Beautifully Abnormal Urban Japan, Part I: Hankyu and the Commuter Rail

If you were on the way from Osaka to Kobe, you would likely be traveling by train. I say likely, because that is how most people make the trip.

There are three different train companies with regular service between the two cities, four if you count the Shinkansen as a distinct rail service.

But this happens in Europe also, right? Different companies share a common track, and they run various trains, all using the same right of way.

Well, yes, and track sharing is common in Japan. But it’s child’s play compared to what is going on in most urban rail corridors here. In the narrow, highly urbanized stretch of land between Osaka and Kobe, mountain on one side, sea on the other, three rail companies each have their own tracks, they each have their own distinct right of way, their own stations, their own real estate empires, stadiums, shopping centers, and each run multiple levels of rail service between Kobe and Osaka and a dozen or so urban areas in between.

The three main commuter lines, Hankyu, JR, and Hanshin illustrated on the corridor between Kobe and Osaka. There is also a Sanyo-Shinkansen bullet train line which is not illustrated — it’s not exactly the local’s choice for this short trip.

If you add all of these trains running on all of these tracks together, you will find a train leaving the Osaka-Umeda station complex nearly once a MINUTE bound for Kobe Sannomiya.

“Pretty astounding rush-hour service,” you might say?

“No,” the train-obsessed Japanese say. Not rush hour. There are 9 commuter trains departing Osaka on this narrow corridor every 10 minutes, at mid-day.

 Timetable (Osaka -> Kobe routes)
     3:00pm JR rapid Himeji
     3:00 Hanshin ltd. exp. Sumaurakoen
     3:00 Hankyu ltd. exp. Shinkaichi
     3:01 Hanshin local Kosokukobe
     3:01 Hankyu local Kobe-Sannomiya
     3:03 Hanshin Express Nishinomiya*
     3:07 JR rapid Aboshi
     3:10 Hanshin ltd. exp. Sanyo-Himeji
     3:10 Hankyu ltd. exp. Shinkaichi

*stops short of Kobe, in Nishinomiya

Although Osaka and Kobe are the main attractions here, the train service is not all about these two big cities. You will notice in the map above, that the three commuter lines tend to spread out and compact back together. This is partly on account of geography. The result is that the entire region in between Osaka and Kobe is filled with communities that are served by the rail network.

The Hankyu line, Hanshin line, and JR line each serve distinct communities in this corridor, somewhat like a metro rail system would in other cities, and each station is more or less a bustling hub of activity where people live, work, eat, pray, love, relax, and variously spend their time.

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Today I am on the Hankyu line. One of my favorite train lines in the world.

Interior and Exterior of a Hankyu Train at Osaka Umeda Station (images CC BY-SA, P.M. Lydon)

Rumor has it that the Hankyu line was also a favorite of David Bowie. It seems right. The classic contours of the carriages and seats, the color combinations, the experience of sitting down on those plush spring-loaded deep green velvety seats made of mohair. These trains somehow manage to be elegant, flashy, and utilitarian all at once.

A friend once told me “We could never have something like that in New York” and I agreed. I sometimes wonder why public transport in the United States is so gleefully abused by the very people who rely on it, and whose taxes pay for it. But then I am reminded that in the 1970s, a mob of Japanese commuters destroyed a train station in Tokyo and took the station master hostage, apparently on account of train service issues. I guess there is a time and place for everything?

Today at least, passengers in Japan seem to love and respect these trains for what they are. Yet I was also surprised when I first learned that most trains in Japan today are not government run, as they typically are in the United States. Even JR West (the company that manages JR train service in this part of the country) is a publicly-traded corporation.

A NOTE ON COST

Almost all rail operations in Japan are privately owned enterprises today, they tend to be beautifully kept, and impeccably on time, and yet somehow the fares in this case are far cheaper than comparative urban commuter services in the United States.

How much cheaper?

