, Hankyu, Kentetsu, Nankai"

Also Keihan. And most, if not all, of these companies have huge land and real estate development projects generating non-rail income all up and down their lines.

Comment by 6 hours ago

Comment by Klonoar 7 hours ago

Tech industry needlessly idolizes the country, so you're unfortunately bound to read this slop until the heat death of the universe.

Comment by alephnerd 7 hours ago

It's an age thing. Most HNers are in their 30s-50s so would have been impressed by Japan in the 1990s-2000s.

Japan is a decent country but everyone who writes about it tends to overindex on the posh parts of Tokyo.

Comment by tjpnz 7 hours ago

As someone who's lived in Tokyo for 10 years it's largely met my expectations. My living situation is far more modern than the western country I'm from, even if my suburb looks a bit plain (my only real complaint is that there's too much concrete and not enough trees).

Would even go as far as to say many comments about the place being trapped in the 80s or 90s don't match reality. For instance, the only time I've ever been asked to use a fax machine was by a US company.

Comment by pibaker 7 hours ago

The decaying rural areas of Japan would probably love to be stuck in the 80s if they can. Too late, now they have hollowed out and everyone young is moving to the same cities most tourists stay at.

Every time you read a story about some Japanese town offering people, even foreigners, money to move there and occupy an abandoned house, keep in mind this is a gesture of desperation, not gratitude,

Comment by harrall 6 hours ago

Decaying rural areas happen in every country, throughout history, throughout time. It’s just how the world works.

The only reason it recently reversed in the US was due to COVID.

Second, many countries are modern in some ways and backwards in some other way. To label a country as modern or not is silly.

Here how it works: I build a porch today and my neighbor builds a pool. In 30 years, he builds a porch but I build a pool. If you cherry pick porches, I look outdated and he looks modern, but it’s reversed if you cherry pick pools!

Comment by nihonde 6 hours ago

Japan has seen millennia of huge cultural shifts. Its strength is its ability to adapt and survive with some measure of continuity, even while embracing the new reality. Go watch some Ozu films. They're all about the "hollowing out" of traditional small-town lifestyle and culture. It isn't so much a problem as a feature of the landscape that reminds people about how transient their reality can be.

Comment by alephnerd 7 hours ago

Additonally, most foreigners who would comment on HN or Reddit are earning significantly higher than the average Japanese or even Tokyoian.

Comment by tjpnz 7 hours ago

The people you're probably thinking of are working in finance or Japanese mega venture/US tech companies. They make up a vanishingly small percent of foreigners working in Japan.

Comment by alephnerd 6 hours ago

> finance

Most finance roles in Japan almost exclusively hire Japanese nationals

> Japanese mega venture/US tech companies

They don't tend to hire foreigners in most cases except for Chinese (Taiwanese and Mainland) and Koreans

Comment by golemiprague 4 hours ago

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Comment by Klonoar 6 hours ago

It’s not just an age thing; the younger part of the tech industry has the same issues.

Comment by queenkjuul 5 hours ago

While i am admittedly in my 30s-50s i don't believe this to be an age problem; Japan is still held on a pedestal in a lot of American pop culture

Comment by akimbostrawman 4 hours ago

Its because deep down they know japan has something which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country.

Comment by d5lt5 3 hours ago

"which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country" Arguably the ideology and hate are prerequisites for a country to have a monoculture. With ideology and hate comes xenophobia and racism == monoculture.

Comment by akimbostrawman 3 hours ago

If you love different cultures you want them to continue to exit independent of each other to preserve them. The only outcome of a melting pot is literally a monoculture by design. Thank you for being an example of the exact lack of self awareness, contradictions and dogmatism i was describing.

Its honestly quite telling that the only way you think to not be some ism, is by destroy other cultures to become one homogenous blob of people. At least then we are all the same and you don't need to be scared to be called a racist right?

Comment by CurryFurry 1 hour ago

Do Indian Railways next. I wonder how they can operate at all. Feces-covered shitcans.

Comment by decimalenough 23 minutes ago

The miracle of Indian Railways is largely that it operates despite the numerous challenges of operating any business in India. The sheer passenger volume of something like the Mumbai suburban railways (7.5 million passengers per day!) is mind-boggling.

Comment by Shitty-kitty 8 hours ago

The U.S had the greatest rail network and then we built the Interstate Highway system and abandoned rail.

Truth is that nobody funds multiple competing transportation network. Japan chose rail, we chose highways.

