How Rural Japanese Trains Still Exist

Hello world. If you've ever visited Japan before, one of the things on your bucket list was probably to ride on the ultra-fast Shinkansen. And it'd be pretty hard to avoid riding on the metro or subway lines, if like most tourists, you started your Japan trip in Tokyo. But have you ever ridden on the tinier, slower trains that run through rice paddies, mountainsides, and sleepy towns? These rural train lines, called Chihousen, are probably what you imagine when you think of a Studio Ghibli movie. These trains, despite being relatively old, continue to run all across the country, transporting tens of thousands of people to crucial transfer locations every day. Though not as flashy or frequent as their modern counterparts, these local trains play an important part of keeping rural economies and communities alive. But in the last few decades, many of these rural train lines have started to shut down, with over 1,200 kilometres of rail disappearing since the year 2000. That's like the distance from Tokyo to Fukuoka. But that said, there's still a lot of train rails left in Japan, over 25,000 kilometres worth, which is like two-thirds of the Earth's circumference. So for this video, I wanted to investigate why there's so much rail in Japan, and how these various train lines continue to operate. But first, let me introduce this video's sponsor. It's us! My family just built and opened this mini-hotel called Silver Daisy Stay Nikko. Getting to Nikko from Tokyo is easy, as there are some cool express trains, like the futuristic and swanky Spacia X, the well, also futuristic looking Revity, or the classic Kegon. And once you're here, if you're looking for something really classic, there's the Taiju DL and SL, DL standing for Diesel Locomotive, and SL for Steam Locomotive. Okay, let's get going by defining what we'll call a local train line, a Chihousen. Here's the three criteria we chose. One, the train line doesn't run through heavily populated areas. Two, as a general rule, local trains are unprofitable, even when they run at maximum efficiency. And three, if you see a train that has three cars or fewer, it's probably a local train. Now, how and why in the world did all of Japan's train infrastructure get built to begin with? Well, Reece from RM Transit is going to help us answer this. So a big part of it is that rails were built as speculative investments a lot of the time, and you know, like, people built them, and they went bankrupt in a lot of cases. But we still have the rails, and the expensive stuff got built, and so once you have that, continuing to operate it and maintain it isn't super expensive, you know, of course, relative to building something brand new. And then, of course, there's the population decline factor, right? Like, a lot of these rail lines probably made more sense when there were more people living in various areas. But also, when you think about it as a speculative investment that's often related to real estate, there's often a belief that, hey, if we build a rail line here, like, that's going to lead to a new town developing, or it's going to lead to a new housing development, and that's going to fund things, right? And so in many cases, you know, these rail lines just might have not, you know, paid off. In some cases, they had different uses originally, right? Some of them were kind of like streetcar lines that got upgraded over time. And so basically what I would say is that no one really planned or predicted the way that things would end up today, and that's part of why it doesn't necessarily feel like it makes a ton of sense or that it's, like, kind of economically viable, and it's just because Japan ended up with a lot of rail, and now it's got a surplus, and it's sort of like, how do we keep this running, especially because it's not like the alternatives have stayed still. And to dig even deeper, let's go back to the very beginning and talk about how trains got their start in Japan, since they definitely weren't invented here. To answer this, we have to go back to the Meiji period in the 1870s. On October 14th, 1872, the first ever Japanese train line, the Tokaido Line, was opened, connecting Shinbashi to Yokohama. It spanned 29 kilometers and was built with the help of British engineers. In fact, the locomotives themselves were even imported from the UK, because there were no train manufacturing facilities in Japan yet. As no rail companies existed in Japan, this was all backed by the Japanese imperial government. And they made sure that the British engineers taught their Japanese colleagues everything they knew, so that Japan's railways could be self-sufficient. And so, by 1889, the Tokaido Line had connected Tokyo to Nagoya, Kyoto, Kobe, and Osaka, and private railway companies had started to operate throughout Japan. By 1906, the Japanese government railways, or JGR, unified all private railways to help supply military bases and ports to feed Japan's military-industrial complex. But after World War II, with the nation's economy in shambles, JGR was reorganized into a state-owned public corporation called Japanese National Railways, or JNR. It's a bit complicated, but basically, JNR was able to operate like a business by expanding and modernizing its rail services across the country. But at the same time, it tried to fulfill its public duty to provide affordable rail access to rural communities, which were generally unprofitable. And in 1964, the famous Shinkansen was launched for the Tokyo Olympics, thanks to JNR research and development. Fun fact, the grandmother and mother of our part-time producer, Bobby, rode the Shinkansen from Nagoya to watch the Tokyo Olympics that year. Anyway, despite all of its rail expansion throughout the 1970s and 80s, JNR faced massive financial problems. We're talking a jaw-dropping $250 billion of debt. Much of this debt was due to decades of mismanagement of funds that ballooned over time due to compounding interest rates. Other factors, like increased car ownership and convenient freight trucks, had chipped away at train ridership and freight profits. So, to address this giant fiscal problem, the government split JNR into nine entities, with six main passenger companies, including JR East, Central, West, Shikoku, Kyushu, and Hokkaido. The other three entities were JR Freight, JR Technical Research Institute, and the JNR Settlement Corporation. The government was hoping that the more profitable JR companies, like JR East, Central, and West with their Shinkansen lines, would eventually become publicly traded companies on the