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Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger

606 points by hudibras 11y ago

CydeWeys 11y ago
Well it's not that much different from a school bus that only picks up a single student at a particular bus stop, right?
- jeswin 11y ago
  a) The primary function of a school bus is to pick up children. The Railways have different priorities. b) Of course, way more expensive (operationally and financially) to run a train and maintain a railway line. Add: This story made my day.
  - tempestn 11y ago
    Technically it just says the station is closing. It's possible the line will remain operational. (The train might be going by there anyway.) Although it did say the schedule was adjusted for the student, so maybe not. Edit, ah, so I guess a bunch of trains go by, and adjusting the schedule basically means deciding which trains stop at that station, not changing when trains run.
    - hkmurakami 11y ago
      Japanese Twitter tells me that once this station closes, there will be a 40 minute section of the railway that won't have any stops. The line itself will remain operational.
      - rtkwe 11y ago
        Looking at Google Maps the change won't be terribly drastic in reality [0] unless the station just over 3 km further down the line closes too. For a person walking it's a decent distance but for the rest of the passengers there would be very little change. Of course the same could be said for pretty much any station that closed between there before now. [0] https://goo.gl/maps/cqZBrzvjJJk https://goo.gl/maps/cqZBrzvjJJk
        hkmurakami 11y ago
        Unfortunately my source is second hand as well from a Japanese discussion thread, so my information may be faulty. One possibility is that the station 3km away is already out of operation (and I do recall someone posting that a nearby station did already shut down). In either case I think you are right that for 99% of the passenger life will go on as it always has.
    - pcurve 11y ago
      There are still plenty of stops before and after. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kami-Shirataki+Station/@43.876495,143.1431023,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0xb12990146a8e54ea https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kami-Shirataki+Station/@43... Kamikawa station to the west actually has sizeable population.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  That's a really good analogy. No one's manning the station and the structure already exists so the marginal cost is pretty low.
  - canthonytucci 11y ago
    Monetary cost, sure. What about the cost on the environment to slow the train down and bring it back up to speed?
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - kalleboo 11y ago
      Way less than the cost to the environment of her parents driving her to school in a car
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        And definitely safer, too.
    - Gibbon1 11y ago
      I'm guessing very small train, probably 30ton weight. Max speed 33m/s. So accelerating 30,000 kg to 33m/s... what E = 1/2 * 30000 * 33^2 = 16335000J or 4.5kwhr at $0.20 kwhr that's about $0.90 in electricity costs.
- pcurve 11y ago
  considering the time it takes to decelerate, stop, accelerate, making this stop adds at least a full minute or minute and a half to one way journey. Everybody who is taking the train during the same leg as her, is essentially chipping in 1 minute of their time to support her transportation. And I think that's just beautiful.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Consider also the energy it takes to do those maneuvers. And that the station needs to be maintained; even though it doesn't seem to be staffed, the cost of keeping it in shape over many years was likely nonzero. I am not a train expert, but I suppose that stations require additional infrastructure - like lights and semaphores - which also needs to be maintained and regularly tested. Then you can start pricing in the opportunity cost of the land that could be sold or put to different use. And the organizational overhead of adjusting schedules to match the girl's lesson plan. It adds up to some considerable costs, of which the company management was surely aware... ...and yet they chose to ignore it. That is indeed just beautiful.
    - jsmeaton 11y ago
      They were already paying it though. It wasn't an additional cost they had to make. It was a cost they chose not to cut for a period of 3 years. I agree with you, it is beautiful.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- sandworm101 11y ago
  When I was little I lived in the country for a while. I was the only kid at my stop. But at least when I got on the bus it was full of other kids, most of whom were also the only kid at each of their stops. This girl is the only person on the train.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    I don't think that the article implies anywhere that this girl is the only person on the train. She is just the only passenger on her station.
    - sandworm101 11y ago
      Maybe something is being lost in translation, but the article starts with: "The train makes only two stops—one when a lone high-school student leaves for school and the other when she returns." The train makes two stops, rather than "the train stops here only twice". Both may be true, but the initial statement describes actions of the train rather than the station.
      - hkmurakami 11y ago
        That's definitely mistranslated. It's the station that only has two times of the day when the train stops there.
      - Gracana 11y ago
        Looks like they changed it: "The train stops there only twice a day—once to pick up the girl and again to drop her off after the school day is over."
      - rtkwe 11y ago
        It's not the only stop, or even the last stop of the train, at least as it looks on google maps. It's just a poorly worded statement I think. https://goo.gl/maps/cqZBrzvjJJk https://goo.gl/maps/cqZBrzvjJJk
sandworm101 11y ago
Only girl in the village? They are going to close the line when she graduates. Therefore we can surmise there aren't any other younger girls. So much for having a social life. There are parts of Japan where children just aren't around anymore. Towns are becoming extended retirement homes. That's the truly depressing side of this story. At least this is happening today, when the few remaining kids in such situations can connect via technology.
