It's always frustrating to read anything by most foreigners about Japanese trains.
There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong.
The title, "How Japan's railways stayed one" is just false. They were never one, they are still not one.
Take Tokyo, off the top of my head there is Toei, Tobu, Odakyu, Keio, Seibu, Tokyu, Keikyu, Tokyo Metro, ... and JR
If you're in Shibuya. You can take JR (4 lines: Yamanote, Saikyo, Shinjuku-Shonan, N-EX), Keio (1 line: Inokashira), Eiden (3 lines: Ginza, Hanzomon, Fukutoshin), Toyku (2 lines: Den-en-toshi, Toyoko)
Or Osaka, there's Hanshin, Hankyu, Kentetsu, Nankai, ... and JR
Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private. Even JR's 7 are now private and they were originally private, there was a middle period where the government took them over. It was the period where they nearly went bankrupt, had extremely bad performance.
As someone who's lived in Tokyo for 10 years it's largely met my expectations. My living situation is far more modern than the western country I'm from, even if my suburb looks a bit plain (my only real complaint is that there's too much concrete and not enough trees).
Would even go as far as to say many comments about the place being trapped in the 80s or 90s don't match reality. For instance, the only time I've ever been asked to use a fax machine was by a US company.
The decaying rural areas of Japan would probably love to be stuck in the 80s if they can. Too late, now they have hollowed out and everyone young is moving to the same cities most tourists stay at.
Every time you read a story about some Japanese town offering people, even foreigners, money to move there and occupy an abandoned house, keep in mind this is a gesture of desperation, not gratitude,
The people you're probably thinking of are working in finance or Japanese mega venture/US tech companies. They make up a vanishingly small percent of foreigners working in Japan.
Decaying rural areas happen in every country, throughout history, throughout time. It’s just how the world works.
The only reason it recently reversed in the US was due to COVID.
Second, many countries are modern in some ways and backwards in some other way. To label a country as modern or not is silly.
Here how it works: I build a porch today and my neighbor builds a pool. In 30 years, he builds a porch but I build a pool. If you cherry pick porches, I look outdated and he looks modern, but it’s reversed if you cherry pick pools!
Japan has seen millennia of huge cultural shifts. Its strength is its ability to adapt and survive with some measure of continuity, even while embracing the new reality. Go watch some Ozu films. They're all about the "hollowing out" of traditional small-town lifestyle and culture. It isn't so much a problem as a feature of the landscape that reminds people about how transient their reality can be.
"which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country"
Arguably the ideology and hate are prerequisites for a country to have a monoculture. With ideology and hate comes xenophobia and racism == monoculture.
This article is about the JR branding and design, not train operations. The title may be overstating the case, but the content is definitely not drawing over generalized conclusions about railroads in Japan.
Not to mention the idea that JR is only 7% of Japanese railroad makes little sense in real life. JR carries a majority of rail passengers in Japan. The long tail of non JR railroad companies in Japan are small, regional operators owning maybe one or two lines with infrequent services. Many of them are also private only in the sense that they are incorporated in the same way as private companies. But if you dig a little around you will find out they are actually owned by local governments.
JR is big, but 62% of passenger volume is not JR and that remaining 38% is split by 7 companies
Further, in the big metro areas, the private trains do just fine.
JR East is #1, Tokyo Metro is #2, JR West is #3, Tokyu is #4, ... the next JR, JR Central is down at #9 with #5 #6 #7 #8 all private. Tokyo Metro is private, Toei (is the city run subway, it has 4 lines as is far down the list).
Japan operates a kind of hybrid system where the subway (at least in Tokyo) mostly consists of tracks that connect to private operators on either end, and a train will just run through from the private parts of the track to the subway parts with no interruption whatsoever.
> There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong.
JR is a whole lot more than 7% of trains (downthread you claim 38% of passengers, but even that understates things; over 60% of passenger-km are with JR).
> Eiden
Not what it's called lol.
> Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private.
Yes and no. Other operators are structured as private companies but often have significant public ownership, and even those that are notionally 100% privately owned often have strong ties with the political system via the keiretsu system, and always collaborate very closely with local and national governments in practice. E.g. fares are regulated, not simply set at "what the market will bear" levels; conversely the government provides a lot of legal support and subsidy for building new lines.
Also Keihan. And most, if not all, of these companies have huge land and real estate development projects generating non-rail income all up and down their lines.
