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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 oth
by socalgal2 4mo 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 4mo agoTech industry needlessly idolizes the country, so you're unfortunately bound to read this slop until the heat death of the universe.
- alephnerd 4mo agoIt'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 4mo agoAs 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.
- pibaker 4mo agoThe decaying rural areas of Japan would probably love to be stuck in the 80s if they can. Too late, now they have hollowed out and everyone young is moving to the same cities most tourists stay at. Every time you read a story about some Japanese town offering people, even foreigners, money to move there and occupy an abandoned house, keep in mind this is a gesture of desperation, not gratitude,
- alephnerd 4mo agoAdditonally, most foreigners who would comment on HN or Reddit are earning significantly higher than the average Japanese or even Tokyoian.
- tjpnz 4mo agoThe people you're probably thinking of are working in finance or Japanese mega venture/US tech companies. They make up a vanishingly small percent of foreigners working in Japan.
- alephnerd 4mo ago> finance Most finance roles in Japan almost exclusively hire Japanese nationals > Japanese mega venture/US tech companies They don't tend to hire foreigners in most cases except for Chinese (Taiwanese and Mainland) and Koreans
- golemiprague 4mo ago[dead]
- harrall 4mo agoDecaying rural areas happen in every country, throughout history, throughout time. It’s just how the world works. The only reason it recently reversed in the US was due to COVID. Second, many countries are modern in some ways and backwards in some other way. To label a country as modern or not is silly. Here how it works: I build a porch today and my neighbor builds a pool. In 30 years, he builds a porch but I build a pool. If you cherry pick porches, I look outdated and he looks modern, but it’s reversed if you cherry pick pools!
- Klonoar 4mo agoIt’s not just an age thing; the younger part of the tech industry has the same issues.
- queenkjuul 4mo agoWhile i am admittedly in my 30s-50s i don't believe this to be an age problem; Japan is still held on a pedestal in a lot of American pop culture
- throwaway2037 4mo agoYou don't think the reverse is also true? When you see Japanese people write about the United States, it is pretty similar -- they tend to overindex on the posh parts of major cities, like Manhattan, Honolulu, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
- alephnerd 4mo agoThe posh parts of America are suburbs or outer neighborhoods, not the inner city which is where most visitors end up staying. For example, when you visit the San Francisco Bay Area, the actual posh areas are Marin, the Tri-Valley, and the hill adjacent areas of South Bay suburbs (eg. Woodside, Atherton, Saratoga, Los Altos, Los Gatos, Foster City, San Mateo). Your average Japanese or other foreign visitor isn't visiting or staying in those suburbs nor would they be able to afford the hotel fees for hotels in those areas. This is a major reason why Japan and Euro-trips have become fairly common amongst younger Americans now - renting a decent 4 start hotel room or Airbnb in a posh area of Japan that is out of reach for most Japanese comes out roughly the same as a middle-of-the-pack experience in the US because an American median salary is double the Japanese or European one.
- akimbostrawman 4mo agoIts because deep down they know japan has something which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country.
- d5lt5 4mo ago"which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country" Arguably the ideology and hate are prerequisites for a country to have a monoculture. With ideology and hate comes xenophobia and racism == monoculture.
- akimbostrawman 4mo ago[flagged]
- bluebarbet 4mo agoThis comment clearly does not meet HN benchmarks for civility and good faith.
- d5lt5 4mo agoUSA is a melting pot and is not viewed as a monocultural country.
- creaturemachine 4mo agoIts leadership sure doesn't see things that way.
- klausa 4mo ago>If you love different cultures you want them to continue to exit independent of each other to preserve them. The only outcome of a melting pot is literally a monoculture by design. This only makes sense if you think as "culture" as an immutable snapshot in time, which is... sure, I guess, a point of view to hold, though not a particularly interesting one.
- pibaker 4mo agoThis article is about the JR branding and design, not train operations. The title may be overstating the case, but the content is definitely not drawing over generalized conclusions about railroads in Japan. Not to mention the idea that JR is only 7% of Japanese railroad makes little sense in real life. JR carries a majority of rail passengers in Japan. The long tail of non JR railroad companies in Japan are small, regional operators owning maybe one or two lines with infrequent services. Many of them are also private only in the sense that they are incorporated in the same way as private companies. But if you dig a little around you will find out they are actually owned by local governments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-sector_railway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-sector_railway
- socalgal2 4mo agoJR is big, but 62% of passenger volume is not JR and that remaining 38% is split by 7 companies Further, in the big metro areas, the private trains do just fine. JR East is #1, Tokyo Metro is #2, JR West is #3, Tokyu is #4, ... the next JR, JR Central is down at #9 with #5 #6 #7 #8 all private. Tokyo Metro is private, Toei (is the city run subway, it has 4 lines as is far down the list).
- queenkjuul 4mo agoAt least where i live, subways and railways aren't really considered to be the same thing
- bobthepanda 4mo agoJapan operates a kind of hybrid system where the subway (at least in Tokyo) mostly consists of tracks that connect to private operators on either end, and a train will just run through from the private parts of the track to the subway parts with no interruption whatsoever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_through_trains_in_Japan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_through_trains_in_Japa...
- klausa 4mo agoThe line gets really blurry in some places in Tokyo. Asakusa (one of "my" lines!) line, is definitely a subway inside central Tokyo, but you can stay on the same physical train going all the way from Narita to Haneda (think RER in Paris?) — I think it would be qualified as "light rail" anywhere else in the world.
- gryson 4mo agoWhat does any of that have to do with the article, which is about the branding and logo of JR?
- lmm 4mo ago> There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong. JR is a whole lot more than 7% of trains (downthread you claim 38% of passengers, but even that understates things; over 60% of passenger-km are with JR). > Eiden Not what it's called lol. > Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private. Yes and no. Other operators are structured as private companies but often have significant public ownership, and even those that are notionally 100% privately owned often have strong ties with the political system via the keiretsu system, and always collaborate very closely with local and national governments in practice. E.g. fares are regulated, not simply set at "what the market will bear" levels; conversely the government provides a lot of legal support and subsidy for building new lines.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- razorbeamz 4mo agoYeah, it's always obvious when this kind of thing is written by someone who has only ever been to Japan as a tourist, if they have at all. Just a deep fundamental misunderstanding of how things work.
- nihonde 4mo ago> "Hanshin, Hankyu, Kentetsu, Nankai" Also Keihan. And most, if not all, of these companies have huge land and real estate development projects generating non-rail income all up and down their lines.
- N_Lens 4mo agoWhy are you frustrated when you didn’t even read the article?