Comment by kalleboo 8 hours ago

Although Japan also has extensive highways, and they're privatized in a similar way to JR (NEXCO East, West, Central) and are nearly all tolled - if you're driving alone, it's often the same price in tolls alone as a ticket on the Shinkansen (but the equation quickly flips when you more people in the car)

Comment by armada651 6 hours ago

This is a big difference with much of the U.S. and Europe, Japan doesn't subsidize car ownership as heavily. There is no on-street parking in the city, businesses aren't required to provide parking and if you want to own a car you first have to prove you have a parking space for it.

Comment by lava_pidgeon 4 hours ago

You do some heavy assumptions about European nations

Comment by wongarsu 1 hour ago

Any statement about "Europe" as a whole will always be an oversimplification. But in Germany all of this rings true. We have lots of on-street parking, business are frequently required to provide parking spots (depends on the municipality though), it's even becoming more common that new residential construction has to provide parking spaces for all residents, no matter if the actual residents own a car

And while Germany is probably a bit worse than European average, I have seen plenty of other similarly car-pilled places in Europe. Though also some positive examples. Paris has done a lot to bring some parks to a horribly car-infested city. Amsterdam is great. Rome is pretty decent. Few places in Europe are as bad as the US when it comes to car-dependence. But there are also very few places comparable to Japan's approach to car ownership

Comment by fleroviumna 3 hours ago

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Comment by toast0 5 hours ago

Rail is great when you have a lot of people or things moving on the same path.

Highways are great when everyone has a different path.

Japan has most (but not all) of its large destinations on the pacific coast, which works great for rail.

I'm sure passenger rail networks used to have more routing options than amtrak does now, but it's hard to get between a lot of places by rail without going through Chicago. In the western US, you can go north/south in the pacific states or near the missisipi. Sure mountains are hard to cross, but there's no north/south in the plains either... Or Atlanta to Florida, etc.

Comment by queenkjuul 4 hours ago

Air is exactly the same but there are connections to everywhere from Kansas or Montana or wherever. I really think the rail situation in the US is primarily lack of investment. And it sucks; even here in Chicago where the connections are plentiful, the schedules and frequency are awful.

Comment by toast0 4 hours ago

Air travel is easier to make work because most of the infrastructure is at the airports, not on the routes. Airlines can change routes easier than railroads. The speed of air travel has natural utility. Commercial airplanes come in many sizes... Turboprops can reasonably service small airports that can't fill a 737. Once daily or even a few times a week service from a middle of nowhere airport to a hub opens you up to a lot of destinations with 1 stop, and a 2nd stop (maybe with a different airline) probaly gets you to anywhere you want to go.

With small airports, there's probably plenty of flight time is worse than drive time and security and rental counter time add up too, so flying isn't always less time than any other mode, but often it is.

Comment by denkmoon 6 hours ago

Rail is hardly abandoned in the US, the US has a top tier _freight_ rail network. It's just passenger rail that sucks big balls in the US.

Comment by linguae 8 hours ago

Germany has both the Autobahn and rail.

Comment by adrianN 8 hours ago

The German rail network is chronically underfunded and Germany is completely incapable of building new lines. Per capita spending on rail pales in comparison to e.g. Switzerland and Austria.

Comment by bombcar 7 hours ago

Germany is roughly the size of Montana, with the population of almost CA and TX combined.

Comment by saimiam 6 hours ago

Shouldn’t that extra population in a limited amount of land lead to more demand and better outcomes for rail and roads?

Comment by coffe2mug 3 hours ago

The locals value silence. It is not easy to put rails or roads. until recently people used to protest the noise of windmills (thats changing now).

Comment by trains39472 8 hours ago

Given the reputation of the phrase "getting deutsche bahn'ed", I think they chose the Autobahn.

Comment by iso1631 1 hour ago

The US did not abandon rail, it just used it for freight

Europe shifts people by train, not freight.

The US/Canada/Mexico is about 10% more than the EU, but it shifts 7 times as much freight by rail.

Comment by tough 8 hours ago

japan is a small island the US is one of the most extensive and biggest distance from population centers country on earth

I tihnk that helps explain the feasiability of train on each country more than inherent choices

Comment by cael450 8 hours ago

It’s not just about size. Much of the U.S. would be cheaper to build rail networks because there is a lot of open, relatively flat land without dense building on it. Japan is very mountainous and has a lot of dense development, and it has to be more resilient in case of earthquakes.

Comment by true_religion 8 hours ago

Civil planning on that scale isn’t about feasibility but about what direction you want to shape the county in.

A sparse railway system would leave parts of the country less populated by design as it’s simply harder to get to them. People would bunch up into cities and towns because they had to.

Comment by sylos 8 hours ago

We had a railway powered country until it was torn down

Comment by adrianN 8 hours ago

The US has several areas of high population density that have laughably bad rail networks.

