9 ms·

How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

188 points by ddrmaxgt37 3mo ago

rramadass 3mo ago
Nakanishi was opposed to treating corporate identity as just a logo and a logotype; instead, he created a framework splitting it into three layers. MI, or Mind Identity, is the philosophy, values, and vision behind a company. BI, or Behavior Identity, is how the company and its people act in the world — the kind of service they provide. And VI, or Visual Identity, is the visual expression of how the mind and behavior identities are manifested. A nice framework for all types of communications.
Liftyee 3mo ago
A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company but in Japan it helped make all these efficient and meticulous changes possible, and avoids issues of privatisation like neglecting maintenance / short term profit maximisation.
- jmspring 3mo ago
  In the west the employee / employer social contract died sometime in the 80s. It's rare, especially in tech, to have employees with decades of tenure. You see Microsoft trying to buyout older employees recently.
  - linguae 3mo ago
    Pre-Carly Fiorina Hewlett-Packard was a great example of an old-school Silicon Valley company, long before the era of “move fast and break things” and of Zuck, Elon, and Altman. I used to work for a Japanese company until I left a few years ago to teach, and when I read about the HP Way, it reminds me in many ways of life at my former employer: https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/publications/measure/pdf/1977_07.pdf https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/publications/me...
    - jmspring 3mo ago
      While in college, my advisor / professor I worked for took me to HP Labs off Page Mill. I recall entering and seeing a sea of cubicles. That said, I enjoyed hearing the stories of those that worked there.
      - c0nsumer 3mo ago
        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.
    - 17383848 3mo ago
      [dead]
      - mitthrowaway2 3mo ago
        It was.
  - Loic 3mo ago
    Here in Europe (I guess you are US based), we still have quite a lot of long tenures. This from my experience in France, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark. The bigger the company, the longer the average tenure. But it is also true that I do not work in tech, I work and am exposed mostly to industrial companies. I have very little experience with "tech" companies.
- sandworm101 3mo ago
  And the concept of company families, of client corporations beholden to larger/older ones. They dont work together because of financial incentives or contractual obligation. The work together because they are fraternal organizations.
- DANmode 3mo ago
  > A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company Diminishingly few. It is a feedback loop.
- captainbland 3mo ago
  The short term profit maximisation thing comes from leadership culture rather than employees per se
  - tokioyoyo 3mo ago
    To be fair, it is the same in Japan.
- d3Xt3r 3mo ago
  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. [1] https://izanau.com/article/view/black-companies-japan https://izanau.com/article/view/black-companies-japan [2] https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/karoshi-deep-look-japans-unforgiving-working-culture https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/karoshi-deep-look-japans-... [3] https://www.jil.go.jp/english/archives/emm/2006/no.74/74_si.html https://www.jil.go.jp/english/archives/emm/2006/no.74/74_si.... [4] https://japantoday.com/category/national/family-files-lawsuit-against-jr-west-after-overworked-employee-commits-suicide https://japantoday.com/category/national/family-files-lawsui... [5] https://www.vice.com/en/article/japan-railways-lawsuit-late/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/japan-railways-lawsuit-late/
  - tokioyoyo 3mo ago
    I agree in general, but keep in mind, a lot of things have changed in Japan in the past 10+ years. Quite a bit of labour law changes and etc.
- killingtime74 3mo ago
  Yeah and we would feel that way in the west if the company didn't lay us off every time the stock market twitched and gave us company housing.
TazeTSchnitzel 3mo ago
I've always thought the JR logo looked like 駅, the kanji for “train station”, and assumed it was deliberate. Perhaps that was a factor in them settling on the JR name?
- razorbeamz 3mo ago
  I think that's just coincidental. I've mentioned it to Japanese people before and they can't see the connection at all.
  - tonyhart7 3mo ago
    well because they see kanji and "english" differently
    - queenkjuul 3mo ago
      So a Japanese designer probably didn't consider it?
      - curiousObject 3mo ago
        They can’t see it even. The part of their brain which interprets Japanese is much bigger and faster. On the other side, visitors who can’t read Japanese can’t do anything but try to interpret those letters in the language they know
