How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

by ddrmaxgt37 • 1 month ago

188 142 1 month ago

rramadass• 1 month ago

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.

Liftyee• 1 month ago

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.

jmspring2• 1 month ago

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.

linguae2• 1 month ago

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...

Loic• 1 month ago

Here in Europe (I guess you are US based), we still have quite a lot of long tenures. This from my experience in France, Germany, Switzerland and Denmark. The bigger the company, the longer the average tenure.

But it is also true that I do not work in tech, I work and am exposed mostly to industrial companies. I have very little experience with "tech" companies.

sandworm101• 1 month ago

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.

DANmode• 1 month ago

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.

captainbland• 1 month ago

The short term profit maximisation thing comes from leadership culture rather than employees per se

tokioyoyo2• 1 month ago

To be fair, it is the same in Japan.

d3Xt3r• 1 month ago

The flip side of that cultural sense of duty is unfortunately a rise in "black" companies (ブラック企業, burakku kigyo) and employee exploitation[1] leading to very long working hours (often unpaid) and high karojisatsu rates (suicide from overwork / stressful working conditions)[2].

At least in the past, companies like JR East were known for their worker exploitation and unfair policies, leading to decades of hostile labor disputes with Kokuro (the National Railway Workers' Union)[3].

In 2013, a family sued JR West after an overworked employee committed suicide. The family claimed he worked over 100 hours a month, and that during some months, he worked over 254 hours of overtime[4].

Japanese trains are renowned for being extremely punctual, but operators often punish employees for the smallest mistakes. They fine employees if the train is delayed by even a single minute, leading to one driver suing JR West in 2021[5].

I know the west likes to romanticise Japanese culture, but the reality of the working culture in Japan is far from romantic.

[1] https://izanau.com/article/view/black-companies-japan

[2] https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/karoshi-deep-look-japans-...

[3] https://www.jil.go.jp/english/archives/emm/2006/no.74/74_si....

[4] https://japantoday.com/category/national/family-files-lawsui...

[5] https://www.vice.com/en/article/japan-railways-lawsuit-late/

tokioyoyo2• 1 month ago

I agree in general, but keep in mind, a lot of things have changed in Japan in the past 10+ years. Quite a bit of labour law changes and etc.

killingtime74• 1 month ago

Yeah and we would feel that way in the west if the company didn't lay us off every time the stock market twitched and gave us company housing.

TazeTSchnitzel• 1 month ago

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?

razorbeamz2• 1 month ago

I think that's just coincidental. I've mentioned it to Japanese people before and they can't see the connection at all.

tonyhart7• 1 month ago

well because they see kanji and "english" differently

tedd4u• 1 month ago

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

currydove• 1 month ago

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...

jdw643• 1 month ago

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

peyton• 1 month ago

This is not the time to grind your axe against privatization and inequality.

jdw643• 1 month ago

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.

jdw643• 1 month ago

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

Shitty-kitty2• 1 month ago

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.

tough• 1 month ago

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

true_religion• 1 month ago

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.

adrianN2• 1 month ago

The US has several areas of high population density that have laughably bad rail networks.

cael450• 1 month ago

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.

linguae2• 1 month ago

Germany has both the Autobahn and rail.

adrianN2• 1 month ago

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.

trains39472• 1 month ago

Given the reputation of the phrase "getting deutsche bahn'ed", I think they chose the Autobahn.

kalleboo2• 1 month ago

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)

armada651• 1 month ago

This is a big difference with much of the U.S. and Europe, Japan doesn't subsidize car ownership as heavily. There is no on-street parking in the city, businesses aren't required to provide parking and if you want to own a car you first have to prove you have a parking space for it.

denkmoon• 1 month ago

Rail is hardly abandoned in the US, the US has a top tier _freight_ rail network. It's just passenger rail that sucks big balls in the US.

toast02• 1 month ago

Rail is great when you have a lot of people or things moving on the same path.

Highways are great when everyone has a different path.