- gizmo686 11y ago
  She she does travel to high school, so presumably she sees kids her age regularly. And presumably she also has access to the rest of the public transportation that does not go the the highschool (unless she is the only one in the town to use public transportation to go anywhere), so she can still socialize in other places. Plus, she can socialize with people not her age.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  Generally speaking, the population of Japan is going down and the population of the Greater Tokyo area is going up. Once youth hits college or working age, they disproportionately head for the capitol. But then there's a small counter current where younger (say, 30's) are moving back to their original prefectures as they realize that they might be able to afford a better QoL making less money but also paying much less in expenditures.
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    I hope some move back. From what I've seen/heard, the countryside is suffering radical population shifts. The following article has some great graphs to illustrate the point. There is a giant dip in the 20s (school) and a terrifying peak in the 55-60 range. But the greatest disparity is that there are many many more old (70s) than teenagers in the countryside. Across the nation those two groups are roughly equal. http://www.tofugu.com/2015/03/06/japanese-countryside-emptying/ http://www.tofugu.com/2015/03/06/japanese-countryside-emptyi...
    - 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
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TeMPOraL 11y ago
Lovely story. Hats off to Japan Railways. I'm also happy that The Atlantic/Citylab decided to publish this story. And thanks 'hudibras for submitting it here! They say that it's the money that makes the world turn, and love only keeps it together. It would be easy for the Railways to ignore that girl. There's no economical reason to keep that station open. It's a waste of time and resources. And yet, someone decided to make that random act of kindness, for a single passenger. It's a symbol. It represents the best side of our nature. That even in this big and complex world, full of heavy machines and complicated systems, we're still humans, and we care for one another. That we aren't slaves to the processes we brought into existence. Random acts of kindness like that are happening every day around us. I think that as a society, we need to pay more attention to them. They bring hope and inspiration, which is infinitely better than yet another outrage. And that girl, she will have one hell of a story to tell to her future friends. -- The article links to a Facebook page with some more photos: https://www.facebook.com/cctvnewschina/posts/1109784289062390 https://www.facebook.com/cctvnewschina/posts/110978428906239...
- quintin 11y ago
  You just made my day.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  The thing is, they (the headline) say "Japan", but this only happened because it's way out in the countryside where people have a "village mentality" of helping each other out (but the trade off is that everyone sticks their nose in your business). Japan railways itself split into several separate companies upon privatization. This would never happen in Tokyo. As much as we think of the country as being monolithic (in many ways it is), there are great differences between different regions of the country (much like any country). Tokyo is a place where a train being 2 minutes late causes ire (and a train conductor once killed himself for a mistake as trivial as this). It's a place where if a person jumps into the train to kill themselves, many will curse under their breaths about being late to work. It's a place where if you faint in the train concourse during the morning rush hour, no one will stop to help you. It's a place where young mothers with strollers are given stinkeye on public transit. If you ask someone (in fluent Japanese) to take a photo for you, you will often be completely ignored. Tokyo is cold. I agree with you that this story represents the good in us all. But Japan is like a black box to those who don't live there. I would caution you against idolizing it on a national level as a result of stories like this.
c3534l 11y ago
Wouldn't it be both cheaper, and friendlier to the environment to hire a person chauffeur for her? This is outrageously inefficient. Public transport only becomes worth it when it achieves relatively high ridership.
- xyzzy4 11y ago
  It would be even friendlier to the environment if she wasn't formally educated. Will educating her really provide that much for society to make it worthwhile?
  - shripadk 11y ago
    Your statement reminds me of a quote from a wise man: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10867178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10867178
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  This station is on an existing, operational line that would run trains on the tracks even if she weren't there (and this is what is going to happen once she graduates). So the marginal cost of stopping at this station is actually not that large.
  - c3534l 11y ago
    I was under the impression that it was the line that was underused, not just a stop on the line. I suppose that makes things pretty different, especially since I think Japanese lines tend to go out farther to pick people up in general.
- ayuvar 11y ago
  The train is already going past the existing station, so I would imagine the additional cost of supporting the station for the two times a day the train stops there is relatively small - additional brake dust in the air, some extra energy burned. It wouldn't surprise me if the accounting/management, HR and maintenance overhead for the station was higher than the cost of having the train make an extra stop twice a day. It is a little surprising the station appears to be staffed based on the picture of the train schedule, but there is something to be said for producing that extra job. I am sure the station master who resides in that office is really happy it still exists.
