Aura of Success: The First Years of Japan's Privatized National Railways
What does it take to make a railway a "success"?
As the clock approached midnight on March 31, 1987, Japan’s television stations live-broadcasted the end of the country’s public national railway system. Cameras on standby at major station platforms caught late-night commuters, and pre-recorded tributes filled the dead time. Five minutes before midnight, a chorus of vintage steam locomotives, lined in a half-circle in a train yard, whistled “Auld Lang Syne” as uniformed men — at least one openly crying — sang goodbye.
(A 2.5 hour live television special on the final hours of JNR on March 31, 1987, skip to 1:49:00 for the Auld Lang Syne performance)
On midnight, under fireworks and a matching percussion performance, the Japanese National Railways (JNR) died, and the new Japanese Railways (JR) was born. Agents across the county replaced signage at stations and trains on cue to reflect the historical change. JNR’s corpus — a world-class national train agency who birthed the Shinkansen but languished under two decades of serious financial stress — was split into seven regional, privatized JR companies to give a birth to a new era.
After years of reputation damage to JNR, the new JR honchos were eager to distance their new rail companies from JNR, and a live television bonanza satisfied their bombast. They desired to project a public image of a modern, young, sleek, forward-thinking and profitable JR, a rail system befitting a 1980s Japan whose economy was running red-hot, its zeitgeist engorged from speculation and hubris. As new kids on the block, the JR Group — especially the major three companies based in the largest Honshu Island — were eager to mature and ready to offer their company shares on the Japanese stock market as soon as possible.
Readers are likely aware of JR’s longstanding successes. JR stands as a model for global railway excellence. For believers, JR is a North Star in prescribing privatization as a cure for ailing public railways. The media honed this narrative early into JR’s lifetime; foreign observers, like the BBC, for example, hailed JR “the envy of the world” by 1993, only its sixth year of operation.1
But why and how did JR deserve such glowing coverage so early in its project? And did it deserve it? It is impossible to answer fully without the complicated, heavily bureaucratic, and decade-long political struggle which led to privatization and sectionalization — the focus of the JNR/JR series on this Substack thus far. The struggle occurred in the bowels of the Japanese administrative state and on the streets with militant labor unions. The manner and conditions which transformed privatization from an idea to reality will be essential to evaluating its post-privatization successes and failures.
A closer examination into JR’s adolescent years in the late 1980s and early 1990s show the lengths the Japanese state went to clear the runway for JR to take off in two ways: first, most of JNR’s long-term debt liability of 37.2 trillion Yen (roughly $264 billion in 1987 USD, yes, billion)2 were selectively contained in new bureaucratic agencies separate from the JR companies. This accounting maneuver shielded the railway babes from exposure to the radioactive material which ultimately killed JNR. Second, the mass labor unions — which held an uneasy and often confrontational relationship with JNR — were crushed into oblivion prior to privatization. Casualties ranged in hundreds of thousands of workers who were forced into early retirement, pushed out, re-shuffled or laid off. All remaining employees were re-hired by the JR companies, who rebuilt their workforce in their vision. In their total victory over organized labor, Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and his architects of the JR — all devotees of that ascendant Reagan/Thatcher neoliberal system — expended great political capital to win, even at great concerns coming internally from their Liberal Democratic Party.
Ian Smith, the British scholar who has been foundation to this Substack series, writes:
The degree to which the privatization of the JNR has enhanced this reputation is…more easily discernible at this uncritical ‘image’ level than in detailed analysis. Thus, it is contended that the aura of success…is due, in reality, as much to the prior conditions applied to the privatization process as it to the tangible results of the new policy of managing the national railways.
The key to understanding the creation of this aura is to be found in the analysis for the preconditions established as an integral part of the legislative process by which the JNR’s division and privatization was enacted. The procedures introduced to shelve the bulk of the JNR’s debt and thereby to remove the massive interest burden, to cut drastically the labor force of the national railway and to neutralize any union opposition, were the essential elements of a policy initiative designed to conceive an instantly profitable JR Group of operating companies…Their execution, moreover, did not solve the financial problems; it merely ensured that they were not inherited by the new ‘profitable’ privatized JR Companies and, instead, that the real financing burden remained in the public domain.