tedd4u 3mo ago
Here a link to the best recent HN-featured long-form article on Japan rail network. Probably spent more time with this than any other item posted here in months. “Why Japan has such good railways” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815395
- currydove 3mo ago
  Here's another slightly related topic I wrote on a while ago. Not my best writing but I'm fascinated by this kind of history - https://culturecompiled.com/p/strong-state-capacity-is-a-product https://culturecompiled.com/p/strong-state-capacity-is-a-pro...
jdw64 3mo ago
Reading this article, I get the feeling that a nationally inefficient infrastructure is made to be perceived as a stable one through a single JR mark. Privatization forces people to bear inefficient and high train costs due to misguided policies, but the value of a well-designed brand logo and branding offsets all of that. Looking at the content of the article itself, there are some unsettling points, the dissolution of the national railway, the split into companies, and regional profitability gaps. In other words, that signals regional inequality within Japan. It seems like the question is how the dismantled national railway, broken up for the benefit of traditional construction companies, can be perceived as stable through a single brand. I always think that it's not always the good ones that win; even if it's inefficient, you can learn a lot from how you brand it. It's a good article
- junofan 3mo ago
  This is not the time to grind your axe against privatization and inequality.
  - jdw64 3mo ago
    Doesn't this article exactly make that point? Because it shows how JR was split apart, yet the brand logo still makes it appear as if it's a single unified group, doesn't it? Here's the passage I'm referring to: >'Rail transport in Japan was originally run by Japanese National Railways (JNR). Like many state-owned corporations, it was starting to struggle in the 80s with mounting debt. JNR was losing its advantage over other transport, in both passenger and freight. In the ’80s, the Japanese government began pushing to privatize its state-run monopolies — to reduce the national deficit and improve efficiency across these sectors.'" The article mentions 'improve efficiency,' and that's the part I was looking at. Then it goes on to explain the strength of the brand logo. So the overall point here is, 'How can something that has been broken apart still appear as one?' And I was simply saying that, despite the inefficiencies in that process, the fact that it still comes across as so stable shows that the branding strategy is good.
  - jdw64 3mo ago
    I think you probably wrote that comment because you assumed I was engaging in some kind of ideological axe grinding. But you're only reading the superficial part of this article — the observation that the logo design provides consistency. What I was actually thinking about was why that consistency in the logo design is being emphasized in the first place. It's clearly no longer a single national infrastructure, but rather a corporate one now, and yet it still carries the branding of a 'national' entity. That's what struck me, and it's simply a different perspective
Shitty-kitty 3mo ago
The U.S had the greatest rail network and then we built the Interstate Highway system and abandoned rail. Truth is that nobody funds multiple competing transportation network. Japan chose rail, we chose highways.
- tough 3mo ago
  japan is a small island the US is one of the most extensive and biggest distance from population centers country on earth I tihnk that helps explain the feasiability of train on each country more than inherent choices
  - true_religion 3mo ago
    Civil planning on that scale isn’t about feasibility but about what direction you want to shape the county in. A sparse railway system would leave parts of the country less populated by design as it’s simply harder to get to them. People would bunch up into cities and towns because they had to.
    - sylos 3mo ago
      We had a railway powered country until it was torn down
  - adrianN 3mo ago
    The US has several areas of high population density that have laughably bad rail networks.
  - cael450 3mo ago
    It’s not just about size. Much of the U.S. would be cheaper to build rail networks because there is a lot of open, relatively flat land without dense building on it. Japan is very mountainous and has a lot of dense development, and it has to be more resilient in case of earthquakes.
- linguae 3mo ago
  Germany has both the Autobahn and rail.
socalgal2 3mo ago
