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Comment by decimalenough | Hacker News Reader

Now we need a part two that shows how the rural parts of the same network are slowly being closed due to depopulation. As of 2025, Japan has lost 1366 km of track (about 5% of the total) since the 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_closed_railway_lines_i...

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>closed due to depopulation

Meanwhile, there's more people in the city of Tokyo than nearly the whole continent of Australia :) Japan's population is concentrating into a handful of big cities. I mean, who wants to live in a small town when there are endless options for shopping, restaurants, etc in the big city? It's not like in the US where big cities are dangerous. There's not much of a positive tradeoff for choosing small town life in Japan. Maybe you think you want to be a big land baron as all Americans seem to desire, but then you find out that undeveloped land in Japan is heavily taxed with property taxes. If you are not doing something very productive with Japan's limited land, Japan wants you to move your arse off it and let someone with a plan work it. Anyway, as rural areas empty out, the local rail lines close. JR is however building lots of bullet trains to connect the big cities. There is a new bullet train line opening soon between Shin-Hakodate and Sapporo for instance. It will probably be extended from Sapporo up to Asahikawa after that.

I love Tokyo (I spent eight months in Kawasaki in 2010), but I can see the appeal of living in a smaller place in Japan (though I’d personally be hesitant to live in a small, isolated town with little or no public transportation). Crowded trains and long lines can get tiring after a while.

I spent last summer in Toyohashi in Aichi Prefecture; I was a visiting researcher at Toyohashi University of Technology. While Toyohashi is not a small town by any means, it is far smaller than Tokyo. I found it nice for day-to-day living. Not crowded at all, and I found the bus service to be good; not world class, but comprehensive and ran frequently enough to be useful. It had plenty of grocery stores and department stores for everyday living. If I needed something unavailable in Toyohashi, Nagoya wasn’t too far away, and if I needed to be in Tokyo, I could get there in 90 minutes on a Hikari train on the Tokaido Shinkansen. I’d do it again; in fact, I’m going back to Toyohashi in a few weeks for another monthly stay.

Having just traveled through a range of cities and towns in Japan, I don't think the lack of options for shopping and restaurants are the reason that small (150,000+ population) towns are depopulating.

There's plenty of ways to spend money in them. That's not the problem. Neither is there a huge lack of conveniences. Any one of them is way more livable than almost anywhere in North America.

Poor economic prospects for the area is likely a part of the problem. The big cities pay significantly more for ~the same work.

A UK one would be more dramatic, losing over 8000 miles over the twentieth century, most in the 1960s https://www.transportxtra.com/files/13108-l.jpg

To be fair, most countries have due to privatisation and people getting wealthier and buying cars. In my country a ton of lines have closed down too and ourv population only grows.

> To be fair, most countries have due to privatisation

Japan's system is almost entirely private and is best in the world by nearly every metric. We (the people) do not owe support to depopulated areas. If you choose to live in the boonies the government is not required to build or maintain roads, tracks, sewers, power to your place. Funds are not infinite.

Japan's private system works because the government mostly got out of the way and let them build and run complementary businesses. Most other countries either make them public, and then they eventually are underfunded and are prevented from expanding/responding, OR, if they do let them be private they find some other way to cripple them like by disallowing other interests.

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-rai...

This take is hilariously misinformed. Japan's long-distance network was almost entirely public until JNR was privatized in 1987, and its successors the JRs continue to be for all intents and purposes controlled by the government.

Some not-very-light reading about the rise and fall of JNR:

https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/aura-of-success-the-first-ye...

https://www.substack-bahn.net/p/the-death-and-privatization-...

This is entirely wrong. Jees this is so infuriating to see repeated. Japan has ~100 train companies. JR is 1 of those (now 7). The rest are not. Hanshin, Hankyu, Keio, Keikyu, Tokyu, Toei, etc all giant train companies, all private, have been since they were foudned.

No, it's not. The successful private companies all serve suburban commuters. The long-distance network was almost entirely JNR.

As of 1996, JR group still controls over 20,000 km of Japan's 30,000 km of rail, and that's after privatizing and closing a large slab of it (mostly those duplicated by Shinkansen).

The long distance is mostly irrelevant, People use trains daily for short commutes. As for JR, the arguably only reason it was in the position it was in was because the government got in the way. If they'd stayed out of the way the private companies would have built the rest.

Further, JR started private. It was nationalized in 1906. The Tokaido Line and tha Sanyo Line already built by private companies. They forced out 17 other companies and then ran it into the ground.

The only place private "might" not have built is rural and JR built those mostly as "pork-barrel" (favors to politians) when it was run by the government. I also say "might" because it is/was common, not just in Japan, to build housing and trains to that housing. You pick a place like Enoshima, build a few 1000s homes, build a train out there to sell the homes. So "rural" places do get private trains.

Or, more commonly, they have:

1. The public pay for and build the lines and prove market demand.

2. Decades later some 'fiscal conservatives' get elected.

3. Who then privatize them for a sweetheart deal to their friends.

4. Who then proceed to squeeze every penny they have out of the public, while foregoing expansion and service quality.

With an end result of everyone getting to pay through the nose for shit service, while profits accrue up. And nobody's building any competing lines, because rail is a textbook example of a natural monopoly, and it's hard to compete on capex with someone who got a full rail network by buying it, fully built out[1].

Nobody with a lick of sense will ever lend you the 100 billion dollars you need to open a from-scratch competitor, if you ever want to eat into the incumbent's margins. The incumbent knows this.