Comment by jdw64 8 hours ago

Reading this article, I get the feeling that a nationally inefficient infrastructure is made to be perceived as a stable one through a single JR mark. Privatization forces people to bear inefficient and high train costs due to misguided policies, but the value of a well-designed brand logo and branding offsets all of that. Looking at the content of the article itself, there are some unsettling points, the dissolution of the national railway, the split into companies, and regional profitability gaps. In other words, that signals regional inequality within Japan. It seems like the question is how the dismantled national railway, broken up for the benefit of traditional construction companies, can be perceived as stable through a single brand. I always think that it's not always the good ones that win; even if it's inefficient, you can learn a lot from how you brand it. It's a good article

Comment by peyton 8 hours ago

This is not the time to grind your axe against privatization and inequality.

Comment by jdw64 8 hours ago

I think you probably wrote that comment because you assumed I was engaging in some kind of ideological axe grinding. But you're only reading the superficial part of this article — the observation that the logo design provides consistency. What I was actually thinking about was why that consistency in the logo design is being emphasized in the first place. It's clearly no longer a single national infrastructure, but rather a corporate one now, and yet it still carries the branding of a 'national' entity. That's what struck me, and it's simply a different perspective

Comment by jdw64 8 hours ago

Doesn't this article exactly make that point? Because it shows how JR was split apart, yet the brand logo still makes it appear as if it's a single unified group, doesn't it? Here's the passage I'm referring to:

>'Rail transport in Japan was originally run by Japanese National Railways (JNR). Like many state-owned corporations, it was starting to struggle in the 80s with mounting debt. JNR was losing its advantage over other transport, in both passenger and freight. In the ’80s, the Japanese government began pushing to privatize its state-run monopolies — to reduce the national deficit and improve efficiency across these sectors.'"

The article mentions 'improve efficiency,' and that's the part I was looking at. Then it goes on to explain the strength of the brand logo. So the overall point here is, 'How can something that has been broken apart still appear as one?' And I was simply saying that, despite the inefficiencies in that process, the fact that it still comes across as so stable shows that the branding strategy is good.

Comment by waterTanuki 6 hours ago

Something I don't see mentioned in this article is the nation-wide adoption of a universal transit-payment system: IC Card (Suica is only one of several companies, but often used colloquially to mean train card). This makes it so easy to board any bus/ferry/train without worrying about setting up 30 different accounts each with its own card system.

I've lived in Japan for 4 years now and it was a bit of a culture shock travelling to Germany where I had to have a different pass/app for the various buses and trains. The U.S.'s public transit buildout is slow but happening, and I worry it's falling into the same trap. I'd like to see a federal bill requiring all private/public transit to use the same universal payment scheme accepted in Japan in order to get federal funding for their projects.

Comment by kalleboo 44 minutes ago

Although I'm seeing more and more public transit around the world (including Japan) adopting tap-to-pay so you can use your regular debit/credit cards.

Comment by ddrmaxgt37 5 hours ago

Been wanting to write about this. The graph of interoperability agreements that makes this possible is crazy.

My first visit to Japan, there were still places that would only accept a subset of IC cards and not all.

Comment by historical1234 5 hours ago

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Comment by rramadass 9 hours ago

Nakanishi was opposed to treating corporate identity as just a logo and a logotype; instead, he created a framework splitting it into three layers. MI, or Mind Identity, is the philosophy, values, and vision behind a company. BI, or Behavior Identity, is how the company and its people act in the world — the kind of service they provide. And VI, or Visual Identity, is the visual expression of how the mind and behavior identities are manifested.

A nice framework for all types of communications.

Comment by greatgib 2 hours ago

My personal experience of the multiple operators in Tokyo while traveling there only once for tourism was that it is a mess and not very convenient for users. Like having a station with almost a same name but different operator, a few hundred meters or a km away. And the difficulty of commuting between lines.

Comment by decimalenough 20 minutes ago

Confusing, perhaps. Inconvenient, not really, the same Suica/Pasmo cards work everywhere and handle transfers seamlessly.

Comment by metalman 29 minutes ago

It reads like fucking science fiction about an improbable alternate universe where everybody grows up into intelliegent well adjusted indivuals that can express themselves in a group without focusing on conflict and meaningless competition. Any where else in the "universe" this has lead to corporate standoffs and litigation that has fall out for generations, and even killings and corporate subsidised wars in the developing world. Except of course China, where the level of engineering prowess and scale of machinery and projects is rapidly building out a backbone transport system for themselves, and there customers.ie: they can lay down new, high speed rail lines, ready for use, at a steady walking pace, and are, at multiple locations in China and in other countrys.

Comment by ezconnect 5 hours ago

There are some section of a train line where 4 stations are owned by someone else and they change names along the same rail route. They also change the driver or whatever he is called when changing the company name of the train.