This post unpacks the first eight years of the JR era, from 1987 to 1995.
Author’s Note
This is the fifth and last installment of a multi-part examination of JNR’s history. Popular in discussions of global railways, a detailed and granular history of both JNR and JR is much needed, especially in the English language.
To accomplish this post, I rely almost exclusively on University of Stirling academic Ian Smith’s 1996 study “The Privatisation of the JNR in Historical Perspective: An Evaluation of Government Policy on the Operation of National Railways in Japan”, which provides the most comprehensive English-language understanding of JNR’s dissolution and JR’s first five years of operation. I also used Smith’s 1997 report in the Japan Railway & Transport Review “10 Years of JR Operation — The Explicit and Implicit Aims of JNR Privatization”. It is out of the sheer lack of available English-language material on this topic and time period.
In the three-years-plus timeline of research, reading and writing this project, I can sense there is much literature in Japanese on this topic that is unavailable to an English speaker in the United States. As such, I welcome all feedback, including corrections.
And eternal gratitude to Ian Smith, whose work I have read a hundred times over.
The 37.2 Trillion Yen Question
Before the clock struck midnight, JNR shouldered a long-term liability burden of 37.2 trillion Yen. The size of the burden was so big it made up nearly 70 percent of the total national public sector deficit.3 By 1983, the burden was equivalent to two South American countries’ national debts, combined.4 How was this possible? To recap, the most egregious culprit was the exponential growth of the Japanese rail network into the sparsely populated rural areas — a favorite quid pro quo of politicians in the national legislature, the Diet, with constituents — which sunk JNR’s healthy profits into deep red by the mid-1960s. Even after objecting, JNR was obligated to run trains in these long distance rural lines with less than 100 riders per day in the name of national connectivity.5 High-risk bond schemes and further spending increases added fuel to the money bonfire, as a growing Japanese middle class increasingly ditched the train for the automobile. After the Oil Crisis of 1973, the hemorrhaging took on its own velocity, and the annual deficit grew at eye-watering exponentiality. By the mid-1980s the Diet finally intervened: dissolve the JNR and privatize its entities.
When killing a national train agency, burial is a key logistic. For the Diet, it involved creating a new corporation, the JNR Settlement Corporation (JNRSC), where 25.5 trillion Yen of JNR’s long-term liabilities will be held. In a blink of an eye, the money pit swallowing JNR was moved to a new location. For Smith, the JNRSC accounting magic served a tacit “acknowledgement of the financial burdens which had been imposed on [JNR]…beyond its financial capabilities”, that JNR indeed was left neglected for decades.6 JNRSC was not only a dumping ground for undesirable capital but also undesirable labor: the last holdouts of the militant JNR Kokuro labor union membership, rejected during the re-hiring process, were transferred to work at JNRSC.7 On JR’s third birthday, in April 1, 1990, these employees would be fired by JNRSC; their lay-offs would spark a courthouse odyssey which would ultimately be settled in 2010 for 20 billion Yen (roughly $225 million).8
The total 37.2 trillion Yen debt were divided between longstanding debt and extra burdens carried by JNR, such as pension obligations, railway construction liabilities, among others.9 As its founders envisioned, JNRSC would repay the liabilities down through two revenue streams: first, by selling JNR’s surplus real estate, and second, from stock purchases when the three Honshu JRs would make its initial public offering. However, even at its rosiest outlook, 13.8 trillion Yen — only 37% of the total liability burden — was expected to be left over after both streams were exhausted as “Long Term Public Sector Obligation”, as seen in the table below.10
It was an optimistic time. Japan in the 1980s was enjoying a major real estate price appreciation, often with eye-popping figures: a square meter of land in Tokyo’s central Ginza shopping district, for example, were selling for nearly $250,000.11 Two-thirds of Japan’s private wealth was tied to land and real estate in the late 1980s. Japan’s real estate market was aggregately priced four times larger than that of the United States, a country 26 times bigger in land mass.12 JNRSC were expected to aggressively sell more than 8,180 acres of non-operational land held by JNR — about 13% of its total real estate acreage — through open competitive bidding.13 Holding some of the hottest undeveloped real estate lots in Japan, previously unavailable for purchase, JNRSC was primed to cash in big at the right time.