Japanese stock exchange. After their initial public offerings, the government sold off their shares of their JR companies to public investors for a decent sum of money. But even then, they could only pay off about one-third of the debt. The remaining $150 to $200 billion was to be paid by taxpayers, starting in 1998 and continuing to this day. This, as you could imagine, was a controversial decision. From the government's perspective, by wiping out the debt that JNR had created, the modern JR companies, especially JR East, Central, and West, could now be profitable and thrive on their own. But from the public's perspective, they had just bailed out a ton of government-made mismanaged debt so that private companies could profit from their tax money. And in case you were curious, JR Kyushu eventually became profitable enough to go public and become a private company in 2016. Meanwhile, JR Shikoku and Hokkaido have remained under government ownership because they're simply not profitable. So how does all of this relate to local train lines, to Chihousen? Well, roughly 70% of Japan's railway network is owned and managed by JR groups. And many of these train lines are local lines, with fewer and fewer passengers every year, putting them in danger of closure. And to help explain this, we talked to Steve, a transportation engineer. So essentially, JR Group, one of the norms they created was that if the ridership density of a line is less than 4,000 per day, you can consider it for closure. A daily ridership density of 4,000 simply means that 4,000 passengers travel across the entirety of the track every day. So, if on average, a passenger only travels half the length of the tracks, you would need 8,000 passengers to hit a passenger density of 4,000. But this was created in the 80s or 70s. But a lot of operators took that as a hard line. So Meitetsu was big on this, and then they said, this is less than 4,000, we're going to close it. But that was just a rule of thumb, it's not legally binding. And then the other thing they look at is operating ratio, which is the cost divided by revenue multiplied by 100. If you have an operating ratio of 100, it would simply mean that expenses equals revenue, so not losing money, but not making money. Less than 100 is good, you're making money. Over 100 is bad, you're losing money. Like, they'll take into account if it gets to, like, you know, 1,000, which is, you're losing, like, for every 100 yen, you're losing, like, 1,000 yen, which a lot of lines are, you know, that they maybe consider other things. Like, for example, the passenger density is the big one. So, if you have a limited express, which is long distance, carrying 600 people from one end of the line to the other, that really pumps up your numbers, right? As opposed to lots of little short runs of a line. So, to give a real-life example of what Steve means with passenger density, let's look at the Chizu Express. There are 14 local stops along the Chizu Express route, spanning 56 kilometres. These trains mainly serve as students, seniors, and locals commuting to work. They may be relatively full in the morning and evening, but during the afternoon, they're pretty empty. This makes the passenger density of the local line quite low. However, the express in Chizu Express comes from having two rapid trains run through their train tracks, the Super Inuba and the Super Hakuto. These two rapid trains not only get high ridership, but they quickly cover the entirety of the tracks, which means the passenger density of the Chizu Express can be hugely boosted with only a few of the Supers passing through. But even with relatively high ridership, it doesn't guarantee that a train line is safe from closure. The Railway Business Act, which is kind of like the Bible of railway legal minutiae in Japan, they revised it to have a more looser criteria for closure of lines in the 2000s. So, Article 28-2. Now, to close a line, you just need to notify the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism one year in advance. And, of course, they also have this caveat in the law that you have to provide hearings and set up committees to gather opinions from relevant stakeholders, usually local governments. So the options are third sectorization, so public-private partnerships. The local government might be interested in putting in some money, and it becomes like a spun-off company. It has a nice name, some cool branding, some logos, and it becomes third sectorized. So the Chizu Express is an example of a third-sector line, a partnership between local government and a private company. And in case you're wondering, first sector would be government-operated, like Toei in Tokyo, and second sector would be completely private, like Tobu Railway. As Steve mentioned, if a private company chooses to no longer operate a line, but local governments need those services, the locals may agree to help subsidize the line. And quite often, they run parallel to Shinkansen lines, like up in northern Japan. The issue with this is that they struggle to compete against the speedy Shinkansen. But for locals who live in between the major Shinkansen stops, it's an important service. The other option is more of the political option, where they kind of drag it on. They don't set up the committee, right? And the railway kind of is stuck with this railway. And this is kind of the more passive-aggressive method. And then the last option is straight-up closure. But once a train line closes, it effectively eliminates safe, affordable public transit for communities near the train line. But if various train lines continue to close throughout Japan, what will local people do to get around? The aging population means a lot of people are starting to not be able to drive. You don't want a situation where you have elderly in rural areas sort of trapped in their town. Before railways it would be, they would visit neighboring towns and stuff for events and social kind of aspects. If you don't have the railway anchoring the town and everything, everything's just gone. Or you see a lot of national, you know, along national routes, it's starting to look like America. So it's going to be very strip mall-based. Japan has a lot of roadways, and it's built more and more expressways every year. Even now, new expressways are built in places where they compete with railways, right? And so it's not even just the population declining in a lot of smaller cities and towns, but it's also that there are now, there's another option. And in a lot of these places, you might take the train to go to the next town, but like