pmiller2 11y ago
There's a general term for these things: ghost stations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_station).
- facetube 11y ago
  BBC covered a similar situation in Britain. One of the arguments for keeping them running: inactive lines quickly fall in to disrepair (physically or legally/procedurally), which could actually end up costing more, assuming demand is projected to increase and the line would have to be reopened. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-secret-ghost-trains http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-sec...
  - jamessb 11y ago
    Also, the cost of actually closing a station is not negligible. From the same article: Closing down a line is cumbersome. There must first be a transport appraisal analysing the effect of a closure on passengers, the environment and the economy. The proposal is submitted to the Department of Transport and at that point its details must be published in the press, six months ahead of the closure. Then comes a 12-week consultation period, during which time anyone is welcome to protest; public hearings are sometimes held, especially if the closure is controversial. Then, finally, the plans are submitted to the Office of Rail and Road, who decide if the line closes. As a result it often costs less – in terms of time, paperwork and taxpayers’ money – to keep a line running at a bare minimum.
  - m-i-l 11y ago
    Indeed. There was a discussion about these on HN last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936028 .
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
hngiszmo 11y ago
Heart-warming story but too much praise for the government for my taste. What are the opportunity costs of not shutting down this platform years ago? And of getting the train delayed by 40s twice a day for who knows how many passengers plus some minor costs like acceleration, meetings to change the schedule etc. Considering all this it would almost certainly be cheaper to provide her with a taxi at the train cost, maybe only to the next train stop. Maybe given the choice of getting a taxi twice a day or getting the compensation in cash, the girl would even have taken the money and moved closer to school.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > Heart-warming story but too much praise for the government for my taste. I found it weird too after I Googled some more and learned that the Japan Railways[0] is a group of companies that were the result of privatization of national railway system. But I've seen a similar phenomenon in Poland - even though our rail system has also been mostly privatized, people tend to think and talk about it like it's still a government service. I guess that it's because in some places, the concept of "infrastructure" generally pattern-matches to "government". About your second paragraph - the most heartwarming thing I could imagine about this story would be learning that the company did in fact take into account everything you wrote and then decided to just ignore it. We are homo sapiens, not homo economicus. We have a capacity to care about other people, and caring is an economical inefficiency. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railways_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railways_Group
- mrob 11y ago
  Social equality has value. Other people might be resentful if she were given cash or a taxi. Keeping the station open is a strong signal of support for treating people equally. People who approve of this will have an improved opinion of Japan Railways, and that goodwill has value too.
  - canthonytucci 11y ago
    I'm not sure I follow. I understood it that they're keeping the station open solely for her and stopping the train to align with her schedule. They're not (to my knowledge) doing this for anyone else, so it seems to me like she's being given extra special treatment that has a net negative (albeit small) effect on the other users of the system and the environment. It made me smile though.
desdiv 11y ago
>“Why should I not want to die for a country like this when the government is ready to go an extra mile just for me,” one commenter wrote on CCTV’s Facebook page. “This is the meaning of good governance penetrating right to the grassroot level. Every citizen matters. No Child left behind!” Ironically, the railway is a private one, i.e. Japan Railways Hokkaido[0] is private corporation, not a government agency. And yet the company executives, and to a lesser extent, the shareholders, okayed this arrangement. I can't imagine this happening anywhere outside of Japan. There's a similar phenomenon in the UK called "ghost trains"[1] that's only superficially similar. Basically there's a ton of bureaucracy in closing down a line, so instead of actually closing a line, we just run an unscheduled and unannounced "ghost train" through it once a week. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkaido_Railway_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkaido_Railway_Company [1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-secret-ghost-trains http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-sec...
- Symbiote 11y ago
  "Ghost trains" in the UK are scheduled and announced, they're just easy to miss, as almost all are at the beginning or end of service, often the first train of the day out of the depot.
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Japan Railways Hokkaido[0] is private corporation, not a government agency Notionally. In practice, their operations are fairly minutely controlled -- sorry, "guided" -- by various levels of government, which explains, among many other things, why the JRs continue to operate tons of lines that are loss-making.
  - pilsetnieks 11y ago
    It's public transportation, it's heavily regulated by national and/or municipal governments in most countries.
- 7952 11y ago
  In Britain there are also 150 odd request stops that you have to flag the train down.
droithomme 11y ago
This is very nice and part of Japanese culture. People focus on asian cultures as being communal, but part of asian communal thinking is actually great respect for the striving of the lone individual. The train stops here until she graduates and then the stop will be retired. It's a reasonable decision, even if not an economic one.
