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Japan's fast train is 50 years old

Japan of 2014 is clearly a troubled nation -– and I will remind the reader about only a few key components of its peculiar situation. The country is still rich by any global standard but its national debt is far higher than that in any other affluent country, and rising, and in 2014 its economy has been chronically close to, or actually in, a deflationary recession. Japan is still the world’s third largest economy, but after decades of huge trade surpluses it is now running substantial trade deficits. The cause of these deficits goes beyond the post-Fukushima need for higher imports of oil and gas: offshoring of Japan’s manufacturing has seen widespread loss of capacities and jobs, and many jobs have become part-time and temporary. Japan is still home to famous global brands (Toyota, Honda, Nikon) but performance of some of these companies has been tainted by poor quality products and corporate scandals (financial fraud by Olympus, massive recalls of Toyota cars, Takata’s deficient airbags installed in millions of vehicles) and some firms that were previously pioneers of widely admired technical advances and the envy of corporate managers (Sony, Panasonic, Fujitsu) now face chronic difficulties, if they are not nearly bankrupt.

Japan’s life expectancy retains its global primacy but concerns about the future delivery of affordable health care lead to bizarre attempts to robotize hospital tasks rather than open up the country to much needed immigration of skilled labor to provide medical and welfare support. Economic ties with its two most important Asian neighbors, China and South Korea, have deepened during the past generation -– but so have mutual recriminations and accusations and, for the first time in decades, fears of actual armed confrontation in the case of China and Japan. And above it all hang the implications of the world’s fastest-aging and now also inexorably declining population, a demographic destiny that will not be reversed by government appeals to marry early, have two children and move out of Tokyo.

Amidst this deepening angst one 2014 anniversary deserved much more attention, and considerably more praise, than it had received: on October 1, 1964 the first rapid train of Japan’s new trunk line (shinkansen) left Tōkyō for Ōsaka –- and the first fifty years of its increasingly more frequent and faster service have been completed without a single fatal accident. Europeans, starting with the French and their TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) and the Germans with their InterCity Express, eventually began to copy Japan’s great example, and, most recently, rapidly modernizing China became the world’s most extensive builder of rapid trains while North America’s passenger trains remain embarrassingly old-fashioned, unreliable and slow. Why did Japan take the lead –- and has its commitment to rapid trains paid off , or is it yet another bottomless pit swallowing government subsidies?

Read entire article at Japan Focus- Asia-Pacific Journal