Japan Keeps This Defunct Train Station Running for Just One Passenger
citylab.com
citylab.com
They say that it's the money that makes the world turn, and love only keeps it together. It would be easy for the Railways to ignore that girl. There's no economical reason to keep that station open. It's a waste of time and resources. And yet, someone decided to make that random act of kindness, for a single passenger.
It's a symbol. It represents the best side of our nature. That even in this big and complex world, full of heavy machines and complicated systems, we're still humans, and we care for one another. That we aren't slaves to the processes we brought into existence.
Random acts of kindness like that are happening every day around us. I think that as a society, we need to pay more attention to them. They bring hope and inspiration, which is infinitely better than yet another outrage.
And that girl, she will have one hell of a story to tell to her future friends.
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The article links to a Facebook page with some more photos:
https://www.facebook.com/cctvnewschina/posts/110978428906239...
This would never happen in Tokyo. As much as we think of the country as being monolithic (in many ways it is), there are great differences between different regions of the country (much like any country).
Tokyo is a place where a train being 2 minutes late causes ire (and a train conductor once killed himself for a mistake as trivial as this). It's a place where if a person jumps into the train to kill themselves, many will curse under their breaths about being late to work. It's a place where if you faint in the train concourse during the morning rush hour, no one will stop to help you. It's a place where young mothers with strollers are given stinkeye on public transit. If you ask someone (in fluent Japanese) to take a photo for you, you will often be completely ignored. Tokyo is cold.
I agree with you that this story represents the good in us all. But Japan is like a black box to those who don't live there. I would caution you against idolizing it on a national level as a result of stories like this.
Still, if one is to feel ashamed for the bad things happening within a group one associates with (e.g. their country), it's fair to also feel proud for the good things happening within that group.
however I don't think the original post was trying to idolize japan, at least I didn't see it that way. To me it was more of an observation that small acts of kindness happen all around us.
As far as I know, no one killed themselves.
Apologies, it was a station manager, not a conductor.
If you had made a big enough stink about it they would have let you ride the Shinkansen using your pass. This is the country where rail operators give out "late passes" to workers if their train is more than a few minutes late after all.
Who is "they"? I believe the train I took is not even run by the same company as the one that issues JR passes.
That said, I didn't think to ask about getting a free ticket on the later train.
I understand what you're saying and I agree. I am definitely not going to define the entire country by this single act. And you're right - I think that keeping the station open for this girl was only possible because it was a rural area and not a large city. Villages generally tend to be more laid-back, there is a lot more of space to introduce little inefficiencies without causing a disproportionate economic loss. And the mentality probably takes a part too.
Since you and sandworm101 decided to ruin the sublime mood by calling attention to the ordinary reality, let me play along. I do believe there may be another layer to this story. As much as I want to believe in the most positive interpretation, the choice to keep that station open could be a result of e.g. her influential family using their connections to keep the train stopping there. Or something completely unrelated. Media reports tend not to be very accurate, and decisions in real life tend to be made slowly and with multiple inputs.
But we don't know for sure. I am not going to idolize a country for a single story, but I choose to assume the most charitable interpretation, that this is in fact an act of kindness to another human. And so I believe people involved should be praised for that. We need more of such kindness in this world. We already spend too much time getting angry at stuff. Let's be joyful for once instead.
For whatever reason this train stops for the girl, whether it's "village mentality", external influence or honest good will, the fact is that there is this huge metal machine, driven by even greater systems and processes of our economies, and that mighty machine stops for one girl, to let her continue her education undisturbed. She could have been ignored, but she wasn't - and that is heartwarming, if you let it to be.
Japan is almost always presented to the West from a unbalanced, exaggerated perspective (which has irked me in the past), and upon reading your post, gleaming with optimism, I instinctively reacted by adopting an exaggeratedly grave perspective to attempt to balance it out -- which in retrospect was simply uncalled for.
Thanks for your optimism and hope for the good in all of us. I could use some of that too.
No worries. Your points were fair and your tone wasn't harsh.
> Thanks for your optimism and hope for the good in all of us. I could use some of that too.
I try. And it's hard, too. But I think we need to do it, we need to learn to refocus on positive things, because our own attitudes on individual and social level form a feedback loop that drive our outlook.