In October 1987, six months after privatization, the Nakasone government halted JNRSC’s land auctioneering to rein in real estate prices from spinning further out of control. Under the Emergency Countermeasures against Rising Land Prices, JNRSC were limited to selling only developed land, through Land Trusts, and without competitive bidding. These anti-speculatory measures dampened massive interest from cash-ready speculators.14 Continued government intervention, including tightening the monetary supply in 1989, finally cooled off the once red-hot real estate market by 1990, but the cool-off precipitated a stock market crash, where the Nikkei 225 lost 39% of its start-of-year index by end of 1990.15 This economic paralysis heralded the famous “Lost Decade.” Missing out on a golden opportunity, JNRSC’s land-sell scheme yielded abysmal results: by the end of fiscal year 1991, JNRSC generated only 2.2 trillion Yen in real estate sales, just 27% of the 7.7 trillion Yen forecasted target set by the JNR Reform Commission prior to privatization.16
A backsliding stock market spelled further trouble for JNRSC, which was also responsible for setting up the initial public offerings for JR East, JR Central and JR West. Their stock market debuts (along with JR Freight’s) in 1991 and 1992 were postponed. Despite a government mandate that ready JR companies enter the stock market as early as possible, the first JR stock sale occurred in October 1993, five and half years post-privatization.17 However, the first sale of JR East stocks beat forecasts and generated 1.07 trillion Yen in revenue, gifting some belated good news for JNRSC. However, the profits from the JR East IPO left nary a dent on JNRSC’s debt: between 1987 and 1992, JNRSC’s long-term liabilities also increased by nearly a trillion Yen, from 25.5 trillion in 1987 to 26.4 trillion thanks to interest.18
JR West and JR Central ultimately went public in 1996 and 1997, respectively.19 But as land prices in both urban and rural areas fell through the entire 1990s, real estate sales failed to make the sorely needed impact.20 JNRSC ran out of ideas — and their debt continued to grow to 27.7 trillion Yen. Finally, in 1998, the Japanese Diet passed the “Act on the Handling of Debts of the Japanese National Railways Settlement Corporation” which disbanded JNRSC. Fixed assets, leftover JR shares held by JNRSC and pension debts of around 4.1 trillion Yen were transferred to the Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation.21 All of the JNR-era leftover debts, totalling 23.5 billion Yen, of which two-thirds bore interest, were deposited into the General Account of the Japanese Government. 22
It bears spelling out in plain terms: 11 years after privatization, nearly all of JNR’s long-term liabilities was ultimately subsumed into the Japanese national debt as taxpayer responsibility. Despite an unforeseen rough Japanese economy of the 1990s, JNRSC ultimately was a major failure, its dissolution a total affront to the aims of the JR framers’ vision that the debt crisis could be handled through the stock market and real estate rationalization. And this last, truly grand intervention by the Japanese government to absorb the debt and put an end to a 30-year-long fiscal crisis underscores a running theme of public oversight over the supposedly independent JR.
“A Form of Stage-Management”
A critical form of the “aura of success” mentioned above is the patina of JR as an exemplary model where free market principles can and do succeed in a nation-scale passenger railway system. But as observed by the life and death of JNRSC, a key instrument to develop said patina, the true free market was either introduced very late (not in full until 1997) and in limited fashion thanks to constant government intervention.
