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.
> 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.
This 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.
JR 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).
> 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
In any country other than Japan, there is zero chance a coherent national railway system would ever arise from such an arrangement. In Japan, the greatest friction is knowing what ticket to buy for which rail. This might sound like a lot, but with all these trains arriving on all these platforms, on time, with plentiful interchanges, in ubiquitous and conveniently located stations... it just becomes a map-reading and ticket-buying problem.
I mean, you kind of betray yourself in your wording. Nobody in America would list off seven rail systems in one city with the expectation that it was only slightly nontrivial to transfer from one rail system to another, in the same New Yorkers would remember which subway letters or numbers transfer to which other subway letters or numbers. In most of the world -- yes, including central Europe -- there's always an unconscious, if not conscious, worry that the train won't show up on time, or not go somewhere, or not go where you want to go, or not allow the transfer you want. Japan simply does not have that. The worst thing that you'll happen is you'll ask someone "nihongo'o wakaramiasuka?" and a friendly person will pop up to help you.
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.
The 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,
Decaying 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 reverse if you cherry pick pools!
The 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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
> 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
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.
Although Japan also has extensive highways, and they're privatized in a similar way to JR (NEXCO East, West, Central) and are nearly all tolled - if you're driving alone, it's often the same price in tolls alone as a ticket on the Shinkansen (but the equation quickly flips when you more people in the car)
The German rail network is chronically underfunded and Germany is completely incapable of building new lines. Per capita spending on rail pales in comparison to e.g. Switzerland and Austria.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
> 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.
This 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
JR 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).
> 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
In any country other than Japan, there is zero chance a coherent national railway system would ever arise from such an arrangement. In Japan, the greatest friction is knowing what ticket to buy for which rail. This might sound like a lot, but with all these trains arriving on all these platforms, on time, with plentiful interchanges, in ubiquitous and conveniently located stations... it just becomes a map-reading and ticket-buying problem.
I mean, you kind of betray yourself in your wording. Nobody in America would list off seven rail systems in one city with the expectation that it was only slightly nontrivial to transfer from one rail system to another, in the same New Yorkers would remember which subway letters or numbers transfer to which other subway letters or numbers. In most of the world -- yes, including central Europe -- there's always an unconscious, if not conscious, worry that the train won't show up on time, or not go somewhere, or not go where you want to go, or not allow the transfer you want. Japan simply does not have that. The worst thing that you'll happen is you'll ask someone "nihongo'o wakaramiasuka?" and a friendly person will pop up to help you.
What does any of that have to do with the article, which is about the branding and logo of JR?
Tech industry needlessly idolizes the country, so you're unfortunately bound to read this slop until the heat death of the universe.
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.
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.
The 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,
Decaying 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 reverse if you cherry pick pools!
Additonally, most foreigners who would comment on HN or Reddit are earning significantly higher than the average Japanese or even Tokyoian.
The 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.
> 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
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?
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.
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.
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/me...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Although Japan also has extensive highways, and they're privatized in a similar way to JR (NEXCO East, West, Central) and are nearly all tolled - if you're driving alone, it's often the same price in tolls alone as a ticket on the Shinkansen (but the equation quickly flips when you more people in the car)
Germany has both the Autobahn and rail.
The German rail network is chronically underfunded and Germany is completely incapable of building new lines. Per capita spending on rail pales in comparison to e.g. Switzerland and Austria.
Germany is roughly the size of Montana, with the population of almost CA and TX combined.
Given the reputation of the phrase "getting deutsche bahn'ed", I think they chose the Autobahn.
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
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.
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.
We had a railway powered country until it was torn down
The US has several areas of high population density that have laughably bad rail networks.
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
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-pro...
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.
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
This is not the time to grind your axe against privatization and inequality.
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
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.