And yet we have big shot VC's bashing HN as "Hater News" if the conversation doesn't support their narrative. When I see a HN thread turn predominately negative on a topic it's usually because it deserves it.
Now might be a good time to link to Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch ( http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) , if anyone is in for some very accessible (but also very long, and thought-provoking) reading. It does a good job of helping one think about the forces for and against, say, a train station remaining open for a single girl.
My name is Hajime (Haj) Kenneth Murakami, and I am cofounder and COO at a mobile software startup. We are currently in stealth.
I don't see it as that big a deal at all. A single train in the middle of nowhere stops for 20 seconds. This is cute, nothing more.
First off people will stop during rush hour in Tokyo to help people. Happens all the time. Tokyo is not cold. I've never seen anyone have trouble getting someone to take their picture, ever. I'm not denying your experience but I'm going to claim it's not common.
Second, while it's sad people feel the need to take their own lives it is arguably the height of selfishness to do it by jumping in front of a train and putting out 50k+ people. I see no problem with recognizing that and being annoyed by it. Especially in Japan where putting your problems on someone else is the height of rudeness.
And I'm sorry if you think mothers on strollers aren't a PITA on public transport in a city as busy as Tokyo. That sounds like a fully western (or maybe American POV). F everyone else, I have my needs and F you if they inconvenience hundreds or thousands of people.
This: http://www.toysrus.com/graphics/product_images/pTRU1-3490966...
Not this: http://www.bobgear.com/uploads/products/stroller-strides-fit...
You'd think that a $500 stroller would be better, but after trying 3 of those it's just not true. A $50 one folds up to the size of large umbrella, and weighs 2-3 kg. A $500 one folds up to the size of a suitcase, weighs 20-30 kg. Even folded out they're smaller.
So it should be pretty obvious that a $50 one is far, far better anytime you have it with you and aren't using it as a stroller. Which is really quite often : in the car, on stairs, anywhere you're expected to sit down (from parties, at friend's houses, even cinemas). And truth be told, they're better when you're using them as well. They don't roll as nicely, but they're so much lighter. Also, you have zero issues with breaking them.
Wow. I feel sorry for disabled people in wheelchairs around you. And for your mother.
Whenever I spot tourists lost in my town I do these sorts of things for them, so that I can set their understanding of my entire city from just my one interaction.
The driver going too fast from being late was the cause of a (100+ fatalities) train accident about 10 years ago.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amagasaki_rail_crash
> It's a place where if a person jumps into the train to kill themselves, many will curse under their breaths about being late to work.
The rail operator will also send a large bill to the jumpers family.
Isn't this the case in most countries? I suspect they do it to discourage other jumpers, since if you jump you know you're saddling your family with a debt.
As a society we could avoid these things if we provided a legal path to requesting to be euthanised, a legal self-determination on the end of your own life. In my country you can request it, but you must be medically found by multiple doctors to be under unbearable and untreatable pain. If we made such a mechanism more inclusive, we could get rid of jumpers, as well as having an opportunity to turn the ship around for people considering suicide.
I don't think so. Personally, I only heard about it in Japan, because this particular method of suicide is so endemic there.
About US, on the other hand, I read a different story. Gun-inflicted suicides are more common there, and there are reports that often, police officers purposefully misreport those as "gun-related accidents", so that the family can still get life insurance of the deceased person.
Typically if a person's net worth is negative, debts are not passed on to heirs, leaving creditors to sue for relief. Again, jurisdictions vary, and I would expect there are many other factors at play in a country like Japan where keeping the family's social standing intact may be worth paying off those the deceased wronged instead of dragging the dead person's dirty laundry through the court system even if there's no chance of winning.
Jurisdictions vary, but I would imagine in a case such as the aforementioned, the state wouldn't take the whole estate, only part, after debts are satisfied.
A phenomenal article on this aspect of the "what happens after you die" question is this one:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/nyregion/dying-alone-in-ne...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10404538
I get virtually all of my reading material from HN or TheBrowser or ReadThisThing. I then save it to Pocket, getting back to it days or weeks later. I'm so far behind the curve that it doesn't make sense for me to submit anything.
Unless Japan has some unorthodox laws that make relatives of successful suicides liable for their debts to Tokyo Metro?
That is definitely the case in the US, but I would hesitate before assuming it's that way everywhere else in the world.