The first years of the JR Group is fueled by constant and diversified government subsidies to upkeep the system. To set the table, JR and JNRSC collectively received, on average, a gross annual subsidy payment of 155 Billion Yen in its four years between 1987 and 1990.23 (As comparison, JNR in its last year in 1986 received a total 188 billion Yen in subsidies.24 ) In 1989, the Japanese government endowed a one-time special payment of 442 Billion Yen to reduce JNRSC’s pension burden.25
In addition to JNRSC and further subsidies, its JR framers added two more mechanisms — The Management Stabilization Fund and the Shinkansen Holding Corporation — to make its clockwork system tick. These lesser-understood mechanisms maintained the image of a private railway company without relieving itself of public aid. Or as Smith puts it, they served a “form of stage-management to ensure that the results of the new JR companies would appear favorable by comparison with those of the JNR.”26
The Management Stabilization Fund
The framers of JR were well aware that urban and intercity Shinkansen lines in Honshu were where the money resided. The other three big islands in the Japanese archipelago were running at a major deficit under JNR, so the Management Stabilization Fund was created to subsidize operating deficits for JR Hokkaido, JR Shikoku, and JR Kyushu.
Unlike a regular public subsidy, the Fund was a pool of money which JNRSC would invest in the stock market for a return. Created by Tokyo University economists, the Fund was created with a 1.3 trillion Yen principal, which would be invested for an ambitious 7.3% annual interest return, the level necessary to cover the three companies’ operating deficits.27 Interestingly, or maddeningly, the government did not deposit the principal; it was instead JNRSC who took out additional debt to kick-start the Fund.28 For the first two years of JR, JNRSC paid to JR Hokkaido, JR Shikoku, and JR Kyushu an amount equivalent to a 7.3% return by taking on more debt, as the principal existed only in name and without any government assistance.29 From 1989 until JNRSC’s dissolution in 1998, the policy was changed, to JNRSC simply paying from the principal annually to the Three Island JR companies.30
Despite the quirky start, the Management Stabilization Fund has served its purpose every year since 1987 and still remains to this day. In the mid-2000s, JR Kyushu stopped receiving the Fund and in 2016 became the first non-Honshu JR company to offer stocks.31 In 2011, the Diet amended the aforementioned “Act on the Handling of Debts of the Japanese National Railways Settlement Corporation” to allow the Japanese Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency (JRTT) to issue special bonds to stabilize the two remaining island JR companies.32 However, the future looks unclear at Hokkaido and Shikoku. As mentioned in my previous blog post on JR Shikoku, the company ran a 13 billion Yen in fiscal year 2019 and saw its ridership crater following the COVID-19 pandemic.
Shinkansen Holding Corporation
The Shinkansen Holding Corporation was created as the proprietor of the then-existing four Shinkansen high-speed rail lines. They would lease them to JR East, JR Central, and JR West which would operate the services. SHC not only inherited from all Shinkansen facilities but also its liabilities at about 5.7 trillion Yen.33 This liability would be paid down by revenues generated by the lease payments from the Honshu JR Companies, which could fluctuate based on passenger traffic and market values. A further 2.9 trillion Yen debt — dedicated as capital for eventual repairs of Shinkansen facilities — was added onto SHC for them to pay to JNRSC over 30 years.34
The lease payments were unevenly divide to minimize financial burden on the three JR companies. JR Central carried the largest lease payment burden as they ran trains on majority of the extremely profitable Tokaido and Sanyo Shinkansen lines. SHC and its payment pipelines were a finely tuned system to ensure payments were met without impacting the JR companies’ profit margins.35 However, the delicate system faced its first challenge in 1989, as a new Shinkansen line — the Hokiriku Shinkansen — began construction. The decision for a new Shinkansen was decided on “national” grounds prior to privatization and had not factored new sectional leasing system.36 How this new Shinkansen would be funded — and by whom — was in flux. And this was enough to topple the intricately formed SHC.
In 1991, SHC was disbanded by the Diet and reorganized at the urging by JR Central, the carrier of the heaviest lease burden.37 (A new funding framework for the Hokiriku Shinkansen simultaneously went into effect) On October 1, 1991, SHC sold all its Shinkansen facilities and assets to the Honshu JR companies for a total of 9.1 trillion Yen, and the SHC became the Railway Development Fund.38 That money became the principal for the Railway Development Fund, now a special fund to meet construction costs for new planned Shinkansen lines in the future.39 These arrangements, per Smith, enabled two things: first, for the Honshu JR Companies to take control of the Shinkansen assets and create a cash flow for when facilities are being replaced, if possible; and second, to dedicate a funding source to encourage new Shinkansen construction, which was postponed since 1982, outside of JR company pockets.40
Privatization: What’s It Good For?