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Osaka to Kobe:
Distance — 32km (20 miles)
Time — 21-30 minutes (depending on which express train)
Cost — 330 yen ($2.30 USD)

San Jose to Redwood City
Distance — 34km (21 miles)
Time — 46 minutes (on the Caltrain ‘baby bullet’)
Cost — 1,170 yen ($8.25 USD).

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The California version of this route takes twice the time, and four times the cost compared with the Osaka-Kobe trip.

Yet there is one similarity between these trains.

Can you guess it?

While the Caltrain ‘gallery’ cars are not quite as elegant as those on the Hankyu line, both trains were in fact, built in Japan. The Caltrain carriages are quite beautiful in their own 1980s vintage way, aren’t they?

Did you know the classic CalTrain ‘gallery’ cars still in service today were built in 1985 in Japan by Nippon Sharyo? (Images CC-BY 2.0, Michael Hicks [left], Yukihiro Matsuda [right])

To be fair, you can credit much of the cost difference between these two train lines to the fact that private rail companies in Japan tend to own much of the real estate around their stations. If you think of the urban train companies in Japan then, not as train companies, but as primarily real estate companies who happen to also own train lines, then you begin to see the sense here.

Trains in urban areas of Japan could be seen — least partly — as a service provided by real estate companies, to facilitate travel in between each of those company’s properties (the stations), where in turn people spend money before and after getting on the train. When residents and shop owners then pay rent, that all goes back to real estate company, who use part of the profit to subsidize the cost of the train service. This would also explain why so many train stations in Japan exit directly into shopping malls. Very logical.

Thanks in part to this arrangement, the vast majority of Japan’s rail operators cover well over 100% of their operating expenses without the need for government subsidies. The details are somewhat unclear to me (and I am happy for anyone who has clarification) but in the case of Hankyu, the revenue to cost ratio was nearly 170% as of 2018. Meanwhile “farebox recovery” for rail systems in the United States hovers around 10-20%.

Private rail companies in many of Japan’s urban centers are lately in such a position, that they do not need to survive only on fare box income. Yet the profitability of the rail system here is due not technically to their privatization, but to the ingenuity of an interconnected system — frequent, efficient and reliable public transit paired with dense, walkable neighborhoods ensuring high passenger volumes — that was devised to be financially, socially, and ecologically stable for the long term. They see rail as part of a larger self-supporting system, and this system includes of course, making efficient use of the real estate on which the train stations sit. This is the simple version of the story, and it must be said that getting there was no walk in the park.

Some will claim that a capitalist business model is what drove all of this to happen. If so, it must be acknowledged that these business entities all had the choice of how to develop their real estate. Nearly all of them chose the same method — smooth, frequent, comfortable train service connecting a string of dense, walkable neighborhoods. Indeed, the space efficiency of rail & pedestrian based cities, paired with the positive relationship between density and land value, makes such developments a good business decision.

However, it is clear that this arrangement — and most exemplary Japanese urbanism — is never primarily about profit. Often the opposite is true. And so the Hankyu trains that David Bowie had an eye for, and the endearing, wild, walkable, close-knit neighborhoods here, all exist because of something else entirely — a balancing act that produces the kinds of beautifully abnormal urban neighborhoods that one can only experience in Japan. I hope we can celebrate these abnormalities, and make them more acceptable elsewhere.

Next time (in a fortnight) we will hop on that Hankyu line train together for a short ride, then alight, and begin to discover how this plays out, in streets filled with the kinds of wondrous surprises that give Western urban planners nightmares.

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Thanks for reading, and a note on the format going forward the next few months. Because we are doing an interior design/build for our new space, and because that seems of interest to many readers here, the publishing schedule will increase to once a week. Next week’s writing will be about the building process (building the possible city) and the following week will be a continuation of our urban adventure (experiencing or dreaming the possible city).

We’ll see if that publishing schedule is sustainable. Till then, good wishes for the New Year. Thanks for being with me on this adventure! Tell your friends. Tell your colleagues. Let’s enjoy this together.