TOKYO Sitting in one secluded, but heavily secured, huge room in Tokyo’s busy Shinkansen station are men glued to the large projector screens monitoring in realtime, every bullet train criss-crossing Japan.
This is the nerve centre of the world’s first and arguably the most modern fast-train network. Here in Tokyo, a bullet train departs every three minutes during the peak period.
Yet, its punctuality is the envy of the world, with average delays measured in just seconds. In its 53 years of operations, there has been zero fatality.
Japan had rolled out its first Shinkansen bullet train on Oct 1, 1964, just in time for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics.
Millions of Japanese were glued to the television to witness this historic event, which, like the Olympics, signalled not just Japan’s post-World War 2 recovery, but ushered what would be Japan’s remarkable rise as an economic superpower.
Tokyo is set to host the next Olympics in 2020, just a year away. Just as Japan’s overall economic transformation, the Shinkansen (literally means “new trunk line”) lies at the very centre of the huge reconstruction effort and changes the face of Japan forever. The inaugural Shin-kansen journey between Tokyo and Osaka — Japan’s two biggest cities by train — had previously taken close to seven hours. The Shinkansen train had made the trip in less than four hours. Over the years, the journey has been cut down further to just two hours 22 minutes, currently.
Japan subsequently extended the Shinkansen network nationwide, a policy promulgated by Kakuei Tanaka, Japan’s prime minister from 1972 to 1974.
Takashi Hara, a political scholar and expert on Japanese railroads, was quoted by the media as saying that the policy was to connect regional areas to Tokyo.
“And that led to the current situation of a national Shinkansen network, which completely changed the face of Japan. Travel times were shortened… making it possible for more convenient business and pleasure trips. But I have to say that the project just made all the (connecting) cities part of Tokyo,” he said.
The Shinkansen, no doubt, is a powerful symbol of Japan’s post-war recovery. But it is also ground-breaking because at the dawn of the jet age when air travel seemed destined to replace everything else, the less sexy train was about to make a comeback.
As the world looked to planes and highways, the Japanese were blasting through difficult terrains, drilling dozens of tunnels and building hundreds of new bridges to build a railway.
But this was not going to be just any railway. It was one of the most ambitious rail projects of the century. The trains on this new line would travel at a speed unparalleled anywhere in the world — almost twice as fast as any existing trains in Japan.
But for all its ambitions, there were detractors, too. Many had dismissed the Shinkasen as ridiculous. A senior Japanese railway official had described the project in 1964 as “the height of madness”. Many had questioned the value of the fast train. But the criticism would soon disappear.
When the first Shinkansen line opened in October 1964, the world took note because the once-profitable inter-city air routes were now being threatened by trains. In just the first three years of service, the Shinkansen carried over 100 million passengers and demand sky-rocketed. The new line did not just better connect Tokyo and Osaka, it also seemly to pull them closer together.
It turned out the Shinkansen was anything but ridiculous because the project proponents were not gambling on some untested new technology. Instead, they adopted the very best proven technology and brilliantly integrated them into one single system.
At 270km per hour, the new Shinkansen train has the highest service speed in the world. Yet speed has never been the real motivation. The Shinkansen has always been about moving a large volume of passengers.
So, the engineers designed the new line to withstand the stress of running 60 high-speed trains in each direction every day, a number that would increase through the years to 358 today.
The introduction of Shinkasen in Japan also changed the way the world saw railways. The success of the Japanese high-speed trains helped inspire other countries, such as France, to develop their own high-speed networks.
Japanese officials say that Japan’s industrial belt has benefited from increased connectivity brought about by the Shinkansen and train network.
“There has been an increase in efficiency of production bases in Japan,” said Dr Makio Miyagawa, Japan’s ambassador to Malaysia.
“This model can be applied to several places in Southeast Asia, particularly as the first step, by Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. We are ready to offer the solution.”
While Shinkansen trains are no longer the fastest in the world, focussing on speed alone is not always true. No other rail system service in the world can match the Shinkansen for safety, efficiency and punctuality.
Since 1964, the Shinkansen has maintained a wonderful safety record, moving billions of people without a single passenger casualty or accident.
For the proponents who forged ahead with getting the first Shinkansen line built 53 years ago, they had the vision of a modern high-speed rail for the world.