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...
I have a hot take on the price of JR Passes. For those unaware, they are exclusively for foreign visitors. In the "old days", travel to and in Japan was considered very expensive, so JR Pass was envisioned as a way to encourage more travel on trains and in Japan. Now the script has flipped. Japan is no longer expensive for people travelling from other highly developed nations. Quite the opposite: It is now cheap. The era of cheap JR Passes is dead. The primary purpose now is convenience. With the exception of Nozomi super-express Shinkansen between Tokyo and (Shin-)Osaka, every JR train is included in a single ticket.
> 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, ...
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).
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).
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.
> no income taken away, as it is subsidized and compensated on the federal level
Only 50% of the relative loss of transit agencies is subsidised by the federal government, the other 50% gets subsidised by the respective state. And since the compensation is calculated in relation to the prices of monthly subscription tickets on routes in the respective transit area, transit agencies are left with even less.
Additionally, a lawsuit determined that the train network price cap for public transport is illegal, further increasing costs for the states.
This already has caused service reductions in multiple states, e.g. just now in Berlin additional overground Metro services during commuter peaks got halfed. With the results of the lawsuit and now interest from the federal goverment to put more funding into public transport, a lot more services will get axed in the next 3 years.
That is a problem as since the introduction of the ticket there are constant talk from the car lobby politicians to remove it again. So bad for planning for the smaller rail companies.
But the biggest problem for the german trains remains the management of DB (Deutsche Bahn). Who are in charge of the network.
Who paid themself heavy bonuses all the time, while failing on all the metrics that mattered (they succeeded on making a new useless info page go live, that was the official justification for the bonus).
And they could do this, because the job of the ministry of transport was to make it easy for the car industry. And the german train is in theory privatized, in reality not so much.
The current ministry might be better though, so maybe something is happening. But I believe it, when I see it.
Inconvenient truth: It is a bad use of taxpayers' money to highly subsidise train tickets when (1) people can afford to pay more (2) huge structural investments are needed in the country, (3) economic growth has stalled for years.
That's a fallacious argument because roads are the universal, basic transportation infrastructure. You cannot have no roads. Your point has some relevance regarding motorways, which are not free in every countries and may be considered part of the universal road network, too. So mentioning the cost of roads is trying to deflect via "whataboutism" without addressing the point.
One can have a roadnetwork as primary means of transport .. or a railnetwork. With roads mainly for the last mile.
Where society here and now should invest, what direction to go from from here, is totally up to us. What makes the most sense - preferably in the long run.
Cars are pretty shitty for long distances. Rubber tyres wear down the road and create unhealthy dust, way more friction and noise than metalwheel on rail. And they can be directly powered with electricity.
Not carry a heavy battery around and waste energy with charging and discharging.
Or well, have the noise and dirt of combustion engines.
Those are all pretty strong arguments to invest at least equally into a well functioning train network.
Every car that can be replaced with a train (in the simple often case of a person riding the train not moving his vehicel for himself) is a net profit for society. Cleaner air. Less or allmost no pollution.
(The electric trains here next to my home are really silent and still fast)
Note that I did not claim that we shouldn't invest in train networks. I questioned the use of taxpayers' money to make train tickets extremely cheap or free when there is no affordability issue to begin with, both in itself and when compared to everything else that public money could be spent on, and the overall situation in many European countries.
Personally I think this is having our priorities very wrong.
(I also think that rail as a primary mean of transport over roads is totally unrealistic and impractical, but that another issue)
You can definitely have no publicly owned or maintained roads though. There are none in my area of town and $0 tax/public funding. It's private property all the way down. The only reason why public roads look like barely competed against monopolies is that you can't compete with "free" (at the point of use), which creates the illusion that the public element of roads are more crucial than they are. But if you just shit-can all the public transport private transport will emerge organically.
Given that many commuter-rail (and frankly, other) transport systems operate well below capacity during off-peak times and in counterflow directions, such pricing could well increase ridership and revenue.
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.
But the regional passes are still a good deal. If you are in Osaka or Kyoto, and want to take a day trip to Hiroshima, it more than covers the cost, in addition to granting access to various museums plus other benefits.
The Kansai Wide area pass that I'm talking about doesn't include access to museums. But some of the smaller passes (like the one of Osaka that you mentioned) do. Those passes don't include Shinkansen, though.
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.
The flip side of that cultural sense of duty is unfortunately a rise in "black" companies (ブラック企業, burakku kigyo) and employee exploitation[1] leading to very long working hours (often unpaid) and high karojisatsu rates (suicide from overwork / stressful working conditions)[2].
At least in the past, companies like JR East were known for their worker exploitation and unfair policies, leading to decades of hostile labor disputes with Kokuro (the National Railway Workers' Union)[3].
In 2013, a family sued JR West after an overworked employee committed suicide. The family claimed he worked over 100 hours a month, and that during some months, he worked over 254 hours of overtime[4].
Japanese trains are renowned for being extremely punctual, but operators often punish employees for the smallest mistakes. They fine employees if the train is delayed by even a single minute, leading to one driver suing JR West in 2021[5].
I know the west likes to romanticise Japanese culture, but the reality of the working culture in Japan is far from romantic.
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.
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:
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.
Bluntly, cubicles are NICE compared to the massive distracting (but stylish) open plan stuff. From above they look sort of dystopian, but no one in your peripheral vision, reduced noise...
Not as nice as an office with a door, but really not bad. Especially the taller ones.
> 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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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.
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
Rail companies were rather abusive - because they could get away with it. Also, shipping freight was much more profitable/easier/simpler than shipping people. When the interstate system was being built, folks would much rather drive than ride a train (or bus for that matter).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
In the United States, probably the best comparison would be BART in San Francisco Bay Area and WMATA in Washingon, D.C. area. They act like a subway in city center, and like a (commuter) railway outside. As a stretch, also look at SF Muni Metro which acts like a tramway/streetcar outside the dense areas, else like a "light subway" in the dense areas.
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.
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.
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.
You don't think the reverse is also true? When you see Japanese people write about the United States, it is pretty similar -- they tend to overindex on the posh parts of major cities, like Manhattan, Honolulu, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
The posh parts of America are suburbs or outer neighborhoods, not the inner city which is where most visitors end up staying.
For example, when you visit the San Francisco Bay Area, the actual posh areas are Marin, the Tri-Valley, and the hill adjacent areas of South Bay suburbs (eg. Woodside, Atherton, Saratoga, Los Altos, Los Gatos, Foster City, San Mateo).
Your average Japanese or other foreign visitor isn't visiting or staying in those suburbs nor would they be able to afford the hotel fees for hotels in those areas.
This is a major reason why Japan and Euro-trips have become fairly common amongst younger Americans now - renting a decent 4 start hotel room or Airbnb in a posh area of Japan that is out of reach for most Japanese comes out roughly the same as a middle-of-the-pack experience in the US because an American median salary is double the Japanese or European one.
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.
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,
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!
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.
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.
"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.
>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.
This only makes sense if you think as "culture" as an immutable snapshot in time, which is... sure, I guess, a point of view to hold, though not a particularly interesting one.
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.
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.
Funnily enough, one of the companies that don't yet have tap-to-pay is... JR.
Each JR company also have their own website, and their own "network pass", making it quite cumbersome to book online tickets (e.g. needing to book each segment separately if they're on different companies' routes).
The Swiss system also has different companies, but everything can be booked on the SBB website/app.
I find Swiss system to be very convenient. My recent visit to the country was smooth thanks to the SBB app. It works not just for rail but also for bus, trams, and ferry. I think even some cable cars are covered. Plus there it can provide discounts or free visits to selected museums.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.