Empire of steel: Where Japan’s railways stand after 150 years of evolution

The Japan Times
October 10, 2022 (Japan)

Much has changed since the country’s first railway line between Tokyo and Yokohama laid the foundation for a world-renowned network of trains to be created

In one of the more lavish ceremonies of 19th-century Japan, a teenage Emperor Meiji arrived at Shimbashi in the new imperial capital of Tokyo and embarked on something entirely unprecedented for the nation: a passenger train.

On Oct. 14, 1872, the emperor opened a railway line between Shimbashi and Yokohama, a transformative miracle in an era when transport was mostly horse-drawn carriages, horseback and rickshaws.

This year, Japan has been looking back at the 150 years since then and how railways have brought immeasurable change, enabling mass commuting, bringing far-flung places closer together and propelling the economy.

The steam engine that first set out from Shimbashi in 1872 has pride of place today at the Railway Museum in Omiya, Saitama Prefecture. An important cultural property, Locomotive No. 1 (Class 150) was manufactured at the Vulcan Foundry in what is now Merseyside, England.

Indeed, Japan’s first railway was laid with British rolling stock and designed by British engineer Edmund Morel. While the United States was also willing to help Japan build railways, it demanded management rights. The United Kingdom did not, and Japan, fearing colonial control, went with Britain.

With the feudal samurai system recently abolished, however, not all Japanese were keen to join the nation’s headlong modernization drive. Post towns such as Shinagawa that provided accommodation along Japan’s traditional pedestrian highways feared trains would mean their ruin. Landowners refused to sell land to the railway project, forcing Morel to build on reclaimed land by the ocean.

Working under Inoue Masaru, one of the Choshu Five who studied engineering in the United Kingdom before being named Japan’s first director of railways, Morel helped train local engineers establish Japan’s standard gauge of 1,067 millimeters and worked tirelessly over two years, exacerbating a preexisting tuberculosis infection. Morel died a year before the line opened, age only 30.

Despite that setback and exorbitant ticket prices, the line beat the odds and soon became a success. A special 150th anniversary exhibition at the Railway Museum notes how other railways were inspired by it, planned and built.

“There was a strong determination in Japan to build a railway that was essential for the establishment of the nation,” Fumihiro Araki, deputy director of the Railway Museum, says as he looks back on the seminal railway. “A relationship of trust was established with the United Kingdom, and Japan obtained its full cooperation.”

As Japan rapidly industrialized, grew its population and built its own empire, the late 19th and 20th centuries saw enormous expansion of the rail network, funded in large part by private capital. By the early 1900s, the Tokaido Line had linked up various rail segments between Tokyo and Kobe, and a large group of private railway operators was nationalized.

The government had set standards for private railways, allowing for the formation of a national network, Araki says. The nationalized network would survive World War II and the U.S.-led Occupation, though it was reorganized into state-owned Japanese National Railways (JNR) in 1949 before being privatized into the Japan Railways Group in 1987.

Meanwhile, Hankyu Railway founder Ichizo Kobayashi developed a business model that became known as transit-oriented development (TOD). In the 1920s, he anchored the Hanshin Line with a department store at its Osaka terminus and established residential real estate businesses, a baseball team and the Takarazuka Revue to attract passengers. The model was adopted by other private operators such as Tokyu Group in Tokyo. By building towns and shops along their lines, private operators could vastly increase revenue.

“The idea was to maintain demand for railways during off-peak times and on holidays. It was 80 years before the TOD model was proposed in the United States,” says Shigeru Morichi, a professor of infrastructure policy at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies. “Today, major railway companies generate more than half of their total revenue from nonrailway businesses such as urban development, real estate, buses, commerce, hotels, movies, schools, etc.”

The next major evolution of Japanese railways was high-speed services, or bullet trains.

The idea for a bullet train, or dangan ressha, was first floated in 1939 amid Japanese expansionism. The notion of a 200-kilometer-per-hour steam locomotive was part of a wider plan to build a railway linking Honshu with the Asian continent via the Korean Peninsula — trains were to travel through a seabed tube.