It's always frustrating to read anything by most foreigners about Japanese trains. There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong. The title, "How Japan's railways stayed one" is just false. They were never one, they are still not one. Take Tokyo, off the top of my head there is Toei, Tobu, Odakyu, Keio, Seibu, Tokyu, Keikyu, Tokyo Metro, ... and JR If you're in Shibuya. You can take JR (4 lines: Yamanote, Saikyo, Shinjuku-Shonan, N-EX), Keio (1 line: Inokashira), Eiden (3 lines: Ginza, Hanzomon, Fukutoshin), Toyku (2 lines: Den-en-toshi, Toyoko) Or Osaka, there's Hanshin, Hankyu, Kentetsu, Nankai, ... and JR Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private. Even JR's 7 are now private and they were originally private, there was a middle period where the government took them over. It was the period where they nearly went bankrupt, had extremely bad performance.
- Klonoar 3mo ago
  Tech industry needlessly idolizes the country, so you're unfortunately bound to read this slop until the heat death of the universe.
  - alephnerd 3mo ago
    It's an age thing. Most HNers are in their 30s-50s so would have been impressed by Japan in the 1990s-2000s. Japan is a decent country but everyone who writes about it tends to overindex on the posh parts of Tokyo.
    - tjpnz 3mo ago
      As someone who's lived in Tokyo for 10 years it's largely met my expectations. My living situation is far more modern than the western country I'm from, even if my suburb looks a bit plain (my only real complaint is that there's too much concrete and not enough trees). Would even go as far as to say many comments about the place being trapped in the 80s or 90s don't match reality. For instance, the only time I've ever been asked to use a fax machine was by a US company.
vladsiu 3mo ago
[dead]
waterTanuki 3mo ago
Something I don't see mentioned in this article is the nation-wide adoption of a universal transit-payment system: IC Card (Suica is only one of several companies, but often used colloquially to mean train card). This makes it so easy to board any bus/ferry/train without worrying about setting up 30 different accounts each with its own card system. I've lived in Japan for 4 years now and it was a bit of a culture shock travelling to Germany where I had to have a different pass/app for the various buses and trains. The U.S.'s public transit buildout is slow but happening, and I worry it's falling into the same trap. I'd like to see a federal bill requiring all private/public transit to use the same universal payment scheme accepted in Japan in order to get federal funding for their projects.
- ddrmaxgt37 3mo ago
  Been wanting to write about this. The graph of interoperability agreements that makes this possible is crazy. My first visit to Japan, there were still places that would only accept a subset of IC cards and not all.
- historical1234 3mo ago
  The IC card system is one of those things people don't appreciate until they travel somewhere without it. I remember reading that interoperability between Suica, Pasmo, ICOCA and the others didn't happen overnight. A lot of agreements had to be worked out between companies that were technically competitors. It's interesting how much invisible coordination goes into making a system feel simple
- kalleboo 3mo ago
  Although I'm seeing more and more public transit around the world (including Japan) adopting tap-to-pay so you can use your regular debit/credit cards.
  - netsharc 3mo ago
    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.
Pooge 3mo ago
For those of you planning to go to Japan, please make sure you actually calculate how much JR train trips would cost you. They upped the price a few years ago and, since then, it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets. For one of my recent trips, I was actually more better served with a local pass (Kansai Wide Pass) than the JR Pass. Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...
- euroderf 3mo ago
  > Too bad because it used to be a really good deal... Considering the environmental woes & collapses coming down the pike, I'd like to see a trans-border effort to drive down the price of mass transit _everywhere_. Put it on the G7 agenda, the OECD agenda, the UN General Assembly agenda, ...
  - Pooge 3mo ago
    Trains can use renewable energy.
    - Pooge 3mo ago
      I just realized I interpreted your comment the opposite way you intended... Apologies
  - lukan 3mo ago
    This is exactly the reason why in germany we have now a broad ticket for short distance trains. Government realized they fail to meet EU regulations in reducing CO2, so they rushed to implement a cheap german wide ticket. Initially just 10€, now 60€ a month. Still a bargain, you can go anywhere as mich forth and back as you want (just not the dedicated long distance trains, so going through all of germany takes a bit longer).
    - jojomodding 3mo ago
      You can tell this is a true success in Germany because 95% of local passengers now use it. It also caused a significant increase in ridership, putting the already overloaded rail system under a lot more pressure while taking away income from the rail companies (after making it cheaper).
historical1234 3mo ago
[flagged]