---

The rail company is the poster child for either a crown corporation, or at most, a 'customer-facing services outsourced on a fixed-term-contract'.

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[1] Bonus points for rules around eminent domain changing at some point in the past century and a half, making it actually impossible to build a competing line today.

This is wrong! People keep pointing to JR and think that's the entire country and train system. It is not and never was. The majority of train lines in Japan were private, started private, privately funded, and are still private.

>people getting wealthier and buying cars

Haha, my experience is people buying cars feel poorer, not wealthier. Car payments, maintenance, insurance, taxes, fuel... and as soon as you finish paying it off, it's basically EOL. Time to start paying for the next one.

Unfortunately when you live in a place (like most American cities) where they’re largely built under the assumption people will drive everywhere, a car is essentially required. It’s expensive owning and maintaining a car, but it also feels demoralizing dealing with limited public transportation and neighborhoods that aren’t walkable. There are walkable metro areas in the United States, but they tend to be very expensive, sometimes more expensive than living in a suburb or exurb and dealing with the cost of commuting. I grew up poor; dealing with hour-long bus waits, late buses, multiple transfers, and limited choices is a powerful motivation to save up for a car.

Well yes but this is a choice. In a place with good public transport and alternative road modes people just use cars a lot less.

The thing is in the US cars are traditionally a huge part of the economic engine. So they get preference. You see something similar in Germany though not nearly as bad.

> as soon as you finish paying it off, it's basically EOL

The average age of a car on the road in the US today is now more than 11 years. The average new car loan is just less than 6 years. Beyond that, it's all just a different set of trade-offs. Aside from living somewhere truly dense with fantastic public transit and only going places reachable by said transit, owning a car means less time spent on transportation, and infinitely more flexibility on where you go. Lots of people prefer the lifestyle. Even in Europe cars remain quite popular.

The cost of ownership goes WAY up immediately after the warranty expires. I owned one car. A Ford I purchased brand new. I have no more desire to ever own a car. That experience taught me all I ever needed to know about cars. They are an endless money pit. Everyone I know who drives is poorer for it.

>owning a car means less time spent on transportation

See, that's how drivers think. "I need to spend less time in transportation", because it's miserable for them. You don't even consciously think about it, but subconsciously, you hate being in that car. I like riding the train. It's fun. Even the old Amtrak trains are fun to ride. I can enjoy a beer if I want. There's one cute conductor who flirts with me. I'm not getting any of that in a car.

>Lots of people prefer the lifestyle.

How many "prefer" it because they have never tried any other way. Sitting there alone, rage listening to talk radio in gridlock. No thanks. Cars are antisocial. Been there, done that, I don't care for it.

I hear the cope though, about how cars are "freedom" and can "go anywhere," but when you don't have a car for a while, you begin to realize how cars are the opposite of freedom. Cars are an anchor. Everywhere you go, you have to worry about where to put the car. You can't get too far away from the car. If you have to feed a parking meter, you can barely get a block away from the car. Can't even finish the movie, let's go back to the parking meter. You always have to go back to the car, you can't just continue on your journey and leave it behind. That's not an option. Go back to the car.

Once you have no need for a car, only then do you realize what a slave you were to the car.

> I hear the cope though, about how cars are "freedom" and can "go anywhere," but when you don't have a car for a while, you begin to realize how cars are the opposite of freedom. Cars are an anchor. Everywhere you go, you have to worry about where to put the car. You can't get too far away from the car. If you have to feed a parking meter, you can barely get a block away from the car. Can't even finish the movie, let's go back to the parking meter. You always have to go back to the car, you can't just continue on your journey and leave it behind. That's not an option. Go back to the car.

Totally agree, I didn't realise how much of an issue this was.

I often go somewhere, walk 25km and go back from a totally different station. With a car this would have made me so uneasy knowing I still have to make my way back. Knowing I can do whatever I decide in the moment really makes me feel easy.

> See, that's how drivers think. "I need to spend less time in transportation", because it's miserable for them. You don't even consciously think about it, but subconsciously, you hate being in that car. I like riding the train. It's fun. Even the old Amtrak trains are fun to ride. I can enjoy a beer if I want. There's one cute conductor who flirts with me. I'm not getting any of that in a car.

Well personally I hate transportation too, but the car was more of a phenomenon. I had a car because I lived 70km from work. Now I live close and no longer need a car, and I waste less time on commute.

Trains make me motion sick, and they don’t go into the wilderness. You live in a bubble.

True but at least where I'm from it's a huge status symbol. Every time a neighbour gets a new car the whole street is jealous and talking about it.

I personally find driving very stressful and wasteful of my time so I hate cars. Even when I had one from work. In fact that was worse because they only give you a work car because the job involves loads of driving. Even though the tax man wanted lots of money for something I didn't even want in the first place.

Closing lines in the 90s would be unusual; the big spurt of line closures was generally _far_ earlier in most places, generally 50s or 60s.

It was because until the 90s in Holland public transport was seen as a community service, not a business so even lines with limited traffic were served. During the 90s the neoliberal craze began where everything had to be a market.

Yeah, I've noticed this as well. They not only slowly close old stations, but they almost stopped building new ones since about 2007.

I don't understand why people downvote your comment. It isn't like you're forcing them to have babies and do something about the world by stating the fact about Japan's decline

The "decline" you mention is privatization of JR and their efforts to make it more profitable. Privatization started in 1987, but it wasn't fully privatized until 2006.

If it has anything to do with babies, you have your cause and effect reversed. Autos are a cause of declining birth rates...

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/731812

So a reduction in trains causes a reduction in birth rates, not the other way around.

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