Japan has most (but not all) of its large destinations on the pacific coast, which works great for rail.

I'm sure passenger rail networks used to have more routing options than amtrak does now, but it's hard to get between a lot of places by rail without going through Chicago. In the western US, you can go north/south in the pacific states or near the missisipi. Sure mountains are hard to cross, but there's no north/south in the plains either... Or Atlanta to Florida, etc.

queenkjuul5• 1 month ago

Air is exactly the same but there are connections to everywhere from Kansas or Montana or wherever. I really think the rail situation in the US is primarily lack of investment. And it sucks; even here in Chicago where the connections are plentiful, the schedules and frequency are awful.

iso16312• 1 month ago

The US did not abandon rail, it just used it for freight

Europe shifts people by train, not freight.

The US/Canada/Mexico is about 10% more than the EU, but it shifts 7 times as much freight by rail.

woodruffw• 1 month ago

It’s both: the US rail network is (currently) geared for freight, and we’ve systematically removed or neglected the parts that favored passenger rail.

Tangurena2• 1 month ago

Rail companies were rather abusive - because they could get away with it. Also, shipping freight was much more profitable/easier/simpler than shipping people. When the interstate system was being built, folks would much rather drive than ride a train (or bus for that matter).

shepherdjerred• 1 month ago

This decision makes a lot of sense from a strategic point of view, right?

Road is much more difficult to destroy than rail

If you had to choose one or the other, especially in a time of war/aggression, road seems to be the clear choice

Shitty-kitty2• 1 month ago

Eisenhower was a general before becoming President.

socalgal23• 1 month 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.

Klonoar2• 1 month ago

Tech industry needlessly idolizes the country, so you're unfortunately bound to read this slop until the heat death of the universe.

alephnerd4• 1 month ago

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.

akimbostrawman• 1 month ago

Its because deep down they know japan has something which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country.

pibaker2• 1 month ago

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

socalgal23• 1 month ago

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).

newtwentysix• 1 month ago

Agree. The title is partly misleading. I feel they Carefully left out the logo part from the title.

gryson• 1 month ago

What does any of that have to do with the article, which is about the branding and logo of JR?

lmm• 1 month 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.

razorbeamz2• 1 month ago

Yeah, 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.

nihonde2• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

Why are you frustrated when you didn’t even read the article?

waterTanuki• 1 month ago

Something I don't see mentioned in this article is the nation-wide adoption of a universal transit-payment system: IC Card (Suica is only one of several companies, but often used colloquially to mean train card). This makes it so easy to board any bus/ferry/train without worrying about setting up 30 different accounts each with its own card system.

I've lived in Japan for 4 years now and it was a bit of a culture shock travelling to Germany where I had to have a different pass/app for the various buses and trains. The U.S.'s public transit buildout is slow but happening, and I worry it's falling into the same trap. I'd like to see a federal bill requiring all private/public transit to use the same universal payment scheme accepted in Japan in order to get federal funding for their projects.

ddrmaxgt37• 1 month ago

Been wanting to write about this. The graph of interoperability agreements that makes this possible is crazy.

My first visit to Japan, there were still places that would only accept a subset of IC cards and not all.

historical1234• 1 month ago

The IC card system is one of those things people don't appreciate until they travel somewhere without it.

I remember reading that interoperability between Suica, Pasmo, ICOCA and the others didn't happen overnight. A lot of agreements had to be worked out between companies that were technically competitors.

It's interesting how much invisible coordination goes into making a system feel simple

kalleboo2• 1 month ago

Although I'm seeing more and more public transit around the world (including Japan) adopting tap-to-pay so you can use your regular debit/credit cards.

netsharc3• 1 month ago

Funnily enough, one of the companies that don't yet have tap-to-pay is... JR.

Each JR company also have their own website, and their own "network pass", making it quite cumbersome to book online tickets (e.g. needing to book each segment separately if they're on different companies' routes).

The Swiss system also has different companies, but everything can be booked on the SBB website/app.