day to day, you're probably driving, right? And so if you already have the car, why wouldn't you drive on the expressway instead of paying for a ticket to take a once an hour train, right? I personally saw this when I was filming my documentary about what a small town in Japan is like. The town of Kofu has that train that runs like once every hour, and it services the students and those without cars, but the majority of people, especially those working, would take their car into the nearby city of Yonago for work, shopping, services, and fun. Whether we're traveling for fun or for work, it's hard to imagine Japan without its convenient and charming network of trains. Another thing to consider about the economic benefit of keeping these local lines alive is that the profitable Shinkansen running through Osaka and Tokyo depend on passengers that are transferring from local train stations. Think of local train lines as little blood vessels that connect millions of people to the main Shinkansen arteries of Japan. Sure, cars or buses could, in theory, replace these local lines, but just imagine how much more congested roads and the areas near the Shinkansen stations would get. Anyway, it's not all doom and gloom. There are smaller train lines, like Chizu Express, that remain profitable year after year, if you ignore the first three years of COVID. I think it's one of the big missions of Chizu Express Usually, local trains are mainly used for morning and evening business, such as commuting, students, and school. There are only a limited number of people on the local lines, so the number of passengers on express trains is much smaller than on normal trains. I think that's a big influence. Now, I think it's important to remind you that Chizu Express and other public-private railways are financially supported by local governments, and Chizu Express is fortunate to not have competition from Shinkansen lines. For example, up in the Tohoku region, Aoimori Railways has to compete against the Tohoku Shinkansen, which inevitably wins over many potential riders due to its speed, frequency, and comfort. And a final thing to note is that Chizu Express earns money from lending out its tracks to JR West. If, for whatever reason, JR West goes bankrupt or stops running as many trains through Chizu Express' tracks, it would spell financial disaster. And speaking of disasters, Steve had this to say about railway maintenance. The big threat is actually natural disasters. That's what really actually accelerates line closures, which happen to a few third-sector railways. If a bridge collapses due to a flood or earthquake, that line's not viable anymore. So with all this information in mind, whether it's declining train ridership due to increased motorways and shrinking population, the increase in railway closures since the 2000s, or the ever-looming threat of natural disasters, it may seem like there are too many problems to fix. One potential solution is the expansion of services near train stations. It's the policy of putting more development on stations that only metropolitan areas really kind of got down. They're integrating bus and railway together with a common fare. You see, that's not common in Japan. Some of these areas, they just don't have the funds to, say, there's a nice temple or a beach, extend that short two-kilometer. A lot of times, it's these two-kilometer gaps that you just... It's too far to walk, but it also feels bad to use a taxi and all that stuff. Big tourist cities like Kyoto or Himeji do a pretty solid job of making their bus systems intuitive and easy to use for visitors and locals. But the further out you go into rural areas, I find that bus schedules can be difficult to read, payment systems inconsistent, and overall frequency to be less than desirable. So even if they're operated by different companies, perhaps a well-integrated public transit system will help all parties, including the local economy. But if integrating other modes of public transportation is one viable option to increase train ridership, what about those theme-based train cars? One thing I was wondering was, there are lines, local lines I see, they're really trying to attract tourists or hobbyists. And they're trying to do special events surrounding the train line. So maybe they put a stove in it, and they're making fish on it. Are these actually successful? Or are they just trying to do stuff, and they're not really working? I think this is a very promising option. Because Japan gets a ton of tourists. Obviously now more than ever, people are aware of this. And that's a huge potential market. Because people can ride a train anywhere, but Japan's got all these super wacky and unique trains. It's constantly advertised internationally. So I think it's actually a very good option. The key is, how do you parlay running something that's good for tourists, and use it to maybe keep that thing still useful for locals? So there has to be some policy, some thinking about how do we capture this tourist market and use it to fund important local services. But as important as profits are, remember that trains in Japan weren't always about making money. Initially, they were an investment by the government to advance Japan's technology and infrastructure. So perhaps we're living in another transition period of Japan's train line history, where it's evolving from a profit-driven system into something more along the lines of a necessary public service. But you have to understand that there's a lot of benefits that a rail system brings that are hard to quantify. The subway doesn't get to say we made X money on every ticket, but also this person doesn't own a car and that saved them all this money, it saves society all this money. The profitability is useful in the sense that it's measuring efficiency, but it doesn't really measure whether it's doing a good thing for a city or not, because there's so many things that they just don't get to price in. What is the cost benefit of having less emissions, having a greener solution? What is the cost benefit of being easily usable by elderly people? It makes it so that young people can travel before they can have a car. So there's all of these benefits that rail brings that are hard to quantify. Well, I for one hope that Japan's local train lines continue to exist and that they find sustainable ways to keep them operating into the future. And if you're visiting Japan, I highly recommend trying out some of these local train lines. They're a great way to see Japan's beautiful landscapes. Thanks for watching. See you next time. Peace.