Taken for a Ride

On a hot and sticky morning yesterday, I left my Osaka hotel for a quick trip to Okayama. Already, at 8.30 am, the temperature must have been >30C, as I trudged the 10 minutes on foot to Shin-Osaka station trailing my suitcase behind me and laden with a heavy back-pack. I've discovered that Shin means 'new' in Japanese. And  the journey was quick. The 150km took just 45 minutes, including one stop at Shin Kobe. Of course, I was travelling on one of these:

a Shinkansen (tr. Bullet Train). The one I caught was exactly like these shown here - all 16 coaches in length -  and I had seat 1a in car 15.

The journey was more or less silent on track reserved only for the Shinkansen, and the train barely swayed from side to side. I had an aircraft style seat with plenty of leg-room and it was interesting to see the highly urbanised Japanese country flash past me. Alas, I cannot show you and of the scenery because for much of the time the line was screened from view by partial barriers or tunnels. What I can comment on is some interesting aspects of Japanese life. The train seemed to come with a large retinue of staff who actually didn't seem to do much other than bow politely at the door to the carriage. I've noticed this situation frequently in shops, around the streets, in stations, or wherever. So, there's a world class high-tech economy perched on the back of a lot of low-level jobs, which seems to work quite well as unemployment and income disparities are low. And another strange, but frequent, sight is that of residential developments with rice paddies and vegetable gardens in the middle. Doo-chul, with whose family I am staying in Okayama, took me for an after-dinner and after-dark stroll through his neighbourhood and we saw large numbers of these agricultural enterprises on pocket-handkerchief sized blocks of land.

Just one final comment. It would be nice to travel from say, Canberra to Sydney in maybe 90 minutes by high-speed train. However, to be blunt I cannot see how such a system could deliver competitive fares in Australia and turn a profit without MASSIVE subsidies. I gather the system in Japan is also subsidised, but at least there's a dense route network traversed by numerous large trains with short head-ways. While I awaited my train at Shin-Osaka, I counted trains departing at about every 4 minutes, each 16 cars long and full of passengers  That makes, on crude calculation, about 15 x 16 x 80 people departing Osaka for somewhere or other every hour. That's nearly 20,000 passengers an hour. Can anyone envisage even 2000 people per hour wanting to leave Sydney on a bullet train for some local destination? At that rate of patronage the system would have to run at a thundering great loss. My guess is that a similar system in the UK would also be hugely loss making, despite a larger and much more densely packed population than Australia. Get real!

AS