The man who pushed through Japan's bullet train resigned before it opened
In the 1950s many in Japan assumed railways were finished, as America turned to planes and highways. Shinji Sogō, president of Japanese National Railways, argued the opposite and won political backing for a new high-speed line. Its cost nearly doubled, from an estimated 200 billion yen to about 380 billion, and he resigned in 1963 to take responsibility.
The line he championed, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, opened on 1 October 1964, days before the Tokyo Olympics. Limited express trains had taken about 6 hours 40 minutes between Tokyo and Osaka; the new Hikari service needed four hours, later cut to three hours ten minutes as top speed rose from 210 to 220 kilometres an hour. Same-day business trips between the two cities suddenly became possible. The line hit 100 million passengers on 13 July 1967 and a billion in 1976, and in fiscal 2023 alone it carried 161 million.
Japan needed brand-new track more than most countries did. Its older railways used a narrow 1,067 millimetre gauge on winding routes, and narrow gauge forces lower speeds on curves. The word Shinkansen, meaning new main line, first appeared in 1940 for a wartime plan to run standard-gauge trains from Tokyo toward Korea and beyond; that scheme was dropped in 1943, but three tunnels dug for it now carry the Tōkaidō line. The nickname bullet train translates dangan ressha, a term from 1939. Engineering was led by chief engineer Hideo Shima, and three key researchers had designed aircraft during the war.
Geography shapes the trains. Earthquakes, soft ground, mountains, heavy snow and crowded cities mean tighter curves, closer tracks and narrower tunnels than on many foreign lines. When a train enters a small tunnel it compresses air into a pulse that exits with a bang called a tunnel boom, so newer trains have long, sculpted noses to soften it and satisfy strict noise rules.
Today the network covers 2,951.3 kilometres, with trains reaching 320 kilometres an hour on part of the Tōhoku line. An experimental L0 maglev hit 603 kilometres an hour in 2015, and maglev service at 505 is planned between Tokyo and Nagoya.
Source: Shinkansen