Animats 11y ago
Japan keeps the entire island of Hokkaido running for too few people.[1] The population is dropping rapidly. Most infrastructure is funded nationally, and the rest of the country pays for Hokkaido. Partly because it's only about 12 miles from Russia at the closest point, and Japan doesn't want Russia moving in. [1] http://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a03802/ http://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a03802/
- dermotbrennan 11y ago
  I'm Irish and out of interest I looked up the area of Hokkaido to see how it compares to the island of Ireland and they're actually pretty close - Hokkaido is 83,453KM2 with a population of 5.5M versus Ireland 84,421KM2 with 6.3M. So it is funny to me when you say "Japan keeps the entire island of Hokkaido running for too few people". Of course, Irelands population is growing while Hokkaido's is dropping...
- jzwinck 11y ago
  The rest of Japan also really, really loves Hokkaido. From dairy products to lavender to summer vacation to alpine skiing. Maybe not that many people call Hokkaido home, but tons of Japanese call it paradise. As for me, I called it the hardest of four islands on which to find a vacant hotel room.
baldajan 11y ago
This story, like many, brings warm feelings to me. I lived in Japan for 5 mo during a student exchange (Kyoto) and I can say, that even though there was at least 3-4 different train lines operated by different companies in Kyoto alone, it was still a joy to use (even though I did complain at why so many train cos on the region from time to time). It's also a nice change of tone of the eminent doom of Japan written by so many. Like so many countries, Japan has its faults, but it also has a very bright side.
mback00 11y ago
Political connections - nufsed.
mback00 11y ago
Please use Occam's razor: student that can maintain her anonymity in the face of this report + bureacracy that maintains a service for /one/ person = Political connections
- jtolmar 11y ago
  That's not how Occam's razor works. Neither explanation - political connections vs kindness - is simpler than the other. You're just using a more prestigious-sounding name for cynicism.
- krapp 11y ago
  Occam's Razor would imply someone with "political connections" would have the wherewithal for more convenient alternatives, such as moving closer to school.
elcapitan 11y ago
This is similar in some parts of the Eastern German countryside, where population is going down and the pragmatic solution for transport is to have buttons in regional trains (like in busses in cities) that you can use to stop at old stations where basically nobody lives anymore.
osoti 11y ago
World’s top ten coldest places..Must read http://goo.gl/TeWZPf http://goo.gl/TeWZPf
han_stimme 11y ago
That's such a warm story and especially this is from the largest Chinese TV press CCTV. Being as a Chinese, years ago the news of Japan were always about politics, island disputes, refusing to apologize for WWII etc. It is good to have something positive and nice about the neighbor. Wish the world would become less biased to any country.
rangibaby 11y ago
Japan is exotic enough from a Western perspective that outsiders often have an exaggerated opinion of it, both positive and negative. The next time you see someone gushing about how wonderful Japan is or complaining about how the country never "paid" for WWII or how Japan is doomed because (old people, Fukushima, etc) please try to remember that it is a normal country with human beings living there that is pretty much like anywhere else in the world.
Aandre 11y ago
Most spooky places around the globe you must visit..http://goo.gl/rU2qMU http://goo.gl/rU2qMU
accpass09 11y ago
Japan need mass third world immigration, you can't stay so homogenus for this long. Not acceptable for a first world country to do. They must take responsibility like Sweden, there is war now and they must accept refugees from Syria and rest of the middle east.
- k__ 11y ago
  On the other hand it's a good big scale experiment. Lets wait 20-40 years and see who got it worse.
rms_returns 11y ago
Yeah, most developed countries are like that. I remember visiting England in 2010 for my company work and the city buses used to ply even with two passengers on board! OTOH, in the country where I live (India), private vehicles won't ply unless they are compressed upto 70% of the capacity! That's the BEP where they could make even a meager profit!
ommunist 11y ago
Clever PR. However, there are many homeless children in Japan. Where are trains for them?
ekianjo 11y ago
if they only want to serve her, it would be much cheaper to have a taxi or a shuttle bus drive for her morning and evening. To me this is another example of Japan's everlasting inefficiencies long after things stop making sense. Just like every company in Japan keeps fax machines at work just because, you know, they have to.
lazyant 11y ago
Nice. Train stops 7am and 5pm, sure schoolchildren have long days in Japan.
irixusr 11y ago
This story is another example of how mismanaged the Japanese rail system has become. It would be cheaper, and more environmentally friendly, to pick this girl up in a Escalade limousine, provide a tutor to review her lesson plan, and then have the car idle in the parking lot all day. We can have a conversation about how changing demographics have created this situation. Whether or not the urbanization of Japanese society is a good thing. On the future role of trains in Japan. Why Japanese are giving up on sex and baby making (kinda hard to maintain and justify an infrastructure built for 150 million people when your pop. is shrinking at 0.7% annually). But this story should not be lauded, as it is a symptom of the sickness of their society today.
jmadsen 11y ago
Just went to post this and see it has 564pts already - so glad others find this as important as I do.
paki123 11y ago
Why does Japan always have great shit like this?
paki123 11y ago
Why does Japan always have great shit like this?
linhchi 11y ago
There is an article saying this romanticized story is a bit too much: http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/remote-hokkaido-train-station-stays-open-for-one-high-school-girl-perhaps-not http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/remote-hokkaido-t...