Pooge8• 1 month ago

For those of you planning to go to Japan, please make sure you actually calculate how much JR train trips would cost you. They upped the price a few years ago and, since then, it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets.

For one of my recent trips, I was actually more better served with a local pass (Kansai Wide Pass) than the JR Pass.

Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...

euroderf• 1 month ago

Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...

Considering the environmental woes & collapses coming down the pike, I'd like to see a trans-border effort to drive down the price of mass transit _everywhere_. Put it on the G7 agenda, the OECD agenda, the UN General Assembly agenda, ...

Pooge8• 1 month ago

Trains can use renewable energy.

lukan4• 1 month ago

This is exactly the reason why in germany we have now a broad ticket for short distance trains. Government realized they fail to meet EU regulations in reducing CO2, so they rushed to implement a cheap german wide ticket. Initially just 10€, now 60€ a month.

Still a bargain, you can go anywhere as mich forth and back as you want (just not the dedicated long distance trains, so going through all of germany takes a bit longer).

iso16312• 1 month ago

Making it cheaper for people to fly across an ocean to travel around on mass transit is the last place the price needs to go down.

decimalenough4• 1 month ago

The JR Pass has never been (and still is not) aimed at locals, who are not even allowed to buy it. It's for tourists only.

warumdarum• 1 month ago

So when we get riots due to mass unemployment and societal destabilization can iredirect them to you. Im so tired of call for actions without even an attempt to discuss the fallout.

mytailorisrich5• 1 month ago

Where is there an affordability issue? (Especially in OECD and G7 countries)

dredmorbius2• 1 month ago

The Netherlands have implemented unlimited off-peak rail travel for €49/month:

<https://www.ns.nl/en/season-tickets/dal-vrij>

HN discussion 4 days ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48543872>

Given that many commuter-rail (and frankly, other) transport systems operate well below capacity during off-peak times and in counterflow directions, such pricing could well increase ridership and revenue.

tumdum_• 1 month ago

No only that, but to ride the fastest Shinkansen you still need to pay additional fee on top of JR Pass.

decimalenough4• 1 month ago

Pedantic note: the fastest Shinkansen is the 320 km/h Hayabusa service from Tokyo to Hokkaido, which you can ride for free with a JR Pass.

The fastest service on the Tokyo-Osaka corridor, Nozomi, maxes out at 300 km/h but is indeed not included in the pass.

manbash• 1 month ago

If you're referring to the Nozomi, wasn't it always excluded from the JR Pass?

throwaway20373• 1 month ago

I have a hot take on the price of JR Passes. For those unaware, they are exclusively for foreign visitors. In the "old days", travel to and in Japan was considered very expensive, so JR Pass was envisioned as a way to encourage more travel on trains and in Japan. Now the script has flipped. Japan is no longer expensive for people travelling from other highly developed nations. Quite the opposite: It is now cheap. The era of cheap JR Passes is dead. The primary purpose now is convenience. With the exception of Nozomi super-express Shinkansen between Tokyo and (Shin-)Osaka, every JR train is included in a single ticket.

starik362• 1 month ago

But the regional passes are still a good deal. If you are in Osaka or Kyoto, and want to take a day trip to Hiroshima, it more than covers the cost, in addition to granting access to various museums plus other benefits.

Pooge8• 1 month ago

The Kansai Wide area pass that I'm talking about doesn't include access to museums. But some of the smaller passes (like the one of Osaka that you mentioned) do. Those passes don't include Shinkansen, though.

nixass2• 1 month ago

it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets

Not true. It really depends on your use case and blanket statements like this aren't helpful. Yes, the pass has doubled in price since few years ago but it still does make sense in many cases, especially in multi-week multi-city Japan trips

Pooge8• 1 month ago

From what I calculated, you need to use the Shinkansen every day and for long distances which is not how many tourists spend time in Japan IME.

