Building the Linear Chuo Shinkansen entirely on its own account (2014)

Shouldering a national artery on its own account

The core of this decision was a choice with few parallels anywhere in the world: a single private company building a national high-speed railway entirely on its own account. The motive was closer to defence than to idealism. For a company that entrusts nine-tenths of its fare revenue to one great artery — the Tokaido Shinkansen — handing the initiative on the next-generation line to a rival or to the state carried the danger of having the ground cut from under its breadwinner. It went so far as to volunteer for the burden of the test line in order to secure control of the project, then pressed on to groundbreaking — a structure in which the profit won by narrowing down to a single line is redirected into a colossal investment meant to offset the very fragility that such concentration creates.

Yet the principle of paying for it all itself was not carried through unaltered. Impatient to move the schedule forward, the company invited in government-affiliated fiscal loans, and over a water dispute with local communities it fell into a long stall. That a project raised under the banner of not relying on the state came to depend, for money, on government-linked lending and, for its timetable, on the consent of local governments, shows the limits of self-reliance. Even now, as the Shizuoka section has at last begun to move, the opening has slipped nearly a decade beyond the target set at groundbreaking. Whether this long wager — passing the Tokaido’s profits to the next generation of railway — will be repaid is a question still left to a later generation to answer.