I do know that there are cases in Japan where the deceased parents of suicides have had to pay compensation for the externalities of the suicide, in particular for the decreased property value of the apartment that they committed suicide in. I don't know how or why they had to do this, just that it is a thing that happens.
http://www.tofugu.com/2012/11/12/japanese-suicide-apartments...
It looks like in principle it is the same as the English Common Law or the Napoleonic or Germanic law:
"[T]here are two ways for successors to consent how to inherit: simple consent (tanjun-syonin) and limited consent (gentei-syonin). Simple consent is to accept the whole inheritance, including debts and assets. Limited consent is to accept debts with a limitation up to the value of the assets."
-- http://japan.angloinfo.com/money/pensions-wills/inheritance-...
In fact I doubt there is a legal system in existence that doesn't follow this principle. It would be ripe for abuse, as everybody would be getting loans secured on the wealth of their rich relatives.
The article I linked was pretty clear in that the apartment owners sued the family, not the estate.
Think about it, how much is a college kid going to have in his estate? They have to sue the family, because they're the only ones that can make good.
I think it's for properties where the loan is cosigned by the parents.And honestly if you want to kill yourself you dont HAVE to jump before a train. You can do it in other ways without bothering anyone.
This happens everywhere. It's extremely rude (especially at rush hour) to take up 5x the space of everyone else just cause you have a kid. Either the kid is small enough to carry or big enough to stand.
As a son of a women with scoliosis (a chronic problem which affects 2-3% of the US population), I with people weren't so prone to assume laziness or selfishness.
That is true, but after having this happen to me upwards of 20 times over the years, I gradually became one of those people.
For example, on my second day there, right after getting off at my stop, I realized that I lost my phone on the bus. I waited at the stop and asked the bus driver on the next bus how I could retreive it. I speak zero japanese and he spoke no english. He asked over the speaker if anybody spoke english. A young girl came to the front and interpreted. He gave me a number to call. Then I gave the number to the woman at the front desk of our hotel. She said that the driver would DELIVER MY PHONE TO ME in the morning, and what time would I like to get it. I was flabberghasted. sure enough it was delivered the next morning.
That is only one example of the two weeks I spent in a city with the kindest and most helpful people I've ever met. I have so many examples of people going out of their way to help me in Tokyo.
I lived in Finland for years and your description sounds closer to their culture, but even then they were not as cold as you describe, but just very hesitant to help.
This is the UK, yes? And people won't be cursing under their breath. They'll be saying it loudly.
It could be argued that the hope and inspiration and good feels justify it as a utilitarian decision, or that some portion of the world's energy should be diverted to these sorts of situations anyway - like some sort of lottery - or justified on non-utilitarian grounds. But I can't help but see it as an example of how major global problems continue because humans can't prioritize their caring towards those that need it the most.
I'll skip inundating the thread with some personal defense of whether I'm a hypocrit or not. I agree with what TeMPOral said about it being a positive symbol, and was just pointing out another way that it's a negative one. "We've come a long way but we still have a long way to go" sort of thing.
Japan should be doing it that way, too. Train companies in Japan aren't small businesses with kindly old proprietors; they are VERY complex businesses enormously tangled in cross-company ownership (our system owns 40% of yours, yours owns 40% of ours), government ownership, heavy government regulation with negotiated compromises (you have to serve these needs or we won't let you share that track), heavy union obligations, negotiated right-of-way through communities (if you won't service this line, we won't let you stop at the main station), etc., etc.
After living in Japan for many years, I'm afraid this sounds to more like a situation where keeping the train running for one person, though extravagantly wasteful, probably solved multiple practical problems simultaneously (fulfilling union employment agreements, rural service agreements, etc.) along with perhaps the greatest benefit: getting things done in Japanese bureaucracies requires so much negotiation among so many parties that just continuing to do what you have been doing (just keep running the train) is just SO much easier than changing the system--the system has so much inertia--that just letting it go on a couple of years longer was probably the easy way. The fact that it wasn't close to the cheapest way wouldn't necessarily matter to governments, unions, corporate managers and others spending Other People's Money.
I'm not implying anything about Japanese kindness. The Japanese do very kind things all the time, but this doesn't seem like one of them. I don't think kindness has much to do with it, because a private car service would be just as kind as making her stand alone twice a day on a freezing Hokkaido train platform and dramatically cheaper.
