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In October, Japan celebrates the 60th birthday of the shinkansen bullet train, an engineering marvel opened for the 1964 Olympics as proof of the nation’s rising industrial power. For six decades, as it has grown more extensive and faster, this network has been the envy of the world.
But for some years now JR Central, the company that operates the existing shinkansen line between Tokyo and Osaka, has been looking to best itself with a ¥9tn ($60bn), 500km/h magnetically levitating train that will make the run between those cities in just 67 minutes, less than half the current time.
Critically, this is not supposed to be a Concorde or SpaceX — remarkable engineering feats that are in practice the preserve of the very wealthy. Japan’s maglev is intended as public transport for the masses.
There has been scoffing and inevitable questions about the need for such outrageous speed in a country that is, by pressure of demographics, simultaneously shrinking and slowing down. For a project that requires a great deal of tunnelling, there have also been setbacks and cost overruns, meaning that the opening date is now indefinitely delayed.
But this has always been about the bigger picture. Japan, in both the private and public sectors, has increasingly needed an answer to the charge that its powers of homegrown innovation, industrial brilliance and raw ambition were things of the past. The Linear Chuo Shinkansen exists to provide that.
That makes the politics of the project — in essence the construction of an unnaturally straight line of tunnels across different administrative regions in a modern, quake-prone, crowded, occasionally cantankerous and bureaucratically finicky country — all the more fascinating.
Autocracies can push through mega-projects relatively easily; democracies, often to their detriment, face much more bother. Japan’s bullet trains are enviable as much for the all-conquering political conviction that they are necessary as for their engineering panache.
Within Japan, the great challenge to the maglev came from Heita Kawakatsu, the four-times elected governor of Shizuoka prefecture since 2009.
The planned route, which is almost impossible to change, calls for the maglev to cross about 10km of Shizuoka. The leg would take less than a minute. But Kawakatsu, a former economist at one of Japan’s top universities, has blocked construction for about a decade on environmental grounds.
It does not help JR Central’s pleas for compromise that the maglev will not stop in Shizuoka or create any obvious economic benefits for the prefecture. But the bigger pitch — of participation in something that would ultimately be another envy of the world — has fallen on deaf ears.
Kawakatsu’s unbending resistance to the project was presented as the main reason why last month, JR Central formally gave up on the target of having the Tokyo to Nagoya portion of the line up and running by 2027.
Whether or not Shizuoka’s resistance was the only factor in that decision, cheerleaders of the maglev quickly cast the governor as an anti-progress grinch.
But last week, the scene suddenly shifted. Kawakatsu, who has chosen to craft a reputation for intellectual arrogance, told a cohort of new civil servants that they were highly intelligent, “unlike people who sell vegetables, attend to cattle and manufacture products”.
Kawakatsu, whose prefecture’s economy was built on agriculture and manufacturing, will unsurprisingly tender his resignation this week. The frisson around his political demise, and what it might mean for the maglev, has been palpable.
But Japan should temper the celebrations. Kawakatsu, for all his aloofness, was repeatedly given an electoral mandate to oppose the maglev. His personal animus to the project was substantial, but whenever they were given the chance to rein it in, voters declined.
Elected representatives of the Japanese public often oppose things that appear rationally to be in the public interest, from restarting mothballed nuclear plants to preventing Japan from becoming a geothermal superpower. The public meanwhile has, sometimes violently, opposed grand projects such as the construction of Narita airport in which the public benefit is far less clear.
Japan should not relish the downfall of a prominent democratic figure just because that downfall makes it easier to press ahead with something that seems in the public interest. For better or worse, the public decides what is in its interest, and Japan should be endlessly proud of that fact.