Here a link to the best recent HN-featured long-form article on Japan rail network. Probably spent more time with this than any other item posted here in months.
I've always thought the JR logo looked like 駅, the kanji for “train station”, and assumed it was deliberate. Perhaps that was a factor in them settling on the JR name?
For those of you planning to go to Japan, please make sure you actually calculate how much JR train trips would cost you. They upped the price a few years ago and, since then, it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets.
For one of my recent trips, I was actually more better served with a local pass (Kansai Wide Pass) than the JR Pass.
Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...
> Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...
Considering the environmental woes & collapses coming down the pike, I'd like to see a trans-border effort to drive down the price of mass transit _everywhere_. Put it on the G7 agenda, the OECD agenda, the UN General Assembly agenda, ...
A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company but in Japan it helped make all these efficient and meticulous changes possible, and avoids issues of privatisation like neglecting maintenance / short term profit maximisation.
In the west the employee / employer social contract died sometime in the 80s. It's rare, especially in tech, to have employees with decades of tenure. You see Microsoft trying to buyout older employees recently.
Pre-Carly Fiorina Hewlett-Packard was a great example of an old-school Silicon Valley company, long before the era of “move fast and break things” and of Zuck, Elon, and Altman. I used to work for a Japanese company until I left a few years ago to teach, and when I read about the HP Way, it reminds me in many ways of life at my former employer:
While in college, my advisor / professor I worked for took me to HP Labs off Page Mill. I recall entering and seeing a sea of cubicles. That said, I enjoyed hearing the stories of those that worked there.
And the concept of company families, of client corporations beholden to larger/older ones. They dont work together because of financial incentives or contractual obligation. The work together because they are fraternal organizations.
> A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company
Civil planning on that scale isn’t about feasibility but about what direction you want to shape the county in.
A sparse railway system would leave parts of the country less populated by design as it’s simply harder to get to them. People would bunch up into cities and towns because they had to.
It’s not just about size. Much of the U.S. would be cheaper to build rail networks because there is a lot of open, relatively flat land without dense building on it. Japan is very mountainous and has a lot of dense development, and it has to be more resilient in case of earthquakes.
The German rail network is chronically underfunded and Germany is completely incapable of building new lines. Per capita spending on rail pales in comparison to e.g. Switzerland and Austria.
Although Japan also has extensive highways, and they're privatized in a similar way to JR (NEXCO East, West, Central) and are nearly all tolled - if you're driving alone, it's often the same price in tolls alone as a ticket on the Shinkansen (but the equation quickly flips when you more people in the car)
This is a big difference with much of the U.S. and Europe, Japan doesn't subsidize car ownership as heavily. There is no on-street parking in the city, businesses aren't required to provide parking and if you want to own a car you first have to prove you have a parking space for it.
Rail is great when you have a lot of people or things moving on the same path.
Highways are great when everyone has a different path.
Japan has most (but not all) of its large destinations on the pacific coast, which works great for rail.
I'm sure passenger rail networks used to have more routing options than amtrak does now, but it's hard to get between a lot of places by rail without going through Chicago. In the western US, you can go north/south in the pacific states or near the missisipi. Sure mountains are hard to cross, but there's no north/south in the plains either... Or Atlanta to Florida, etc.
Air is exactly the same but there are connections to everywhere from Kansas or Montana or wherever. I really think the rail situation in the US is primarily lack of investment. And it sucks; even here in Chicago where the connections are plentiful, the schedules and frequency are awful.
Air travel is easier to make work because most of the infrastructure is at the airports, not on the routes. Airlines can change routes easier than railroads. The speed of air travel has natural utility. Commercial airplanes come in many sizes... Turboprops can reasonably service small airports that can't fill a 737. Once daily or even a few times a week service from a middle of nowhere airport to a hub opens you up to a lot of destinations with 1 stop, and a 2nd stop (maybe with a different airline) probaly gets you to anywhere you want to go.
With small airports, there's probably plenty of flight time is worse than drive time and security and rental counter time add up too, so flying isn't always less time than any other mode, but often it is.