ezconnect 3mo ago
There are some section of a train line where 4 stations are owned by someone else and they change names along the same rail route. They also change the driver or whatever he is called when changing the company name of the train.
greatgib 3mo ago
My personal experience of the multiple operators in Tokyo while traveling there only once for tourism was that it is a mess and not very convenient for users. Like having a station with almost a same name but different operator, a few hundred meters or a km away. And the difficulty of commuting between lines.
- decimalenough 3mo ago
  Confusing, perhaps. Inconvenient, not really, the same Suica/Pasmo cards work everywhere and handle transfers seamlessly.
  - netsharc 3mo ago
    Yeah, if a tourist refuses to have a Suica/Pasmo card, they're going to be quite inconvenienced. Also, Mt. Fuji Station and Fuji Station are 2h30m apart: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Mt.Fuji+Station,+2+Chome-5-1+Kamiyoshida,+Fujiyoshida,+Yamanashi+403-0005,+Japan/Fuji+Station,+1+Honcho,+Fuji,+Shizuoka+416-0914,+Japan/@35.3847989,138.3621114,10z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x601960cde99d6979:0x1701b521bd89b0a6!2m2!1d138.7958044!2d35.4835262!1m5!1m1!1s0x601a2b4e54db5471:0xe3314146d0254033!2m2!1d138.6512133!2d35.1514968!3e3?hl=en&entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDYxNi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Mt.Fuji+Station,+2+Chome-5-1...
decimalenough 3mo ago
If you're interested in a deep dive into all this, Substack Bahn has a series on the history of JR: https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-years-of https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-ye... (and note the links to the earlier pieces at the beginning)
creatorpilot 3mo ago
[flagged]
CurryFurry 3mo ago
[flagged]
- decimalenough 3mo ago
  The miracle of Indian Railways is largely that it operates despite the numerous challenges of operating any business in India. The sheer passenger volume of something like the Mumbai suburban railways (7.5 million passengers per day!) is mind-boggling.
metalman 3mo ago
It reads like fucking science fiction about an improbable alternate universe where everybody grows up into intelliegent well adjusted indivuals that can express themselves in a group without focusing on conflict and meaningless competition. Any where else in the "universe" this has lead to corporate standoffs and litigation that has fall out for generations, and even killings and corporate subsidised wars in the developing world. Except of course China, where the level of engineering prowess and scale of machinery and projects is rapidly building out a backbone transport system for themselves, and there customers.ie: they can lay down new, high speed rail lines, ready for use, at a steady walking pace, and are, at multiple locations in China and in other countrys.
- decafninja 3mo ago
  It's taboo to speak about, but both Japan and China are homogenous societies and enjoy the benefits that brings. China a bit less so than Japan, but still much more than the US or Western Europe. Plus even the minorities are still phenotypically more or less similar looking to the majorities. China also enjoys the benefits of being an autocratic nation.
  - metalman 3mo ago
    Japan is still a mono culture, living on islands, China is anything but, though they have exactly one rule for everybody, which is "dont mess with the brand", ie : you can have a sub culture as long as nobody else notices. And WOW do they have a bunch of subcultures nobody notices, because they dont want any attention, that bieng realy bad mojo and so survial is to not exist in any overt or competitive way.
    - decafninja 3mo ago
      Most of the people of those subcultures are phenotypically not too different looking than the dominant Han ethnicity though. Like you said, the fact that China is authoritarian is a big factor in all of this. The "melting pot" West does have numerous phenotypically similar caucasian subcultures, but also many non-caucasian ones that do not look phenotypically alike at all.
akashwadhwani35 3mo ago
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 https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo
- emursebrian 3mo ago
  Eki-melos are the things that I really liked about taking trains in Japan. The chirping bird sounds to help blind users find their way to and from the platforms is also a pretty interesting design decision.
  - bdamm 3mo ago
    Personally I loved it. The Japanese aesthetic is subtle and delightful. Also, riding my bicycle in the countryside with very few traffic signs to mar the view. Just the necessary ones, at exactly the right places. They assume you are not an idiot, and somehow it all works out!
panny 3mo ago
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.
bobson381 3mo ago
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.