So far, we have outlined three mechanisms the JR framers and the Japanese state devised to ensure JR’s inaugural financial success. Two of them were disbanded with 11 years of implementation, and critically, JR’s inherited debt situation did not improve. Arguably, it got worse; and no Midas touch of the invisible hand came to the rescue. And yet: JR is considered not only a phenomenal success, but a gold standard for railway management in the world. A yawning gap exists between what has been explicated here already and what is the common understanding — that “aura of success”. This is where we will attempt to bridge it.
In JR’s inaugural fiscal year of 1987/1988, the passenger per kilometer volume rose by 3.2%, the first of a seven-year streak of continual ridership growth.41 The JR Group also recorded a 156 billion Yen profit, the first recorded profit by Japan’s national railways since 1965.42 (Critical to note that JNRSC and SHC payments were not included) But perhaps more important than the numbers were the perception: one commentator wrote “privatization has brought about a change in awareness reflected in media…and in the attitude of the general public…Strong efforts made by the JR Group since its inception have received full public recognition.”43
The JR Group indeed kicked off its new services with a slew of customer-oriented improvements. In its first two years, the JR companies offered the following (not limited to) to woo more passengers:44
Increased train service across all JR companies in its busiest lines
Increase of special service trains (i.e. Friday nights for Tokyo area JR East trains and Shinkansen; event trains for baseball night games in Nagoya)
Improvements and cleaning-up of station facilities, most notably repairing toilets
More trains equipped with “cooling facilities”
Upgrade of train seats across all JR companies
New special scenic trains in Kyoto area (famously the Sagano sightseeing train) and Shikoku
Extension of hours for selling reserved tickets (JR East only)
Smith takes a skeptical view at this list, calling it “minor improvements” of “cosmetic nature”, especially in comparison to, say, the less attractive and graver task of handling 36.5 trillion Yen of long-term liabilities.45 Does it require privatization to be able to make these customer improvements? Smith argues no, and provides hidden trade-offs that muddies the answer. He notes this uptick in operational improvements starting in 1987 was possible because of a 61% year-over-year reduction in capital spending from the final JNR year of 1986. JNR was obligated to maintain a massive capital spending portfolio due to its expanding rail network into rural, extremely unprofitable areas; as a private enterprise, the JR Group was freed from such demands and was given the flexibility to spend the capital money more freely.46 That flexibility to focus on service and cleanliness over critical maintenance, Smith does concede, did make a perceptive difference, or at least “deflect attention from the less positive consequences” of JR Group’s first year.47
Such improvements came easily with a totally domesticized labor force who survived a reckoning in the lead-up to privatization. Within twelve years between 1975 and 1987, JNR headcount was cut nearly 60% from 432,000 to 183,000 workers. In addition, at the onset of JNR’s dissolution, the waiting JR companies got to re-hire all JNR employees as they saw fit. The self-selection of the remaining employees — and mutually, the total destruction of all resistant labor unions — allowed for an acquiescent labor force where nationwide rail strikes and unsanctioned union graffitis on Shinkansen trains and station platforms were relics of a bygone era. Management found it easier to divert capital and labor to their target improvements. The general public and once-hostile media thus were happy to overlook any concerning signs under the JR hood.48
JR management proselytized openly on their new reality and their visions. In a 1992 magazine piece asking JR’s achievements in its first five years, JR East heads cited the removal of the Oyakata Hi no Maru spirit — or “the government will pick up the tab for any excess or mistake” — and the introduction of competitive spirit in a smaller workforce as its main benefits.49 In an internal publication, JR East sought to establish its corporate-ness and its corporate philosophy: “[JR East would put the customer first…Central to our service orientation is the concept “high-quality service and reasonable fares.”50 Other JR companies cited as benefits a decentralized management structure incentivizing quicker decision-making and implementation.51
These new benefits meant they were more on par with Japan’s numerous existing private railways, many of which serve the dense Kansai area. The “Big Fifteen” private railways prided on their diverse portfolio which a majority of its total revenues were generated from non-railway operations; for example, the Hankyu Railways’ holding corporations sport numerous hotels, retail, TV stations, and a legendary all-female music theater troupe company that has served as inspiration for generations of manga and anime creators.52 (In contrast, railway critics have long complained the private railways’ relatively low capital investments to improve its system came at cost of everyday riders.)53
JNR never was given leeway to expand its operations beyond railways under the Ministry of Transport’s tight control. Under the privatization laws of 1986, JR companies were explicitly given privileges to divert capital investment to begin new business activities such as hotels, shopping malls, insurance agencies, concession stores, warehouses, and travel agencies.5455 With the aid of the Railway Development Fund to help find new revenue streams, JR companies increasingly became landlords to the most premier hotels and shopping complexes connected next to their most-used stations.