606 points by hudibras 11y ago

Well it's not that much different from a school bus that only picks up a single student at a particular bus stop, right?

jeswin 11y ago
a) The primary function of a school bus is to pick up children. The Railways have different priorities. b) Of course, way more expensive (operationally and financially) to run a train and maintain a railway line. Add: This story made my day.
- tempestn 11y ago
  Technically it just says the station is closing. It's possible the line will remain operational. (The train might be going by there anyway.) Although it did say the schedule was adjusted for the student, so maybe not. Edit, ah, so I guess a bunch of trains go by, and adjusting the schedule basically means deciding which trains stop at that station, not changing when trains run.
  - hkmurakami 11y ago
    Japanese Twitter tells me that once this station closes, there will be a 40 minute section of the railway that won't have any stops. The line itself will remain operational.
    - rtkwe 11y ago
      Looking at Google Maps the change won't be terribly drastic in reality [0] unless the station just over 3 km further down the line closes too. For a person walking it's a decent distance but for the rest of the passengers there would be very little change. Of course the same could be said for pretty much any station that closed between there before now. [0] https://goo.gl/maps/cqZBrzvjJJk https://goo.gl/maps/cqZBrzvjJJk
      - hkmurakami 11y ago
        Unfortunately my source is second hand as well from a Japanese discussion thread, so my information may be faulty. One possibility is that the station 3km away is already out of operation (and I do recall someone posting that a nearby station did already shut down). In either case I think you are right that for 99% of the passenger life will go on as it always has.
  - pcurve 11y ago
    There are still plenty of stops before and after. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kami-Shirataki+Station/@43.876495,143.1431023,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x0:0xb12990146a8e54ea https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kami-Shirataki+Station/@43... Kamikawa station to the west actually has sizeable population.
hkmurakami 11y ago
That's a really good analogy. No one's manning the station and the structure already exists so the marginal cost is pretty low.
- canthonytucci 11y ago
  Monetary cost, sure. What about the cost on the environment to slow the train down and bring it back up to speed?
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - kalleboo 11y ago
    Way less than the cost to the environment of her parents driving her to school in a car
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      And definitely safer, too.
  - Gibbon1 11y ago
    I'm guessing very small train, probably 30ton weight. Max speed 33m/s. So accelerating 30,000 kg to 33m/s... what E = 1/2 * 30000 * 33^2 = 16335000J or 4.5kwhr at $0.20 kwhr that's about $0.90 in electricity costs.
pcurve 11y ago
considering the time it takes to decelerate, stop, accelerate, making this stop adds at least a full minute or minute and a half to one way journey. Everybody who is taking the train during the same leg as her, is essentially chipping in 1 minute of their time to support her transportation. And I think that's just beautiful.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Consider also the energy it takes to do those maneuvers. And that the station needs to be maintained; even though it doesn't seem to be staffed, the cost of keeping it in shape over many years was likely nonzero. I am not a train expert, but I suppose that stations require additional infrastructure - like lights and semaphores - which also needs to be maintained and regularly tested. Then you can start pricing in the opportunity cost of the land that could be sold or put to different use. And the organizational overhead of adjusting schedules to match the girl's lesson plan. It adds up to some considerable costs, of which the company management was surely aware... ...and yet they chose to ignore it. That is indeed just beautiful.
  - jsmeaton 11y ago
    They were already paying it though. It wasn't an additional cost they had to make. It was a cost they chose not to cut for a period of 3 years. I agree with you, it is beautiful.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
sandworm101 11y ago
When I was little I lived in the country for a while. I was the only kid at my stop. But at least when I got on the bus it was full of other kids, most of whom were also the only kid at each of their stops. This girl is the only person on the train.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  I don't think that the article implies anywhere that this girl is the only person on the train. She is just the only passenger on her station.
  - sandworm101 11y ago
    Maybe something is being lost in translation, but the article starts with: "The train makes only two stops—one when a lone high-school student leaves for school and the other when she returns." The train makes two stops, rather than "the train stops here only twice". Both may be true, but the initial statement describes actions of the train rather than the station.
    - hkmurakami 11y ago
      That's definitely mistranslated. It's the station that only has two times of the day when the train stops there.
    - Gracana 11y ago
      Looks like they changed it: "The train stops there only twice a day—once to pick up the girl and again to drop her off after the school day is over."
    - rtkwe 11y ago
      It's not the only stop, or even the last stop of the train, at least as it looks on google maps. It's just a poorly worded statement I think. https://goo.gl/maps/cqZBrzvjJJk https://goo.gl/maps/cqZBrzvjJJk

sandworm101 11y ago

Only girl in the village? They are going to close the line when she graduates. Therefore we can surmise there aren't any other younger girls. So much for having a social life. There are parts of Japan where children just aren't around anymore. Towns are becoming extended retirement homes. That's the truly depressing side of this story. At least this is happening today, when the few remaining kids in such situations can connect via technology.