Reading this article, I get the feeling that a nationally inefficient infrastructure is made to be perceived as a stable one through a single JR mark. Privatization forces people to bear inefficient and high train costs due to misguided policies, but the value of a well-designed brand logo and branding offsets all of that. Looking at the content of the article itself, there are some unsettling points, the dissolution of the national railway, the split into companies, and regional profitability gaps. In other words, that signals regional inequality within Japan. It seems like the question is how the dismantled national railway, broken up for the benefit of traditional construction companies, can be perceived as stable through a single brand. I always think that it's not always the good ones that win; even if it's inefficient, you can learn a lot from how you brand it. It's a good article
Doesn't this article exactly make that point? Because it shows how JR was split apart, yet the brand logo still makes it appear as if it's a single unified group, doesn't it? Here's the passage I'm referring to:
>'Rail transport in Japan was originally run by Japanese National Railways (JNR). Like many state-owned corporations, it was starting to struggle in the 80s with mounting debt. JNR was losing its advantage over other transport, in both passenger and freight. In the ’80s, the Japanese government began pushing to privatize its state-run monopolies — to reduce the national deficit and improve efficiency across these sectors.'"
The article mentions 'improve efficiency,' and that's the part I was looking at. Then it goes on to explain the strength of the brand logo. So the overall point here is, 'How can something that has been broken apart still appear as one?' And I was simply saying that, despite the inefficiencies in that process, the fact that it still comes across as so stable shows that the branding strategy is good.
I think you probably wrote that comment because you assumed I was engaging in some kind of ideological axe grinding. But you're only reading the superficial part of this article — the observation that the logo design provides consistency. What I was actually thinking about was why that consistency in the logo design is being emphasized in the first place. It's clearly no longer a single national infrastructure, but rather a corporate one now, and yet it still carries the branding of a 'national' entity. That's what struck me, and it's simply a different perspective
There are some section of a train line where 4 stations are owned by someone else and they change names along the same rail route. They also change the driver or whatever he is called when changing the company name of the train.
Something I don't see mentioned in this article is the nation-wide adoption of a universal transit-payment system: IC Card (Suica is only one of several companies, but often used colloquially to mean train card). This makes it so easy to board any bus/ferry/train without worrying about setting up 30 different accounts each with its own card system.
I've lived in Japan for 4 years now and it was a bit of a culture shock travelling to Germany where I had to have a different pass/app for the various buses and trains. The U.S.'s public transit buildout is slow but happening, and I worry it's falling into the same trap. I'd like to see a federal bill requiring all private/public transit to use the same universal payment scheme accepted in Japan in order to get federal funding for their projects.
Nakanishi was opposed to treating corporate identity as just a logo and a logotype; instead, he created a framework splitting it into three layers. MI, or Mind Identity, is the philosophy, values, and vision behind a company. BI, or Behavior Identity, is how the company and its people act in the world — the kind of service they provide. And VI, or Visual Identity, is the visual expression of how the mind and behavior identities are manifested.
It's always frustrating to read anything by most foreigners about Japanese trains.
There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong.
The title, "How Japan's railways stayed one" is just false. They were never one, they are still not one.
Take Tokyo, off the top of my head there is Toei, Tobu, Odakyu, Keio, Seibu, Tokyu, Keikyu, Tokyo Metro, ... and JR
If you're in Shibuya. You can take JR (4 lines: Yamanote, Saikyo, Shinjuku-Shonan, N-EX), Keio (1 line: Inokashira), Eiden (3 lines: Ginza, Hanzomon, Fukutoshin), Toyku (2 lines: Den-en-toshi, Toyoko)
Or Osaka, there's Hanshin, Hankyu, Kentetsu, Nankai, ... and JR
Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private. Even JR's 7 are now private and they were originally private, there was a middle period where the government took them over. It was the period where they nearly went bankrupt, had extremely bad performance.
Tech industry needlessly idolizes the country, so you're unfortunately bound to read this slop until the heat death of the universe.
It's an age thing. Most HNers are in their 30s-50s so would have been impressed by Japan in the 1990s-2000s.
Japan is a decent country but everyone who writes about it tends to overindex on the posh parts of Tokyo.
As someone who's lived in Tokyo for 10 years it's largely met my expectations. My living situation is far more modern than the western country I'm from, even if my suburb looks a bit plain (my only real complaint is that there's too much concrete and not enough trees).
Would even go as far as to say many comments about the place being trapped in the 80s or 90s don't match reality. For instance, the only time I've ever been asked to use a fax machine was by a US company.