I agree that we should prioritize things and aim for maximum effectiveness of our help. But humans are complex beings - we react to examples and positive stories, which often encourage us to change our behaviors. If seeing positive stories like this can make some people even a little more kind, or inspire them to do some good, then those stories are of great value. And if we can encourage people to do good by praising even somewhat inefficient acts of kindness, maybe the next group will figure out a more cost-effective way. It definitely beats no one being inspired to do anything good at all.
Eliezer once wrote a very interesting article "Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately"[0]. His point was that out of the things we get from helping others - warm fuzzy feelings, status increase and the actual results - "all three of these things—warm fuzzies, status, and expected utilons—can be bought far more efficiently when you buy separately, optimizing for only one thing at a time". I kind of agree with this approach, and I think story is mostly about buying fuzzies, not utilons. Yet we are just humans - we need some fuzzies too.
[0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/6z/purchase_fuzzies_and_utilons_sepa...
Actually, taxes are taken to pay for this, right? By simply not taking the taxes, people could be free to make better decisions with that money.
In short, they just agreed to give up a small bit of their own profits.
At some point (and I hope and pray that point is soon), efficiency as the end all be all of the world needs to die. It destroys humanity when efficiency is on the utmost pedestal.
"Random acts of kindness like that are happening every day around us." - It's not a random act of kindness, it's an example of the agency cost of bureaucracies who are more focused on image than the needs of all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, taxpayers, employees, and riders on other lines who are subsidizing the operation of the disused line.
It probably costs in the millions to keep that line running.
So, as you say, the total cost (or rather, the amount they didn't save by decommissioning the station earlier) is just the train stopping and starting twice a day + whatever maintenance costs are required to keep the station in proper shape.
At least this is happening today, when the few remaining kids in such situations can connect via technology.
Plus, she can socialize with people not her age.
Once youth hits college or working age, they disproportionately head for the capitol.
But then there's a small counter current where younger (say, 30's) are moving back to their original prefectures as they realize that they might be able to afford a better QoL making less money but also paying much less in expenditures.
http://www.tofugu.com/2015/03/06/japanese-countryside-emptyi...
They've been talking about the need to decentralize for decades now. The earthquake showed the risk of centralization and having a single point of failure for the economy and the government (famously, some foreign companies moved HQ and/or datacenters to Osaka). Nothing has changed though. If anything things are becoming even more centralized.
There has been minority political endeavors talking of introducing the concept of "States" to Japan to structurally support this sort of decentralization. At times attempts have come close to fruition (most recently Hashimoto's attempt in Osaka), but none have borne fruit.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few decades. Many European countries have similar problems with low fertility rates, but Japan has the additional disadvantage of being extremely xenophobic. While other countries may be able to bolster their populations with immigrants and refugees it seems unlikely Japan's culture will allow that.
I wonder... will all developed nations engage in a war for productive immigrants in order to prevent a population pyramid based collapse of their economies?
[1] http://www.indexmundi.com/graphs/population-pyramids/china-p...
It's yet another topic that lets public avoid having a discussion about real, coming issues.
People will just have to learn to run countries with a stable population.
Developed countries are all dropping below replacement fertility rate, sustained only by immigration and the higher fertility rate associated with recent immigrants.
I haven't seen any evidence for a stable point of population - it looks like it will grow, until it begins to decline in the not-too-distant future. Then does it ever stop declining?
Does it stop declining at a point we can sustain a technological society, much less technological progress?
That's my vote for resolution of the Fermi paradox.
What do you mean, "problems with low fertility"? That looks a highly desirable outcome to me, a blessing in disguise.
Sure, most governments run Ponzi-like schemes and depend on "exponential growth" all around to finance themselves (pensions), but that's an economic snafu. Ultimately unsustainable in any case.
Not sure where this mentality of "more is always better" comes from. You could argue Japan would still be overpopulated even at half its current population.
Random thought: being "extremely xenophobic" seems desirable (necessary?) for such reversal process to stand a chance. Otherwise the country would be overrun by people who simply procreate more (aka race to the bottom when it comes to quality of life). Should maximum procreation trump everything else?
