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> 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.

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

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).

At least where i live, subways and railways aren't really considered to be the same thing

Japan operates a kind of hybrid system where the subway (at least in Tokyo) mostly consists of tracks that connect to private operators on either end, and a train will just run through from the private parts of the track to the subway parts with no interruption whatsoever.

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

In the United States, probably the best comparison would be BART in San Francisco Bay Area and WMATA in Washingon, D.C. area. They act like a subway in city center, and like a (commuter) railway outside. As a stretch, also look at SF Muni Metro which acts like a tramway/streetcar outside the dense areas, else like a "light subway" in the dense areas.

The line gets really blurry in some places in Tokyo.

Asakusa (one of "my" lines!) line, is definitely a subway inside central Tokyo, but you can stay on the same physical train going all the way from Narita to Haneda (think RER in Paris?) — I think it would be qualified as "light rail" anywhere else in the world.

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

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

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.

> "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.

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

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

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.

As someone who's lived in Tokyo for 10 years it's largely met my expectations. My living situation is far more modern than the western country I'm from, even if my suburb looks a bit plain (my only real complaint is that there's too much concrete and not enough trees).

Would even go as far as to say many comments about the place being trapped in the 80s or 90s don't match reality. For instance, the only time I've ever been asked to use a fax machine was by a US company.

The decaying rural areas of Japan would probably love to be stuck in the 80s if they can. Too late, now they have hollowed out and everyone young is moving to the same cities most tourists stay at.

Every time you read a story about some Japanese town offering people, even foreigners, money to move there and occupy an abandoned house, keep in mind this is a gesture of desperation, not gratitude,

Decaying rural areas happen in every country, throughout history, throughout time. It’s just how the world works.

The only reason it recently reversed in the US was due to COVID.

Second, many countries are modern in some ways and backwards in some other way. To label a country as modern or not is silly.

Here how it works: I build a porch today and my neighbor builds a pool. In 30 years, he builds a porch but I build a pool. If you cherry pick porches, I look outdated and he looks modern, but it’s reversed if you cherry pick pools!

Japan has seen millennia of huge cultural shifts. Its strength is its ability to adapt and survive with some measure of continuity, even while embracing the new reality. Go watch some Ozu films. They're all about the "hollowing out" of traditional small-town lifestyle and culture. It isn't so much a problem as a feature of the landscape that reminds people about how transient their reality can be.

Additonally, most foreigners who would comment on HN or Reddit are earning significantly higher than the average Japanese or even Tokyoian.

The people you're probably thinking of are working in finance or Japanese mega venture/US tech companies. They make up a vanishingly small percent of foreigners working in Japan.

> finance

Most finance roles in Japan almost exclusively hire Japanese nationals

> Japanese mega venture/US tech companies

They don't tend to hire foreigners in most cases except for Chinese (Taiwanese and Mainland) and Koreans

Needing a fax machine was something from 1998-2005 ish. The USA and Europe had switched to email. Japan was behind.

If you want examples, unless something has changed, if you run a business (for example consulting) and you make a new contract, you must register the contract with the tax office in person. The Japanese government apparently made moves to fix this type of "must be done in person" stuff because of covid. I haven't registered a contract since 2019.

You don't think the reverse is also true? When you see Japanese people write about the United States, it is pretty similar -- they tend to overindex on the posh parts of major cities, like Manhattan, Honolulu, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

The posh parts of America are suburbs or outer neighborhoods, not the inner city which is where most visitors end up staying.

For example, when you visit the San Francisco Bay Area, the actual posh areas are Marin, the Tri-Valley, and the hill adjacent areas of South Bay suburbs (eg. Woodside, Atherton, Saratoga, Los Altos, Los Gatos, Foster City, San Mateo).

Your average Japanese or other foreign visitor isn't visiting or staying in those suburbs nor would they be able to afford the hotel fees for hotels in those areas.

This is a major reason why Japan and Euro-trips have become fairly common amongst younger Americans now - renting a decent 4 start hotel room or Airbnb in a posh area of Japan that is out of reach for most Japanese comes out roughly the same as a middle-of-the-pack experience in the US because an American median salary is double the Japanese or European one.

While i am admittedly in my 30s-50s i don't believe this to be an age problem; Japan is still held on a pedestal in a lot of American pop culture

It’s not just an age thing; the younger part of the tech industry has the same issues.

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

"which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country" Arguably the ideology and hate are prerequisites for a country to have a monoculture. With ideology and hate comes xenophobia and racism == monoculture.