188 points by ddrmaxgt37 3mo ago

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

Liftyee 3mo ago

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

jmspring 3mo ago
In the west the employee / employer social contract died sometime in the 80s. It's rare, especially in tech, to have employees with decades of tenure. You see Microsoft trying to buyout older employees recently.
- linguae 3mo ago
  Pre-Carly Fiorina Hewlett-Packard was a great example of an old-school Silicon Valley company, long before the era of “move fast and break things” and of Zuck, Elon, and Altman. I used to work for a Japanese company until I left a few years ago to teach, and when I read about the HP Way, it reminds me in many ways of life at my former employer: https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/publications/measure/pdf/1977_07.pdf https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/publications/me...
  - jmspring 3mo ago
    While in college, my advisor / professor I worked for took me to HP Labs off Page Mill. I recall entering and seeing a sea of cubicles. That said, I enjoyed hearing the stories of those that worked there.
    - c0nsumer 3mo ago
      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.
  - 17383848 3mo ago
    [dead]
    - mitthrowaway2 3mo ago
      It was.
- Loic 3mo ago
  Here in Europe (I guess you are US based), we still have quite a lot of long tenures. This from my experience in France, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark. The bigger the company, the longer the average tenure. But it is also true that I do not work in tech, I work and am exposed mostly to industrial companies. I have very little experience with "tech" companies.
sandworm101 3mo ago
And the concept of company families, of client corporations beholden to larger/older ones. They dont work together because of financial incentives or contractual obligation. The work together because they are fraternal organizations.
DANmode 3mo ago
> A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company Diminishingly few. It is a feedback loop.
captainbland 3mo ago
The short term profit maximisation thing comes from leadership culture rather than employees per se
- tokioyoyo 3mo ago
  To be fair, it is the same in Japan.
d3Xt3r 3mo ago
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. [1] https://izanau.com/article/view/black-companies-japan https://izanau.com/article/view/black-companies-japan [2] https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/karoshi-deep-look-japans-unforgiving-working-culture https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/karoshi-deep-look-japans-... [3] https://www.jil.go.jp/english/archives/emm/2006/no.74/74_si.html https://www.jil.go.jp/english/archives/emm/2006/no.74/74_si.... [4] https://japantoday.com/category/national/family-files-lawsuit-against-jr-west-after-overworked-employee-commits-suicide https://japantoday.com/category/national/family-files-lawsui... [5] https://www.vice.com/en/article/japan-railways-lawsuit-late/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/japan-railways-lawsuit-late/
- tokioyoyo 3mo ago
  I agree in general, but keep in mind, a lot of things have changed in Japan in the past 10+ years. Quite a bit of labour law changes and etc.
killingtime74 3mo ago
Yeah and we would feel that way in the west if the company didn't lay us off every time the stock market twitched and gave us company housing.

TazeTSchnitzel 3mo ago

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

razorbeamz 3mo ago
I think that's just coincidental. I've mentioned it to Japanese people before and they can't see the connection at all.
- tonyhart7 3mo ago
  well because they see kanji and "english" differently
  - queenkjuul 3mo ago
    So a Japanese designer probably didn't consider it?
    - curiousObject 3mo ago
      They can’t see it even. The part of their brain which interprets Japanese is much bigger and faster. On the other side, visitors who can’t read Japanese can’t do anything but try to interpret those letters in the language they know

tedd4u 3mo ago

Here a link to the best recent HN-featured long-form article on Japan rail network. Probably spent more time with this than any other item posted here in months. “Why Japan has such good railways” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815395 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815395

currydove 3mo ago
Here's another slightly related topic I wrote on a while ago. Not my best writing but I'm fascinated by this kind of history - https://culturecompiled.com/p/strong-state-capacity-is-a-product https://culturecompiled.com/p/strong-state-capacity-is-a-pro...

jdw64 3mo ago

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

junofan 3mo ago
This is not the time to grind your axe against privatization and inequality.
- jdw64 3mo ago
  Doesn't this article exactly make that point? Because it shows how JR was split apart, yet the brand logo still makes it appear as if it's a single unified group, doesn't it? Here's the passage I'm referring to: >'Rail transport in Japan was originally run by Japanese National Railways (JNR). Like many state-owned corporations, it was starting to struggle in the 80s with mounting debt. JNR was losing its advantage over other transport, in both passenger and freight. In the ’80s, the Japanese government began pushing to privatize its state-run monopolies — to reduce the national deficit and improve efficiency across these sectors.'" The article mentions 'improve efficiency,' and that's the part I was looking at. Then it goes on to explain the strength of the brand logo. So the overall point here is, 'How can something that has been broken apart still appear as one?' And I was simply saying that, despite the inefficiencies in that process, the fact that it still comes across as so stable shows that the branding strategy is good.
- jdw64 3mo ago
  I think you probably wrote that comment because you assumed I was engaging in some kind of ideological axe grinding. But you're only reading the superficial part of this article — the observation that the logo design provides consistency. What I was actually thinking about was why that consistency in the logo design is being emphasized in the first place. It's clearly no longer a single national infrastructure, but rather a corporate one now, and yet it still carries the branding of a 'national' entity. That's what struck me, and it's simply a different perspective