Around where i live, the only young people are boys/men that went straight into some low end industrial or service job after school.
most of the women moved on to higher educations that required moving to a city or other, and stayed there after graduating.
Also who's to stay she's staying in the area after graduation.
There have always been children living in isolated rural communities. Always. Japan is in no way special in this regard, nor is it special in having a low birth rate nor in it having a declining population. South Korea, for example, has a lower total fertility rate than Japan. But people love to focus on Japan and project their own values and beliefs on it, values which are not necessarily shared by the Japanese people, many of whom feel that their nation's population grew too large.
http://www.ide.go.jp/English/Research/Region/Africa/images/1...
The lines are the country's % of working-age people. As you can see, Japan is already collapsing rapidly, while South Korea is just starting to plateau out and China is still climbing.
Pattern 84 looks at the transition from child to teenager in a qualitative way and suggests that teenagers '...should be encouraged to form a miniature society, in which they are as differentiated, and as responsible mutually, as the adults in the full scale society'. He sees the teenagers ranging more widely across a town or city.
I'm wondering to what extent distributed network tech can support that for sparse populations...
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/2/5674448/nagoro-japanese-dol...
In Google Streetview: https://goo.gl/maps/ST3HuCEi1YS2
It's also important to point out that it's not uncommon for Japan high schoolers to travel far to attend the school of their choice. So it's very likely that there's a high school in or near the village that most of the other kids go to, but this girl is attending a different one.
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Of course, Irelands population is growing while Hokkaido's is dropping...
As for me, I called it the hardest of four islands on which to find a vacant hotel room.
b) Of course, way more expensive (operationally and financially) to run a train and maintain a railway line.
Add: This story made my day.
Edit, ah, so I guess a bunch of trains go by, and adjusting the schedule basically means deciding which trains stop at that station, not changing when trains run.
The line itself will remain operational.
One possibility is that the station 3km away is already out of operation (and I do recall someone posting that a nearby station did already shut down).
In either case I think you are right that for 99% of the passenger life will go on as it always has.
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Kami-Shirataki+Station/@43...
Kamikawa station to the west actually has sizeable population.
E = 1/2 * 30000 * 33^2 = 16335000J or 4.5kwhr at $0.20 kwhr that's about $0.90 in electricity costs.
Everybody who is taking the train during the same leg as her, is essentially chipping in 1 minute of their time to support her transportation.
And I think that's just beautiful.
...and yet they chose to ignore it. That is indeed just beautiful.
"The train makes only two stops—one when a lone high-school student leaves for school and the other when she returns."
The train makes two stops, rather than "the train stops here only twice". Both may be true, but the initial statement describes actions of the train rather than the station.
"The train stops there only twice a day—once to pick up the girl and again to drop her off after the school day is over."
Ironically, the railway is a private one, i.e. Japan Railways Hokkaido[0] is private corporation, not a government agency. And yet the company executives, and to a lesser extent, the shareholders, okayed this arrangement. I can't imagine this happening anywhere outside of Japan.
There's a similar phenomenon in the UK called "ghost trains"[1] that's only superficially similar. Basically there's a ton of bureaucracy in closing down a line, so instead of actually closing a line, we just run an unscheduled and unannounced "ghost train" through it once a week.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkaido_Railway_Company
[1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-sec...
Notionally. In practice, their operations are fairly minutely controlled -- sorry, "guided" -- by various levels of government, which explains, among many other things, why the JRs continue to operate tons of lines that are loss-making.
What are the opportunity costs of not shutting down this platform years ago? And of getting the train delayed by 40s twice a day for who knows how many passengers plus some minor costs like acceleration, meetings to change the schedule etc. Considering all this it would almost certainly be cheaper to provide her with a taxi at the train cost, maybe only to the next train stop. Maybe given the choice of getting a taxi twice a day or getting the compensation in cash, the girl would even have taken the money and moved closer to school.
I found it weird too after I Googled some more and learned that the Japan Railways[0] is a group of companies that were the result of privatization of national railway system. But I've seen a similar phenomenon in Poland - even though our rail system has also been mostly privatized, people tend to think and talk about it like it's still a government service. I guess that it's because in some places, the concept of "infrastructure" generally pattern-matches to "government".