Although construction on the pan-Asian line was abandoned in 1944, JNR visionary Hideo Shima persevered to help make the high-speed express a reality two decades later.

Shima became synonymous with the shinkansen. Its other father was former JNR President Shinji Sogo, who helped make it a success.

As author Christopher P. Hood noted in “Shinkansen: From Bullet Train to Symbol of Modern Japan,” this success was due less to the “hardware” of the train’s advanced automatic control system and pressurized carriages (in tunnels, the contents of toilets would explode before this innovation) than the “software” of its highly professional, safety-conscious crew.

“I’m happy as long as the shinkansen runs safely,” said Sogo, who resigned with Shima in 1963 as the project went over budget. “That’s all I wanted.”

The Tokaido Shinkansen debuted to coincide with the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and Japan’s postwar return to the international stage. The early shinkansen services traveled up to 210 kilometers per hour, reducing the journey between Tokyo and Osaka to four hours from 6½ hours on the conventional Tokaido express line. With its remarkable zero-passenger fatality safety record and punctuality, the Tokaido Shinkansen also paved the way for bullet trains across Honshu, then Kyushu and Hokkaido.

Wally Higgins saw the shinkansen being built. The 94-year-old American photographer has been shooting pictures of trains in Japan since he first arrived in 1956 as a U.S. military contractor, and recently showed his Kodachrome prints in Tokyo at an exhibition at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. His images portray the early golden age of rail travel in Japan, which really took off when JNR promotional campaigns contributed to a railway boom among individual travelers.

“Japan shows that a country can do quite well with a passenger railway network, because in the United States, Canada, Brazil as well as in other countries, freight pays the way and the passenger business is a sideline,” says Higgins, who watched trains go by his New Jersey home as a child in the 1930s. “I think good connections with urban railways such as subway systems helped make railways in Japan a success.”

While the shinkansen was a landmark in Japan’s rail history, Higgins notes that as Japanese grew wealthier, car ownership was doubling about every four years. That boosted personal mobility but signaled the end of smaller, local railways serving regional areas.

Today, new bullet train lines continue to be built in Kyushu and Hokkaido, along with a cutting-edge but controversial maglev line, the Chuo Shinkansen, that will whisk passengers from Tokyo to Nagoya in just 40 minutes. The line’s official launch date remains unclear amid opposition to construction in Shizuoka Prefecture.

Japanese railway operators, however, have struggled with challenges to their business model. The coronavirus pandemic reduced profitability as passengers limited travel, but longer-term issues such as depopulation and growing car ownership have raised more doubts about the future of local railways.

For the first time since JNR was privatized, a government panel has proposed criteria to review the viability of lines with low ridership. At least 100 sections of 61 railways in the JR Group, not including JR Central lines, fall under the panel’s threshold, suggesting they may join many other rural lines that have been mothballed.

“Railroads and stations cannot stand still with the same business style as before,” says a JR East spokesperson, adding that even before the pandemic, ridership on many company lines had declined to less than half of what it was when the company was established.

JR East is the biggest of the JR Group operators and its vision of the future may be reflective of the industry as a whole.

Under its Beyond Stations concept, the company wants to transform stations into platforms for “connected lifestyles,” linking people, products and services and centering on JR East points. Initiatives include hybrid online, brick-and-mortar shops and health clinics as well as indoor farms operated by artificial intelligence software.

Japan’s railway hubs have come a long way since rickshaws unloaded passengers at the original 1872 Shimbashi Station, which was re-created in 2003 as a tribute to Japan’s rail heritage.

“Perhaps 100 years from now, people will get around in a way that differs from ‘railways,’” the JR East spokesperson said. “Under the mission of ‘connecting and revitalizing regions,’ railway companies have to continue to flexibly transform in line with customer needs, changes in the environment and technological progress.”

Source
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2022/10/10/national/history/japan-railways-150-anniversary/