Japan: Fast Ride to Osaka

Across paddyfields, through mountains and over highways last week streaked the world’s fastest long-haul train, slithering like an ivory worm along the 320 miles of rail between Tokyo and Osaka. For the first full test run of Japan’s $1 billion New Tokaido Line, the super-express Hikari averaged 80 m.p.h. and often went as high as 125 m.p.h. Crowds waved and cheered, highway traffic stopped to watch, and planes of newsmen circled overhead. Japan was greeting not only a new rail service but a symbol of the nation’s postwar industrial growth and a new bond between its two largest cities.

Even with stops at Nagoya and Kyoto, the Hikari covered the run in a record 3 hr. 56 min. When regular service opens Oct. 1—ten days before the Olympic Games begin—some of the line’s 60 passenger trains a day will make the run in four hours v. 6½ over the parallel Old Tokaido Line. The new line took five years to build, and skirts the sea for most of the way; its architects did away completely with grade crossings, designed 548 bridges, 66 tunnels and 57 miles of elevated right of way. The specially built streamlined trains are models of luxury and, unlike most Japanese trains, travel over standard gauge tracks.

Imaginative Recipe. All this speed is the Japanese National Railways’ imaginative recipe for breaking a transportation bottleneck that is squeezing the nation’s industrial heart. The scenic green seaboard between Tokyo and Osaka—containing only 16% of Japan’s land—holds 43% of its population and half of its 500,000 factories. The lone highway between the two cities is hopelessly jammed. Planes fly often, but fares are high. And the Old Tokaido Line, opened in 1891, is so clogged with a quarter of the nation’s passenger and freight traffic that passengers often reserve seats a fortnight ahead, marshaling yards overflow with goods, and maintenance crews repair tracks, with stopwatch timing, between trains only minutes apart.

While the New Tokaido will serve all of Japan’s six largest cities, it is of particular importance to fast-growing Osaka (pop. 3,100,000), the enterprising center of 25% of Japan’s commerce.

Osakans are naturally so commercially minded that their favorite salutation is “Mokari makka?” (Are you making money?). Though Osaka recovered from the war’s devastation more slowly than Tokyo, it has picked up enormous speed in recent years. With adjoining Kobe, its port ships 41% of Japan’s exports, is a center of shipbuilding. Its factories have diversified from traditional cotton spinning into electronics, chemicals and precision machinery. Its stock market is studied as Japan’s most accurate economic barometer.

Eight Hundred Hostesses. By day, the city is in the throes of major construction that fills the air with dust and snarls traffic along its tree-lined boulevards and across the 1,700 bridges that span its ancient networks of canals (some of which are being filled in to provide 40 miles of expressways and parking space). By night, its theater and nightclub districts glow in gaudy neon. Fun-loving citizens fill dozens of giant cabarets, one of which offers 800 hostesses to entertain customers, or ogle the sights from a 338-ft. observation tower, the symbol of the city’s growth. Osaka’s myriad restaurants are noted for their epicurean meals—and it is just as well. The new trains from Tokyo carry buffet stalls but no dining car. Reason: the railway claims that its trains go too fast to leave time for full-course dinners.