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c h a p t e r s e v e n Former Military Engineers and the Development of the Shinkansen, 1957–1964 At 6:00 in the morning on October 1, 1964, leaving behind fireworks and the marching song composed for the occasion, the Shinkansen slowly left the Tokyo station to head for Osaka for the first time, a distance of 515 kilometers. Fifty doves symbolizing peace were released into the air. It was a historic moment; it was “the Dawn of the New Age of Rail Service,” wrote the Mainichi Shinbun. Even a local newspaper in the remote Saga prefecture carried a report.1 Ishida Reisuke, president of the Japanese National Railways (JNR) cut the tape at the opening ceremony. His presence at center stage surprised those engineers at the Railway Technical Research Institute (RTRI) who were familiar with his view on the high-speed rail service. During his July 1957 visit to observe their experiments for a high-speed run at 200 km/h, he had reportedly said, “Why does a train need to run that fast? I am not going to ride that.”2 Even more surprising were those conspicuously missing from the ceremony. Ishida was new to the rail industry . Originally, he was a Mitsui entrepreneur who headed the JNR organization from May 1963 after Sogō Shinji, known as the father of the Shinkansen project. Neither Sogō nor his right-hand man chief engineer Shima Hideo attended the ceremony, despite their indispensable contributions to the project over the past decades. They and other RTRI engineers watched the ceremony on television. A reasonable understanding of the technological and political development that led to this outcome needs to consider the independent judgments of politicians , engineers, and local citizens within various institutional and national decision-making contexts. Especially after 1957, RTRI engineers, the JNR leadership , and government officials began to display compatible, yet disparate interests in high-speed rail service. Only after their temporary marriage of convenience in 1957 did the national project move forward. Each player successfully capitalized on what the others could bring to the table within the growing national economy, each creating its own version of the Shinkansen success story. 158 Engineering War and Peace in Modern Japan, 1868–1964 A Brief History of High-Speed Rail Service, 1918–1955 Before 1955, the JNR had launched a series of engineering initiatives for longdistance , high-speed rail service across the nation but with modest success. Intercity transportation over short and medium distances was dominant before 1945. Long-distance rail service made slow but steady progress. From 1890 to 1916, the overall train speed increased on the main Tōkaidō line from Tokyo to Osaka, with the average increase of 0.83km/h each year.3 In 1890, the long-distance rail service ran from Shinbashi, Tokyo, to Kōbe with average speed of 30.1 km/h. The progress was incremental. In 1907, rail travel was possible from Tokyo to Shimonoseki on the western end of the Honshū Island at the average speed of 45.3 km/h. The fastest rail service before 1945 was by Tsubame train that ran from Tokyo to Kōbe at the 67.5 km/h on average; in 1950, it ran at the average speed of 68.6 km/h.4 Apart from this gradual progress, the central government launched a highspeed rail project before 1945 that had many political implications.5 At center stage was the Ministry of Railways. In June 1939, it established the Committee for Constructing a New Trunk Line (Shin senro kensetsu junbi iinkai).6 A subcommittee (kansen chōsa bunkakai) subsequently inherited the project and explored the technological feasibility of an entirely new line between Tokyo and Shimonoseki . The following month a committee (tetsudō kansen chōsakai) was formed with representatives from various ministries and specialists in the field. Their proposal, arguing the need for a new trunk line, was submitted officially to the Minister of Railways, marking the beginning of the so-called bullet train project. This massive national plan of 1939 supported the construction of a standard track gauge of 1,435 millimeters in width. The initiative capitalized on the prevailing atmosphere of national emergency associated with the war in China. That same year parliament approved the construction budget, allocating 560 million yen for its completion. This was originally expected by 1940.7 This project failed partly because its technological blueprint embodied both realistic and unrealistic elements. On the realistic side, engineers planned...

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