The decaying rural areas of Japan would probably love to be stuck in the 80s if they can. Too late, now they have hollowed out and everyone young is moving to the same cities most tourists stay at.
Every time you read a story about some Japanese town offering people, even foreigners, money to move there and occupy an abandoned house, keep in mind this is a gesture of desperation, not gratitude,
Additonally, most foreigners who would comment on HN or Reddit are earning significantly higher than the average Japanese or even Tokyoian.
The people you're probably thinking of are working in finance or Japanese mega venture/US tech companies. They make up a vanishingly small percent of foreigners working in Japan.
> finance
Most finance roles in Japan almost exclusively hire Japanese nationals
> Japanese mega venture/US tech companies
They don't tend to hire foreigners in most cases except for Chinese (Taiwanese and Mainland) and Koreans
Decaying rural areas happen in every country, throughout history, throughout time. It’s just how the world works.
The only reason it recently reversed in the US was due to COVID.
Second, many countries are modern in some ways and backwards in some other way. To label a country as modern or not is silly.
Here how it works: I build a porch today and my neighbor builds a pool. In 30 years, he builds a porch but I build a pool. If you cherry pick porches, I look outdated and he looks modern, but it’s reversed if you cherry pick pools!
Japan has seen millennia of huge cultural shifts. Its strength is its ability to adapt and survive with some measure of continuity, even while embracing the new reality. Go watch some Ozu films. They're all about the "hollowing out" of traditional small-town lifestyle and culture. It isn't so much a problem as a feature of the landscape that reminds people about how transient their reality can be.
It’s not just an age thing; the younger part of the tech industry has the same issues.
While i am admittedly in my 30s-50s i don't believe this to be an age problem; Japan is still held on a pedestal in a lot of American pop culture
Its because deep down they know japan has something which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country.
"which they destroyed with there ideology and hate in there own country" Arguably the ideology and hate are prerequisites for a country to have a monoculture. With ideology and hate comes xenophobia and racism == monoculture.
This article is about the JR branding and design, not train operations. The title may be overstating the case, but the content is definitely not drawing over generalized conclusions about railroads in Japan.
Not to mention the idea that JR is only 7% of Japanese railroad makes little sense in real life. JR carries a majority of rail passengers in Japan. The long tail of non JR railroad companies in Japan are small, regional operators owning maybe one or two lines with infrequent services. Many of them are also private only in the sense that they are incorporated in the same way as private companies. But if you dig a little around you will find out they are actually owned by local governments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-sector_railway
JR is big, but 62% of passenger volume is not JR and that remaining 38% is split by 7 companies
Further, in the big metro areas, the private trains do just fine.
JR East is #1, Tokyo Metro is #2, JR West is #3, Tokyu is #4, ... the next JR, JR Central is down at #9 with #5 #6 #7 #8 all private. Tokyo Metro is private, Toei (is the city run subway, it has 4 lines as is far down the list).
At least where i live, subways and railways aren't really considered to be the same thing
Japan operates a kind of hybrid system where the subway (at least in Tokyo) mostly consists of tracks that connect to private operators on either end, and a train will just run through from the private parts of the track to the subway parts with no interruption whatsoever.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_through_trains_in_Japa...
What does any of that have to do with the article, which is about the branding and logo of JR?
> There are around 100 train companies in Japan. JR is 7 of those 100. The other 93 are NOT JR. Drawing any conclusions about Japanese trains from inspecting 7% of them is just wrong.
JR is a whole lot more than 7% of trains (downthread you claim 38% of passengers, but even that understates things; over 60% of passenger-km are with JR).
> Eiden
Not what it's called lol.
> Those others, except maybe 1, are all private, and have always bene private.
Yes and no. Other operators are structured as private companies but often have significant public ownership, and even those that are notionally 100% privately owned often have strong ties with the political system via the keiretsu system, and always collaborate very closely with local and national governments in practice. E.g. fares are regulated, not simply set at "what the market will bear" levels; conversely the government provides a lot of legal support and subsidy for building new lines.
Yeah, it's always obvious when this kind of thing is written by someone who has only ever been to Japan as a tourist, if they have at all.
Just a deep fundamental misunderstanding of how things work.
> "Hanshin, Hankyu, Kentetsu, Nankai"
Also Keihan. And most, if not all, of these companies have huge land and real estate development projects generating non-rail income all up and down their lines.