This unlocking was immediately as a game-changer for JR’s financial vitality in its early years, so much so that one critic of the JNR privatization quipped the elimination of JNR’s prohibition into non-railway businesses “might be the only true advantage of privatization.”56 JR East in its 2024 fiscal report states 32% of its operating revenue comes from non-railway operations, such as retail, hotels and real estate.57 JR Kyushu now holds the most diversified portfolio of all JR companies, with 62% of operating revenues coming from non-railway operations, thanks to its aggressive approach since inception in creating and operating new businesses, such as 20 hotels and more than 530 retail stores and restaurants.58
Was privatization successful from the jump? JR management would say an emphatic ‘Yes.’ From its inaugural year in 1987, buoyed by a ridership jump, the seven JR companies saw instant profit and saw its annual profits grow until its peak at 307 billion Yen in 1991. The profitability turn-around is all the more impressive considering there was no true fare increases across all JR passenger companies until 1995.59
However, we are more aware of the fuller picture. SHC and JNRSC must be accounted for, as they, like the JR companies, are direct descendants of JNR. When accounting their total annual interest payments ranging around 1.5 trillion Yen, JR’s profits ranging between 150 and 300 billion Yen quickly nosedive in the red. However, JR did record a much lower annual deficit despite having a higher interest payment obligation than JNR. Only twice did JR recover back into the black in 1990 and 1993: the first due to JNRSC’s major sale of its holding Tokyo Metro shares (netting 882 billion Yen) and the second following JR East’s IPO (netting more than 1 trillion Yen). This arithmetic comes to a close, of course, in 1998, when JNRSC was dissolved and JNR’s debts were no longer a concern.
What is ultimately the verdict on privatization? I suspect many readers may find their favorite silver linings of privatization: mass workforce reduction; elimination of militant labor unions; introduction of an enterprising corporate culture; customer-oriented improvements; and flexibility of a diversified transit-oriented development portfolio. These are all strengths lauded to this day and are readily apparent when discussing what makes Japan’s transit exceptional. There is no doubt that solely the movement toward privatization unlocked some of these qualities. But are these qualities, truly, mutually exclusive from that of an existing public railway agency, or do all these agencies need to go through a similar existential, exhaustive metamorphosis of a JNR-to-JR to emerge with these qualities?
Smith, I’d like to believe, would argue it was a catastrophe, on the sole fact that the debt was never handled with any degree of competence and grew to a point where it required a bailout from the Japanese government. This resolution flew against the face of JR’s founding vision. Hundreds of thousands of JNR career workers lost their jobs as a cost for this promise. An entire nation was changed, politically and societally, by this promise. And exactly, for what?
Auld Lang Syne to the JNR/JR Series
Our exploration of JNR and JR begins on August 15, 1945, when the Japanese Empire surrendered and handed supreme domestic authority to the United States. Where it ends is much less clear; for our sake, I mark its terminus in 1998, when the debt crisis was resolved forever.
