Information Society on Track: Communication, Crime, and the Bullet Train

This article considers Japan's first bullet train line, completed in 1964, within the context of an emerging "information society." Developed for the industrial economy, the line was reinterpreted by urban planners and fiction writers as both a central infrastructure of the postindustrial society and a symbol of its promise and dangers. Infrastructure became a tool for grappling with fundamental socioeconomic changes. This essay is an intellectual and cultural history of two intersecting tracks, explaining how information became a lens through which infrastructure was read and how the bullet train became a key for understanding social change.