Here a link to the best recent HN-featured long-form article on Japan rail network. Probably spent more time with this than any other item posted here in months.
“Why Japan has such good railways”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815395
Here's another slightly related topic I wrote on a while ago. Not my best writing but I'm fascinated by this kind of history -
https://culturecompiled.com/p/strong-state-capacity-is-a-pro...
I've always thought the JR logo looked like 駅, the kanji for “train station”, and assumed it was deliberate. Perhaps that was a factor in them settling on the JR name?
I think that's just coincidental. I've mentioned it to Japanese people before and they can't see the connection at all.
well because they see kanji and "english" differently
So a Japanese designer probably didn't consider it?
For those of you planning to go to Japan, please make sure you actually calculate how much JR train trips would cost you. They upped the price a few years ago and, since then, it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets.
For one of my recent trips, I was actually more better served with a local pass (Kansai Wide Pass) than the JR Pass.
Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...
> Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...
Considering the environmental woes & collapses coming down the pike, I'd like to see a trans-border effort to drive down the price of mass transit _everywhere_. Put it on the G7 agenda, the OECD agenda, the UN General Assembly agenda, ...
Trains can use renewable energy.
A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company but in Japan it helped make all these efficient and meticulous changes possible, and avoids issues of privatisation like neglecting maintenance / short term profit maximisation.
In the west the employee / employer social contract died sometime in the 80s. It's rare, especially in tech, to have employees with decades of tenure. You see Microsoft trying to buyout older employees recently.
Pre-Carly Fiorina Hewlett-Packard was a great example of an old-school Silicon Valley company, long before the era of “move fast and break things” and of Zuck, Elon, and Altman. I used to work for a Japanese company until I left a few years ago to teach, and when I read about the HP Way, it reminds me in many ways of life at my former employer:
https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/publications/me...
While in college, my advisor / professor I worked for took me to HP Labs off Page Mill. I recall entering and seeing a sea of cubicles. That said, I enjoyed hearing the stories of those that worked there.
And the concept of company families, of client corporations beholden to larger/older ones. They dont work together because of financial incentives or contractual obligation. The work together because they are fraternal organizations.
> A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company
Diminishingly few.
It is a feedback loop.
The U.S had the greatest rail network and then we built the Interstate Highway system and abandoned rail.
Truth is that nobody funds multiple competing transportation network. Japan chose rail, we chose highways.
japan is a small island the US is one of the most extensive and biggest distance from population centers country on earth
I tihnk that helps explain the feasiability of train on each country more than inherent choices
Civil planning on that scale isn’t about feasibility but about what direction you want to shape the county in.
A sparse railway system would leave parts of the country less populated by design as it’s simply harder to get to them. People would bunch up into cities and towns because they had to.
We had a railway powered country until it was torn down
The US has several areas of high population density that have laughably bad rail networks.
It’s not just about size. Much of the U.S. would be cheaper to build rail networks because there is a lot of open, relatively flat land without dense building on it. Japan is very mountainous and has a lot of dense development, and it has to be more resilient in case of earthquakes.
Germany has both the Autobahn and rail.
The German rail network is chronically underfunded and Germany is completely incapable of building new lines. Per capita spending on rail pales in comparison to e.g. Switzerland and Austria.
Germany is roughly the size of Montana, with the population of almost CA and TX combined.
Shouldn’t that extra population in a limited amount of land lead to more demand and better outcomes for rail and roads?
Given the reputation of the phrase "getting deutsche bahn'ed", I think they chose the Autobahn.
Although Japan also has extensive highways, and they're privatized in a similar way to JR (NEXCO East, West, Central) and are nearly all tolled - if you're driving alone, it's often the same price in tolls alone as a ticket on the Shinkansen (but the equation quickly flips when you more people in the car)
This is a big difference with much of the U.S. and Europe, Japan doesn't subsidize car ownership as heavily. There is no on-street parking in the city, businesses aren't required to provide parking and if you want to own a car you first have to prove you have a parking space for it.
You do some heavy assumptions about European nations
Rail is hardly abandoned in the US, the US has a top tier _freight_ rail network. It's just passenger rail that sucks big balls in the US.
Rail is great when you have a lot of people or things moving on the same path.
Highways are great when everyone has a different path.
Japan has most (but not all) of its large destinations on the pacific coast, which works great for rail.