I want to keep it short (I may do a epilogue) and conclude by reminding the readers that this was a saga marked only by politics of a very familiar kind. No natural laws or objective economic truths heralded its arrival. This story was written only in bureaucratic ink: from General MacArthur’s staff meetings with an unstable postwar government; from decisions made at the Ministry of Transport and the Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation during Japan’s 1960s boom; from the boardrooms of the Second Rincho and the Mitsutaka Subcommittee toying with JNR privatization; and the scattered sectionalized offices of the new JR Group. I believe this story is both entertaining and enlightening because these decision points are familiar locales to any reader. From such banal starts, history with magnitude are often weaved.
Smith, Ian. “The Privatisation of the JNR in Historical Perspective: An Evaluation of Government Policy on the Operation of National Railways in Japan.” The University of Stirling, 1996, p. 605
It is not by any means a perfect conversion. My method was using USD/JPY historical data at https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/currency, using the April 1987 point of 140.74 Yen for 1 USD and doing basic arithmetic to arrive at that, frankly unbelievable, figure
Smith, p. 524
Smith, p. 336
https://x.com/kaptrice/status/1856010450757951722 An example on the Shiranuka Line in Hokkaido, built in 1981. JNR was forced to maintain this line.
Smith, p. 468
Smith, p. 482
https://www.zenroren.gr.jp/jp/english/2010/07/english100706_02.html
Ibid.
Smith, p. 471
https://hbr.org/1990/05/power-from-the-ground-up-japans-land-bubble
https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/news-trends/article/3091222/japan-1980s-when-tokyos-imperial-palace-was-worth-more
Smith, p. 525-526
Smith, p. 526
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/23/japan-stock-market-recovery-1990-investment-growth/
Smith, p. 527
Smith, p. 528, p. 530
Smith, p. 522-523
https://www.jrtt.go.jp/settlement/share.html
https://www.aof.org.hk/uploads/conference_detail/465/con_paper_0_559_kawaguchi.pdf
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/日本国有鉄道清算事業団
https://www.jrtt.go.jp/settlement/process-structure.html
Smith, p. 536-538
Ibid.
Smith, p. 537
Smith, p. 487
Smith, p. 538-539
Smith, p. 540-542
Smith, p. 540
Smith, p. 541
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-17/jr-kyushu-to-price-ipo-at-top-end-of-range-to-raise-4-billion
https://www.ejrcf.or.jp/jrtr/jrtr60/pdf/45-51_web.pdf
Smith, p. 463
Smith, p. 464
Ibid.
Smith, p. 464-465
Smith, p. 548
Smith, p. 536
Smith, p.548-549
Smith, p. 549
Smith, Ian. “10 Years of JR Operation — The Explicit and Implicit Aims of JNR Privatization.” Japan Railway & Transport Review, September 1997, p. 43
Smith, p. 214
Smith, p. 494
Smith, p. 495
Ibid.
Smith, p. 564
Smith, p. 496
Smith, p. 496
Smith, p. 507-508
Smith, p. 562
Smith, p. 507-511
Smith, p. 546-547
Smith, p. 547
Smith, p. 495 (Read “Related Projects” under Table 35)
Smith, p. 545-546
Smith, p. 547
https://www.jreast.co.jp/e/environment/pdf_2024/all.pdf
https://www.jrkyushu.co.jp/company/ir_eng/library/integrated_report/pdf/Correction_2024_ir_En.pdf
Smith, Ian. “10 Years of JR Operation — The Explicit and Implicit Aims of JNR Privatization.” Japan Railway & Transport Review, September 1997, p. 43
Fascinating read! I watched the whole JNR celebration you linked above (shoddy auto-translated subtitles and my own middling Japanese skills aiding my understanding), and I'm glad I did because the tone they set during that show was definitely different than what you present here.
The sudden bailout after the other failures was something I suspected would happen but it being confirmed as I read on felt like... I suppose watching a train coming down the tracks towards you, for lack of a better metaphor.
I appreciate your writing being clear for people, like me, who aren't "econ people", thank you for such an informative and thoughtful piece.
An excellent read - thanks!
I often wondered why rail privatisation worked out so well for Japan, but so badly for my country (Britain).
And now I know the answer - massive state intervention!