How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

156 points - last Wednesday at 2:03 PM

Comments

Pooge today at 5:27 AM

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...

akashwadhwani35 today at 12:33 PM

Every platform at Shinjuku plays a different song when a train pulls in. There are sixteen platforms. The system started in 1989 with twelve.

Made something to listen to all the songs - https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo

Liftyee today at 1:31 AM

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.

tedd4u today at 1:52 AM

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

TazeTSchnitzel today at 1:44 AM

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?

bobson381 today at 4:34 PM

Okay, question because someone here might know. I have a faint recollection of reading a few years ago that prior to the current train automation system in Japan, they used to have to keep a staff of graduate students or other temp workers on standby to handle the busy periods. Am I hallucinating this fact? Does anyone know? I've tried to find the article where I read it to no avail.

Shitty-kitty today at 2:03 AM

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.

decimalenough today at 8:52 AM

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)

socalgal2 today at 2:47 AM

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.

waterTanuki today at 4:19 AM

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.

rramadass today at 1:31 AM

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.

panny today at 12:58 PM

Western trademark law really isn't compatible with the Japanese culture of noren-wake. The Japanese solution seems more beautiful and cooperative, while the western style seems intent on conflict and formenting division. Something like Tokyo Fugetsudo and Kobe Fugetsudo, where the new branch operates with the master's blessings, recipes, supply routes, teachings simply cannot exist under western rules. You must defend your trademark or lose it after all. What is sad is the Japanese are starting to adopt the western way instead of the other way around. You can look at JR and see ONE system where people work together in harmony. Even though it's really a half dozen different companies working to do their best job together. The American way would be to fight amongst each other until the greediest least moral company has defeated the others and become a monopoly to everyone's detriment.

greatgib today at 7:58 AM

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.

ezconnect today at 5:41 AM

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.

metalman today at 10:12 AM

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.

creatorpilot today at 9:03 AM

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historical1234 today at 5:36 AM

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vladsiu today at 4:19 AM

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CurryFurry today at 9:08 AM

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jdw64 today at 1:53 AM

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