gizmo686 11y ago
She she does travel to high school, so presumably she sees kids her age regularly. And presumably she also has access to the rest of the public transportation that does not go the the highschool (unless she is the only one in the town to use public transportation to go anywhere), so she can still socialize in other places. Plus, she can socialize with people not her age.
hkmurakami 11y ago
Generally speaking, the population of Japan is going down and the population of the Greater Tokyo area is going up. Once youth hits college or working age, they disproportionately head for the capitol. But then there's a small counter current where younger (say, 30's) are moving back to their original prefectures as they realize that they might be able to afford a better QoL making less money but also paying much less in expenditures.
- sandworm101 11y ago
  I hope some move back. From what I've seen/heard, the countryside is suffering radical population shifts. The following article has some great graphs to illustrate the point. There is a giant dip in the 20s (school) and a terrifying peak in the 55-60 range. But the greatest disparity is that there are many many more old (70s) than teenagers in the countryside. Across the nation those two groups are roughly equal. http://www.tofugu.com/2015/03/06/japanese-countryside-emptying/ http://www.tofugu.com/2015/03/06/japanese-countryside-emptyi...
  - 11y ago

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TeMPOraL 11y ago

Lovely story. Hats off to Japan Railways. I'm also happy that The Atlantic/Citylab decided to publish this story. And thanks 'hudibras for submitting it here! They say that it's the money that makes the world turn, and love only keeps it together. It would be easy for the Railways to ignore that girl. There's no economical reason to keep that station open. It's a waste of time and resources. And yet, someone decided to make that random act of kindness, for a single passenger. It's a symbol. It represents the best side of our nature. That even in this big and complex world, full of heavy machines and complicated systems, we're still humans, and we care for one another. That we aren't slaves to the processes we brought into existence. Random acts of kindness like that are happening every day around us. I think that as a society, we need to pay more attention to them. They bring hope and inspiration, which is infinitely better than yet another outrage. And that girl, she will have one hell of a story to tell to her future friends. -- The article links to a Facebook page with some more photos: https://www.facebook.com/cctvnewschina/posts/1109784289062390 https://www.facebook.com/cctvnewschina/posts/110978428906239...

quintin 11y ago
You just made my day.
hkmurakami 11y ago
The thing is, they (the headline) say "Japan", but this only happened because it's way out in the countryside where people have a "village mentality" of helping each other out (but the trade off is that everyone sticks their nose in your business). Japan railways itself split into several separate companies upon privatization. This would never happen in Tokyo. As much as we think of the country as being monolithic (in many ways it is), there are great differences between different regions of the country (much like any country). Tokyo is a place where a train being 2 minutes late causes ire (and a train conductor once killed himself for a mistake as trivial as this). It's a place where if a person jumps into the train to kill themselves, many will curse under their breaths about being late to work. It's a place where if you faint in the train concourse during the morning rush hour, no one will stop to help you. It's a place where young mothers with strollers are given stinkeye on public transit. If you ask someone (in fluent Japanese) to take a photo for you, you will often be completely ignored. Tokyo is cold. I agree with you that this story represents the good in us all. But Japan is like a black box to those who don't live there. I would caution you against idolizing it on a national level as a result of stories like this.

c3534l 11y ago

Wouldn't it be both cheaper, and friendlier to the environment to hire a person chauffeur for her? This is outrageously inefficient. Public transport only becomes worth it when it achieves relatively high ridership.

xyzzy4 11y ago
It would be even friendlier to the environment if she wasn't formally educated. Will educating her really provide that much for society to make it worthwhile?
- shripadk 11y ago
  Your statement reminds me of a quote from a wise man: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10867178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10867178
hkmurakami 11y ago
This station is on an existing, operational line that would run trains on the tracks even if she weren't there (and this is what is going to happen once she graduates). So the marginal cost of stopping at this station is actually not that large.
- c3534l 11y ago
  I was under the impression that it was the line that was underused, not just a stop on the line. I suppose that makes things pretty different, especially since I think Japanese lines tend to go out farther to pick people up in general.
ayuvar 11y ago
The train is already going past the existing station, so I would imagine the additional cost of supporting the station for the two times a day the train stops there is relatively small - additional brake dust in the air, some extra energy burned. It wouldn't surprise me if the accounting/management, HR and maintenance overhead for the station was higher than the cost of having the train make an extra stop twice a day. It is a little surprising the station appears to be staffed based on the picture of the train schedule, but there is something to be said for producing that extra job. I am sure the station master who resides in that office is really happy it still exists.

pmiller2 11y ago

There's a general term for these things: ghost stations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_station).