This is not a blanket statement as my first sentence is recommending people to make calculations based on their planned trip.

ezconnect• 1 month ago

There are some section of a train line where 4 stations are owned by someone else and they change names along the same rail route. They also change the driver or whatever he is called when changing the company name of the train.

greatgib• 1 month ago

My personal experience of the multiple operators in Tokyo while traveling there only once for tourism was that it is a mess and not very convenient for users. Like having a station with almost a same name but different operator, a few hundred meters or a km away. And the difficulty of commuting between lines.

decimalenough4• 1 month ago

Confusing, perhaps. Inconvenient, not really, the same Suica/Pasmo cards work everywhere and handle transfers seamlessly.

netsharc3• 1 month ago

Yeah, if a tourist refuses to have a Suica/Pasmo card, they're going to be quite inconvenienced.

Also, Mt. Fuji Station and Fuji Station are 2h30m apart: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Mt.Fuji+Station,+2+Chome-5-1...

decimalenough4• 1 month ago

If you're interested in a deep dive into all this, Substack Bahn has a series on the history of JR:

https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-ye... (and note the links to the earlier pieces at the beginning)

metalman2• 1 month ago

It reads like fucking science fiction about an improbable alternate universe where everybody grows up into intelliegent well adjusted indivuals that can express themselves in a group without focusing on conflict and meaningless competition. Any where else in the "universe" this has lead to corporate standoffs and litigation that has fall out for generations, and even killings and corporate subsidised wars in the developing world. Except of course China, where the level of engineering prowess and scale of machinery and projects is rapidly building out a backbone transport system for themselves, and there customers.ie: they can lay down new, high speed rail lines, ready for use, at a steady walking pace, and are, at multiple locations in China and in other countrys.

decafninja2• 1 month ago

It's taboo to speak about, but both Japan and China are homogenous societies and enjoy the benefits that brings.

China a bit less so than Japan, but still much more than the US or Western Europe. Plus even the minorities are still phenotypically more or less similar looking to the majorities.

China also enjoys the benefits of being an autocratic nation.

metalman2• 1 month ago

Japan is still a mono culture, living on islands, China is anything but, though they have exactly one rule for everybody, which is "dont mess with the brand", ie : you can have a sub culture as long as nobody else notices. And WOW do they have a bunch of subcultures nobody notices, because they dont want any attention, that bieng realy bad mojo and so survial is to not exist in any overt or competitive way.

akashwadhwani35• 1 month ago

Every platform at Shinjuku plays a different song when a train pulls in. There are sixteen platforms. The system started in 1989 with twelve.

Made something to listen to all the songs - https://sheets.works/data-viz/bells-of-tokyo

emursebrian• 1 month ago

Eki-melos are the things that I really liked about taking trains in Japan.

The chirping bird sounds to help blind users find their way to and from the platforms is also a pretty interesting design decision.

bdamm• 1 month ago

Personally I loved it. The Japanese aesthetic is subtle and delightful. Also, riding my bicycle in the countryside with very few traffic signs to mar the view. Just the necessary ones, at exactly the right places. They assume you are not an idiot, and somehow it all works out!

panny• 1 month ago

Western trademark law really isn't compatible with the Japanese culture of noren-wake. The Japanese solution seems more beautiful and cooperative, while the western style seems intent on conflict and formenting division. Something like Tokyo Fugetsudo and Kobe Fugetsudo, where the new branch operates with the master's blessings, recipes, supply routes, teachings simply cannot exist under western rules. You must defend your trademark or lose it after all. What is sad is the Japanese are starting to adopt the western way instead of the other way around. You can look at JR and see ONE system where people work together in harmony. Even though it's really a half dozen different companies working to do their best job together. The American way would be to fight amongst each other until the greediest least moral company has defeated the others and become a monopoly to everyone's detriment.

bobson381• 1 month ago

Okay, question because someone here might know. I have a faint recollection of reading a few years ago that prior to the current train automation system in Japan, they used to have to keep a staff of graduate students or other temp workers on standby to handle the busy periods. Am I hallucinating this fact? Does anyone know? I've tried to find the article where I read it to no avail.

How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart

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