I'm sure passenger rail networks used to have more routing options than amtrak does now, but it's hard to get between a lot of places by rail without going through Chicago. In the western US, you can go north/south in the pacific states or near the missisipi. Sure mountains are hard to cross, but there's no north/south in the plains either... Or Atlanta to Florida, etc.
Air is exactly the same but there are connections to everywhere from Kansas or Montana or wherever. I really think the rail situation in the US is primarily lack of investment. And it sucks; even here in Chicago where the connections are plentiful, the schedules and frequency are awful.
Air travel is easier to make work because most of the infrastructure is at the airports, not on the routes. Airlines can change routes easier than railroads. The speed of air travel has natural utility. Commercial airplanes come in many sizes... Turboprops can reasonably service small airports that can't fill a 737. Once daily or even a few times a week service from a middle of nowhere airport to a hub opens you up to a lot of destinations with 1 stop, and a 2nd stop (maybe with a different airline) probaly gets you to anywhere you want to go.
With small airports, there's probably plenty of flight time is worse than drive time and security and rental counter time add up too, so flying isn't always less time than any other mode, but often it is.
Reading this article, I get the feeling that a nationally inefficient infrastructure is made to be perceived as a stable one through a single JR mark. Privatization forces people to bear inefficient and high train costs due to misguided policies, but the value of a well-designed brand logo and branding offsets all of that. Looking at the content of the article itself, there are some unsettling points, the dissolution of the national railway, the split into companies, and regional profitability gaps. In other words, that signals regional inequality within Japan. It seems like the question is how the dismantled national railway, broken up for the benefit of traditional construction companies, can be perceived as stable through a single brand. I always think that it's not always the good ones that win; even if it's inefficient, you can learn a lot from how you brand it. It's a good article
This is not the time to grind your axe against privatization and inequality.
Doesn't this article exactly make that point? Because it shows how JR was split apart, yet the brand logo still makes it appear as if it's a single unified group, doesn't it? Here's the passage I'm referring to:
>'Rail transport in Japan was originally run by Japanese National Railways (JNR). Like many state-owned corporations, it was starting to struggle in the 80s with mounting debt. JNR was losing its advantage over other transport, in both passenger and freight. In the ’80s, the Japanese government began pushing to privatize its state-run monopolies — to reduce the national deficit and improve efficiency across these sectors.'"
The article mentions 'improve efficiency,' and that's the part I was looking at. Then it goes on to explain the strength of the brand logo. So the overall point here is, 'How can something that has been broken apart still appear as one?' And I was simply saying that, despite the inefficiencies in that process, the fact that it still comes across as so stable shows that the branding strategy is good.
I think you probably wrote that comment because you assumed I was engaging in some kind of ideological axe grinding. But you're only reading the superficial part of this article — the observation that the logo design provides consistency. What I was actually thinking about was why that consistency in the logo design is being emphasized in the first place. It's clearly no longer a single national infrastructure, but rather a corporate one now, and yet it still carries the branding of a 'national' entity. That's what struck me, and it's simply a different perspective
There are some section of a train line where 4 stations are owned by someone else and they change names along the same rail route. They also change the driver or whatever he is called when changing the company name of the train.
Something I don't see mentioned in this article is the nation-wide adoption of a universal transit-payment system: IC Card (Suica is only one of several companies, but often used colloquially to mean train card). This makes it so easy to board any bus/ferry/train without worrying about setting up 30 different accounts each with its own card system.
I've lived in Japan for 4 years now and it was a bit of a culture shock travelling to Germany where I had to have a different pass/app for the various buses and trains. The U.S.'s public transit buildout is slow but happening, and I worry it's falling into the same trap. I'd like to see a federal bill requiring all private/public transit to use the same universal payment scheme accepted in Japan in order to get federal funding for their projects.
Been wanting to write about this. The graph of interoperability agreements that makes this possible is crazy.
My first visit to Japan, there were still places that would only accept a subset of IC cards and not all.
Nakanishi was opposed to treating corporate identity as just a logo and a logotype; instead, he created a framework splitting it into three layers. MI, or Mind Identity, is the philosophy, values, and vision behind a company. BI, or Behavior Identity, is how the company and its people act in the world — the kind of service they provide. And VI, or Visual Identity, is the visual expression of how the mind and behavior identities are manifested.
A nice framework for all types of communications.