facetube 11y ago
BBC covered a similar situation in Britain. One of the arguments for keeping them running: inactive lines quickly fall in to disrepair (physically or legally/procedurally), which could actually end up costing more, assuming demand is projected to increase and the line would have to be reopened. http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-secret-ghost-trains http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-sec...
- jamessb 11y ago
  Also, the cost of actually closing a station is not negligible. From the same article: Closing down a line is cumbersome. There must first be a transport appraisal analysing the effect of a closure on passengers, the environment and the economy. The proposal is submitted to the Department of Transport and at that point its details must be published in the press, six months ahead of the closure. Then comes a 12-week consultation period, during which time anyone is welcome to protest; public hearings are sometimes held, especially if the closure is controversial. Then, finally, the plans are submitted to the Office of Rail and Road, who decide if the line closes. As a result it often costs less – in terms of time, paperwork and taxpayers’ money – to keep a line running at a bare minimum.
- m-i-l 11y ago
  Indeed. There was a discussion about these on HN last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9936028 .
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hngiszmo 11y ago

Heart-warming story but too much praise for the government for my taste. What are the opportunity costs of not shutting down this platform years ago? And of getting the train delayed by 40s twice a day for who knows how many passengers plus some minor costs like acceleration, meetings to change the schedule etc. Considering all this it would almost certainly be cheaper to provide her with a taxi at the train cost, maybe only to the next train stop. Maybe given the choice of getting a taxi twice a day or getting the compensation in cash, the girl would even have taken the money and moved closer to school.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> Heart-warming story but too much praise for the government for my taste. I found it weird too after I Googled some more and learned that the Japan Railways[0] is a group of companies that were the result of privatization of national railway system. But I've seen a similar phenomenon in Poland - even though our rail system has also been mostly privatized, people tend to think and talk about it like it's still a government service. I guess that it's because in some places, the concept of "infrastructure" generally pattern-matches to "government". About your second paragraph - the most heartwarming thing I could imagine about this story would be learning that the company did in fact take into account everything you wrote and then decided to just ignore it. We are homo sapiens, not homo economicus. We have a capacity to care about other people, and caring is an economical inefficiency. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railways_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railways_Group
mrob 11y ago
Social equality has value. Other people might be resentful if she were given cash or a taxi. Keeping the station open is a strong signal of support for treating people equally. People who approve of this will have an improved opinion of Japan Railways, and that goodwill has value too.
- canthonytucci 11y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. I understood it that they're keeping the station open solely for her and stopping the train to align with her schedule. They're not (to my knowledge) doing this for anyone else, so it seems to me like she's being given extra special treatment that has a net negative (albeit small) effect on the other users of the system and the environment. It made me smile though.

desdiv 11y ago

>“Why should I not want to die for a country like this when the government is ready to go an extra mile just for me,” one commenter wrote on CCTV’s Facebook page. “This is the meaning of good governance penetrating right to the grassroot level. Every citizen matters. No Child left behind!” Ironically, the railway is a private one, i.e. Japan Railways Hokkaido[0] is private corporation, not a government agency. And yet the company executives, and to a lesser extent, the shareholders, okayed this arrangement. I can't imagine this happening anywhere outside of Japan. There's a similar phenomenon in the UK called "ghost trains"[1] that's only superficially similar. Basically there's a ton of bureaucracy in closing down a line, so instead of actually closing a line, we just run an unscheduled and unannounced "ghost train" through it once a week. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkaido_Railway_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkaido_Railway_Company [1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-secret-ghost-trains http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-sec...

Symbiote 11y ago
"Ghost trains" in the UK are scheduled and announced, they're just easy to miss, as almost all are at the beginning or end of service, often the first train of the day out of the depot.
jpatokal 11y ago
Japan Railways Hokkaido[0] is private corporation, not a government agency Notionally. In practice, their operations are fairly minutely controlled -- sorry, "guided" -- by various levels of government, which explains, among many other things, why the JRs continue to operate tons of lines that are loss-making.
- pilsetnieks 11y ago
  It's public transportation, it's heavily regulated by national and/or municipal governments in most countries.
7952 11y ago
In Britain there are also 150 odd request stops that you have to flag the train down.

droithomme 11y ago

This is very nice and part of Japanese culture. People focus on asian cultures as being communal, but part of asian communal thinking is actually great respect for the striving of the lone individual. The train stops here until she graduates and then the stop will be retired. It's a reasonable decision, even if not an economic one.