About your second paragraph - the most heartwarming thing I could imagine about this story would be learning that the company did in fact take into account everything you wrote and then decided to just ignore it. We are homo sapiens, not homo economicus. We have a capacity to care about other people, and caring is an economical inefficiency.
They're not (to my knowledge) doing this for anyone else, so it seems to me like she's being given extra special treatment that has a net negative (albeit small) effect on the other users of the system and the environment.
It made me smile though.
Being as a Chinese, years ago the news of Japan were always about politics, island disputes, refusing to apologize for WWII etc. It is good to have something positive and nice about the neighbor.
Wish the world would become less biased to any country.
So the marginal cost of stopping at this station is actually not that large.
It wouldn't surprise me if the accounting/management, HR and maintenance overhead for the station was higher than the cost of having the train make an extra stop twice a day.
It is a little surprising the station appears to be staffed based on the picture of the train schedule, but there is something to be said for producing that extra job. I am sure the station master who resides in that office is really happy it still exists.
But you know what would be the most efficient option, from the point of view of the railroad company? Just ignoring the girl and closing down the station. That it didn't happen suggests that someone, at some point, decided that sometimes you have to sacrifice efficiency in order to be human.
(It's actually a general observation - in current highly optimized economy, being human and humane creates inefficiencies. Or in other words, we need to keep some things from being perfectly optimized, in order to avoid living in a misery. Compare to e.g. various laws protecting employees. They purposefully make businesses less efficient, in order to ensure that employees can work in safe and humane conditions.)
I'm surprised how many people are calling this "beautiful" and getting all misty eyed, this feels like an inelegant solution.
I would love to be wrong and hear that someone did the math and found that stopping the train wasn't any more wasteful than just sending this girl a taxi or something, but I have some doubts.
I am unfamiliar with trains, but seeing how cars are tuning themselves off at stop lights now to conserve energy and avoid pollution it really sounds very wasteful stop a whole train for one person. I have to assume that it requires a lot of energy to slow and accelerate a train weighing in at least the tens and likely the hundreds of tons.
It's a sweet idea, but it really does feel misguided to me.
No, the lesson is that when running and optimizing systems, we should not forget why are we having them in the first place. They are there for us. Our willingness to make an occasional exception to cater for another human in need, at the cost of efficiency, is what makes us human.
Think of all those tourists who regularly get injured or lost in the mountains and have to be rescued by helicopter S&R teams. From purely economical perspective, this is burning money. We should leave them to die, because the costs of fueling a chopper and risking its destruction, not to mention lives of highly-trained personnel, are great and the money could be better spent elsewhere. And yet we train S&R teams and fly the choppers, because we chose to. Ruthless economic efficiency is not the end goal.
I remember reading a while ago that someone crunched the numbers, and they figured that it would've actually been cheaper to fly everyone up each day in a helicopter or two than it cost to run the train.
OTOH, in the country where I live (India), private vehicles won't ply unless they are compressed upto 70% of the capacity! That's the BEP where they could make even a meager profit!
http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/remote-hokkaido-t...
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-sec...
Closing down a line is cumbersome. There must first be a transport appraisal analysing the effect of a closure on passengers, the environment and the economy. The proposal is submitted to the Department of Transport and at that point its details must be published in the press, six months ahead of the closure. Then comes a 12-week consultation period, during which time anyone is welcome to protest; public hearings are sometimes held, especially if the closure is controversial. Then, finally, the plans are submitted to the Office of Rail and Road, who decide if the line closes.
As a result it often costs less – in terms of time, paperwork and taxpayers’ money – to keep a line running at a bare minimum.
It's also a nice change of tone of the eminent doom of Japan written by so many. Like so many countries, Japan has its faults, but it also has a very bright side.
The train stops here until she graduates and then the stop will be retired. It's a reasonable decision, even if not an economic one.
We can have a conversation about how changing demographics have created this situation. Whether or not the urbanization of Japanese society is a good thing. On the future role of trains in Japan. Why Japanese are giving up on sex and baby making (kinda hard to maintain and justify an infrastructure built for 150 million people when your pop. is shrinking at 0.7% annually).
But this story should not be lauded, as it is a symptom of the sickness of their society today.
Train stops 7am and 5pm, sure schoolchildren have long days in Japan.
Lets wait 20-40 years and see who got it worse.
You're just using a more prestigious-sounding name for cynicism.