Shitty-kitty 3mo ago

The U.S had the greatest rail network and then we built the Interstate Highway system and abandoned rail. Truth is that nobody funds multiple competing transportation network. Japan chose rail, we chose highways.

tough 3mo ago
japan is a small island the US is one of the most extensive and biggest distance from population centers country on earth I tihnk that helps explain the feasiability of train on each country more than inherent choices
- true_religion 3mo ago
  Civil planning on that scale isn’t about feasibility but about what direction you want to shape the county in. A sparse railway system would leave parts of the country less populated by design as it’s simply harder to get to them. People would bunch up into cities and towns because they had to.
  - sylos 3mo ago
    We had a railway powered country until it was torn down
- adrianN 3mo ago
  The US has several areas of high population density that have laughably bad rail networks.
- cael450 3mo ago
  It’s not just about size. Much of the U.S. would be cheaper to build rail networks because there is a lot of open, relatively flat land without dense building on it. Japan is very mountainous and has a lot of dense development, and it has to be more resilient in case of earthquakes.
linguae 3mo ago
Germany has both the Autobahn and rail.

socalgal2 3mo ago

It's always frustrating to read anything by most foreigners about Japanese trains. There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong. The title, "How Japan's railways stayed one" is just false. They were never one, they are still not one. Take Tokyo, off the top of my head there is Toei, Tobu, Odakyu, Keio, Seibu, Tokyu, Keikyu, Tokyo Metro, ... and JR If you're in Shibuya. You can take JR (4 lines: Yamanote, Saikyo, Shinjuku-Shonan, N-EX), Keio (1 line: Inokashira), Eiden (3 lines: Ginza, Hanzomon, Fukutoshin), Toyku (2 lines: Den-en-toshi, Toyoko) Or Osaka, there's Hanshin, Hankyu, Kentetsu, Nankai, ... and JR Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private. Even JR's 7 are now private and they were originally private, there was a middle period where the government took them over. It was the period where they nearly went bankrupt, had extremely bad performance.

Klonoar 3mo ago
Tech industry needlessly idolizes the country, so you're unfortunately bound to read this slop until the heat death of the universe.
- alephnerd 3mo ago
  It's an age thing. Most HNers are in their 30s-50s so would have been impressed by Japan in the 1990s-2000s. Japan is a decent country but everyone who writes about it tends to overindex on the posh parts of Tokyo.
  - tjpnz 3mo ago
    As someone who's lived in Tokyo for 10 years it's largely met my expectations. My living situation is far more modern than the western country I'm from, even if my suburb looks a bit plain (my only real complaint is that there's too much concrete and not enough trees). Would even go as far as to say many comments about the place being trapped in the 80s or 90s don't match reality. For instance, the only time I've ever been asked to use a fax machine was by a US company.

vladsiu 3mo ago

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waterTanuki 3mo ago

Something I don't see mentioned in this article is the nation-wide adoption of a universal transit-payment system: IC Card (Suica is only one of several companies, but often used colloquially to mean train card). This makes it so easy to board any bus/ferry/train without worrying about setting up 30 different accounts each with its own card system. I've lived in Japan for 4 years now and it was a bit of a culture shock travelling to Germany where I had to have a different pass/app for the various buses and trains. The U.S.'s public transit buildout is slow but happening, and I worry it's falling into the same trap. I'd like to see a federal bill requiring all private/public transit to use the same universal payment scheme accepted in Japan in order to get federal funding for their projects.

ddrmaxgt37 3mo ago
Been wanting to write about this. The graph of interoperability agreements that makes this possible is crazy. My first visit to Japan, there were still places that would only accept a subset of IC cards and not all.
historical1234 3mo ago
The IC card system is one of those things people don't appreciate until they travel somewhere without it. I remember reading that interoperability between Suica, Pasmo, ICOCA and the others didn't happen overnight. A lot of agreements had to be worked out between companies that were technically competitors. It's interesting how much invisible coordination goes into making a system feel simple
kalleboo 3mo ago
Although I'm seeing more and more public transit around the world (including Japan) adopting tap-to-pay so you can use your regular debit/credit cards.
- netsharc 3mo ago
  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.