Animats 11y ago

Japan keeps the entire island of Hokkaido running for too few people.[1] The population is dropping rapidly. Most infrastructure is funded nationally, and the rest of the country pays for Hokkaido. Partly because it's only about 12 miles from Russia at the closest point, and Japan doesn't want Russia moving in. [1] http://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a03802/ http://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a03802/

dermotbrennan 11y ago
I'm Irish and out of interest I looked up the area of Hokkaido to see how it compares to the island of Ireland and they're actually pretty close - Hokkaido is 83,453KM2 with a population of 5.5M versus Ireland 84,421KM2 with 6.3M. So it is funny to me when you say "Japan keeps the entire island of Hokkaido running for too few people". Of course, Irelands population is growing while Hokkaido's is dropping...
jzwinck 11y ago
The rest of Japan also really, really loves Hokkaido. From dairy products to lavender to summer vacation to alpine skiing. Maybe not that many people call Hokkaido home, but tons of Japanese call it paradise. As for me, I called it the hardest of four islands on which to find a vacant hotel room.

baldajan 11y ago

This story, like many, brings warm feelings to me. I lived in Japan for 5 mo during a student exchange (Kyoto) and I can say, that even though there was at least 3-4 different train lines operated by different companies in Kyoto alone, it was still a joy to use (even though I did complain at why so many train cos on the region from time to time). It's also a nice change of tone of the eminent doom of Japan written by so many. Like so many countries, Japan has its faults, but it also has a very bright side.

mback00 11y ago

Political connections - nufsed.

mback00 11y ago

Please use Occam's razor: student that can maintain her anonymity in the face of this report + bureacracy that maintains a service for /one/ person = Political connections

jtolmar 11y ago
That's not how Occam's razor works. Neither explanation - political connections vs kindness - is simpler than the other. You're just using a more prestigious-sounding name for cynicism.
krapp 11y ago
Occam's Razor would imply someone with "political connections" would have the wherewithal for more convenient alternatives, such as moving closer to school.

elcapitan 11y ago

This is similar in some parts of the Eastern German countryside, where population is going down and the pragmatic solution for transport is to have buttons in regional trains (like in busses in cities) that you can use to stop at old stations where basically nobody lives anymore.

osoti 11y ago

World’s top ten coldest places..Must read http://goo.gl/TeWZPf http://goo.gl/TeWZPf

han_stimme 11y ago

That's such a warm story and especially this is from the largest Chinese TV press CCTV. Being as a Chinese, years ago the news of Japan were always about politics, island disputes, refusing to apologize for WWII etc. It is good to have something positive and nice about the neighbor. Wish the world would become less biased to any country.

rangibaby 11y ago

Japan is exotic enough from a Western perspective that outsiders often have an exaggerated opinion of it, both positive and negative. The next time you see someone gushing about how wonderful Japan is or complaining about how the country never "paid" for WWII or how Japan is doomed because (old people, Fukushima, etc) please try to remember that it is a normal country with human beings living there that is pretty much like anywhere else in the world.

Aandre 11y ago

Most spooky places around the globe you must visit..http://goo.gl/rU2qMU http://goo.gl/rU2qMU

accpass09 11y ago

Japan need mass third world immigration, you can't stay so homogenus for this long. Not acceptable for a first world country to do. They must take responsibility like Sweden, there is war now and they must accept refugees from Syria and rest of the middle east.

k__ 11y ago
On the other hand it's a good big scale experiment. Lets wait 20-40 years and see who got it worse.

rms_returns 11y ago

Yeah, most developed countries are like that. I remember visiting England in 2010 for my company work and the city buses used to ply even with two passengers on board! OTOH, in the country where I live (India), private vehicles won't ply unless they are compressed upto 70% of the capacity! That's the BEP where they could make even a meager profit!

ommunist 11y ago

Clever PR. However, there are many homeless children in Japan. Where are trains for them?

ekianjo 11y ago

if they only want to serve her, it would be much cheaper to have a taxi or a shuttle bus drive for her morning and evening. To me this is another example of Japan's everlasting inefficiencies long after things stop making sense. Just like every company in Japan keeps fax machines at work just because, you know, they have to.

lazyant 11y ago

Nice. Train stops 7am and 5pm, sure schoolchildren have long days in Japan.

irixusr 11y ago

This story is another example of how mismanaged the Japanese rail system has become. It would be cheaper, and more environmentally friendly, to pick this girl up in a Escalade limousine, provide a tutor to review her lesson plan, and then have the car idle in the parking lot all day. We can have a conversation about how changing demographics have created this situation. Whether or not the urbanization of Japanese society is a good thing. On the future role of trains in Japan. Why Japanese are giving up on sex and baby making (kinda hard to maintain and justify an infrastructure built for 150 million people when your pop. is shrinking at 0.7% annually). But this story should not be lauded, as it is a symptom of the sickness of their society today.

jmadsen 11y ago

Just went to post this and see it has 564pts already - so glad others find this as important as I do.

paki123 11y ago

Why does Japan always have great shit like this?

paki123 11y ago

Why does Japan always have great shit like this?

linhchi 11y ago

There is an article saying this romanticized story is a bit too much: http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/remote-hokkaido-train-station-stays-open-for-one-high-school-girl-perhaps-not http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/remote-hokkaido-t...