Pooge 3mo ago

For those of you planning to go to Japan, please make sure you actually calculate how much JR train trips would cost you. They upped the price a few years ago and, since then, it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets. For one of my recent trips, I was actually more better served with a local pass (Kansai Wide Pass) than the JR Pass. Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...

euroderf 3mo ago
> Too bad because it used to be a really good deal... Considering the environmental woes & collapses coming down the pike, I'd like to see a trans-border effort to drive down the price of mass transit _everywhere_. Put it on the G7 agenda, the OECD agenda, the UN General Assembly agenda, ...
- Pooge 3mo ago
  Trains can use renewable energy.
  - Pooge 3mo ago
    I just realized I interpreted your comment the opposite way you intended... Apologies
- lukan 3mo ago
  This is exactly the reason why in germany we have now a broad ticket for short distance trains. Government realized they fail to meet EU regulations in reducing CO2, so they rushed to implement a cheap german wide ticket. Initially just 10€, now 60€ a month. Still a bargain, you can go anywhere as mich forth and back as you want (just not the dedicated long distance trains, so going through all of germany takes a bit longer).
  - jojomodding 3mo ago
    You can tell this is a true success in Germany because 95% of local passengers now use it. It also caused a significant increase in ridership, putting the already overloaded rail system under a lot more pressure while taking away income from the rail companies (after making it cheaper).

historical1234 3mo ago

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ezconnect 3mo ago

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

greatgib 3mo ago

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

decimalenough 3mo ago
Confusing, perhaps. Inconvenient, not really, the same Suica/Pasmo cards work everywhere and handle transfers seamlessly.
- netsharc 3mo ago
  Yeah, if a tourist refuses to have a Suica/Pasmo card, they're going to be quite inconvenienced. Also, Mt. Fuji Station and Fuji Station are 2h30m apart: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Mt.Fuji+Station,+2+Chome-5-1+Kamiyoshida,+Fujiyoshida,+Yamanashi+403-0005,+Japan/Fuji+Station,+1+Honcho,+Fuji,+Shizuoka+416-0914,+Japan/@35.3847989,138.3621114,10z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x601960cde99d6979:0x1701b521bd89b0a6!2m2!1d138.7958044!2d35.4835262!1m5!1m1!1s0x601a2b4e54db5471:0xe3314146d0254033!2m2!1d138.6512133!2d35.1514968!3e3?hl=en&entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDYxNi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Mt.Fuji+Station,+2+Chome-5-1...

decimalenough 3mo ago

If you're interested in a deep dive into all this, Substack Bahn has a series on the history of JR: https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-years-of https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-ye... (and note the links to the earlier pieces at the beginning)

creatorpilot 3mo ago

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CurryFurry 3mo ago

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decimalenough 3mo ago
The miracle of Indian Railways is largely that it operates despite the numerous challenges of operating any business in India. The sheer passenger volume of something like the Mumbai suburban railways (7.5 million passengers per day!) is mind-boggling.

metalman 3mo ago

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

decafninja 3mo ago
It's taboo to speak about, but both Japan and China are homogenous societies and enjoy the benefits that brings. China a bit less so than Japan, but still much more than the US or Western Europe. Plus even the minorities are still phenotypically more or less similar looking to the majorities. China also enjoys the benefits of being an autocratic nation.
- metalman 3mo ago
  Japan is still a mono culture, living on islands, China is anything but, though they have exactly one rule for everybody, which is "dont mess with the brand", ie : you can have a sub culture as long as nobody else notices. And WOW do they have a bunch of subcultures nobody notices, because they dont want any attention, that bieng realy bad mojo and so survial is to not exist in any overt or competitive way.
  - decafninja 3mo ago
    Most of the people of those subcultures are phenotypically not too different looking than the dominant Han ethnicity though. Like you said, the fact that China is authoritarian is a big factor in all of this. The "melting pot" West does have numerous phenotypically similar caucasian subcultures, but also many non-caucasian ones that do not look phenotypically alike at all.

akashwadhwani35 3mo ago

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 https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo

emursebrian 3mo ago
Eki-melos are the things that I really liked about taking trains in Japan. The chirping bird sounds to help blind users find their way to and from the platforms is also a pretty interesting design decision.
- bdamm 3mo ago
  Personally I loved it. The Japanese aesthetic is subtle and delightful. Also, riding my bicycle in the countryside with very few traffic signs to mar the view. Just the necessary ones, at exactly the right places. They assume you are not an idiot, and somehow it all works out!

panny 3mo ago

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.

bobson381 3mo ago

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.