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Vol. 1, No. 1 (2024)■

ISSN 2169-0820 (Online)■

DOI 10.5195/shashi.2024.72 ■http://shashi.pitt.edu

Jessamyn R. Abel, Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of theWorld’s First Bullet Train Stanford CA: Weatherhead East Asian
Institute/Stanford University Press, 2022. 302 pp.
ISBN: 9781503610385

Japan’s Shinkansen ‘bullet train’, which opened in 1964 in time for theTokyo Olympics, achieved iconic status both within the country and in other partsof the globe. Nostalgic shots of the train passing in front of Mt. Fuji became one ofthe key representations of Japan’s technological advancement and high-speed
growth for contemporaries and remain familiar images into the twenty-first century.
Previous scholarly work has offered significant insights into the economic andpolitical context of the Shinkansen’s construction and operation, as well as its
technological advances, but Dream Super-Express breaks new ground in focusing
on its cultural history, honing in on the imaginings and dreams associated withtechnological development and infrastructure building in post-war Japan. A project
originally intended to solve a transportation bottleneck seen as impeding industrial
growth thus becomes a window through which we view broader aspects of Japan’scultural, economic, social, and political history in the second half of the twentiethcentury. This story of the bullet train draws on a wide range of historical sources,
makes clear its value-added in the context of the existing literature, and offers acoherent and well thought through narrative that allows the story of the Shinkansen to be embedded in a host of broader
and significant issues.
The core content of the book is spread across five chapters. Chapter 1 focuses on the politicalcontestation and popular protest that were associated with the building of the line, using Kyoto as a case study to shedlight on the existence of disputes between localities and the center. While viewed in many localities as likely to havepositive effects, the new railroad could also be regarded as having a negative impact, demonstrating the multiplicityof responses and feelings towards this new infrastructure. Kyoto’s special historical and cultural status, and the originaldecision to locate the nearest bullet-train stop outside the city, raised deep-rooted questions regarding the importanceof historical traditions and the need for central planners and decision-makers to go beyond the traditional top-down
approach invariably used by central governments and organizations in Tokyo. The second chapter expands thegeographical focus to consider the ways in which the new line impacted on the Tōkaidō region as a whole, and on thediversity of local identities within it. It becomes clear that construction of the new line had major implications for theoverall process of centralization and urbanization in Japan, and intensified fears that it would fail to deliver the kindof dispersal and distribution of benefits to which some of its architects had aspired. Abel shows how the refusal to sellland for construction emerged as a form of resistance, closely tied to growing fears over homogenization and the64

Shashi: The Journal of Japanese Business and Company History
Hunter on Abel | http://shashi.pitt.edu
Vol. 8 No. 1(2024) | DOI 10.5195/shashi.2024.72

erasing of local differences. The line highlighted the fundamental tensions between economic development, and thevisions of a single unified Tōkaidō space associated with it, and the preservation of tradition and individual and localinterests. These tensions were closely associated with the emerging debates over Japan as an information society,which is the topic of Chapter 3. Planners and others had contrasting visions of the role of information in society. The
development of the Shinkansen project became entwined with national debates on democracy and economicdevelopment as the bullet train was conceived by many as a key part of the nation’s neural system, as it were, raisingbroader issues of mobility, freedom and control. While the architect Tange Kenzō and the politician Tanaka Giichi
sought to identify potential virtues in the Shinkansen’s contribution to mobility and information flow, the urbansociologist Isomura Eiichi emphasized the risks of administrative and cultural centralization posed by the informationsociety, as well as the perpetuation or exacerbation of economic and social inequalities, with control of information
often allowing the powerful to oppress the weak.
Chapter 4 moves beyond the imaginings within Japan itself to consider ways in which the planningand imaging of the bullet train linked in to pre-war and wartime experiences, effectively embedding itself within what
the author terms a ‘nostalgia for Imperial Japan’. Selective memories of Manchuria’s pre-war Asian Express and theplanned domestic bullet train eventually abandoned in 1943 were linked to the new 1960s train through a similarrhetoric of technological superiority and national spirit. While the Asia Express had undoubtedly served as a tool ofJapanese imperialism, however, the post-war discourse emphasized instead its positive contribution and the quality oftravelling experience it offered, while accounts of the aborted domestic line emphasized the hardships and valorassociated with the early construction efforts. Both were identified in the post-war years as laying the foundations forthe new bullet train. But the international imaginings of the new line were in turn also shaped by a vigorous cultural
diplomacy that sought to change global perceptions of Japan that still bore the legacy of the Pacific and Second SinoJapanese wars. Chapter 5 shows how the bullet train was used to convey a new image of Japan as a technologicalleader, and in countries such as the US helped to establish Japan as a source of technical expertise and a model to befollowed. This process, however, as the author shows, was associated with both opportunities and risks. There was aninherent ambiguity in the fact that the bullet train was built with an $80 million World Bank development loan while
Japan at the same time was providing overseas technical assistance to other countries in Asia. The technological profilethat was closely associated with the country’s economic growth could clearly help promote relations with othercountries, but in the case of the US in particular came up against a reluctance to go against the old stereotypes. Japanesetechnological leadership could also be regarded as a threat, as demonstrated in growing concerns about the country’s
high-tech exports. The book’s conclusion emphasizes the continuities in many of the tropes discussed through thelater decades of the 20th century. Discourses regarding the Maglev show many similarities, and the same emphasis on
the ongoing role of technology as soft power, and a broader nostalgia in relation to infrastructure development,
resonating with China’s more recent attempts to utilize replication of train technology with a view to enhancing theglobal influence of the People’s Republic. Monumentalizing infrastructure, Abel concludes, continues not only tohave enormous potential but also to pose the possibility of considerable failings.
Dream Super-Express sets out its objectives clearly and does an excellent job of achieving thoseobjectives. It is well-written and accessible and makes excellent use of the wide range of historical sources on which
it draws. I was particularly impressed, for example, with the imaginative use of contemporary writing and television
media in chapter 3 to demonstrate the conflicts and the ambiguous outcomes of construction. Fiction, archival
materials and contemporary periodicals are carefully utilized in conjunction with extensive secondary literature bothto tell the story of how the construction of the Shinkansen was imagined and interpreted and to locate that story in thecontext of broader issues of cultural history and technological development. Above all, this book makes a major
contribution to our understanding of 1960s Japan by embedding the bullet train in its time and place. The reader getsa real feel for the excitement and enthusiasm that it generated along with the fears and concerns that were provokedat the same time. The discussion brings home the extent to which this was a period of transition in Japan, as well as65

Shashi: The Journal of Japanese Business and Company History
Hunter on Abel | http://shashi.pitt.edu
Vol. 8, No. 1(2024) | DOI 10.5195/shashi.2024.72

one characterized by tensions, contradictions, and contestation. With the bullet train as a window through which weare shown the ambiguities that characterized this period of Japan’s history, we are also shown the diversity ofindividual and local responses and experiences, a diversity often obscured by official rhetoric on the nation’s
international representation and recurrent assumptions about ‘the Japanese’. Like the citizens of other countries, thosein Japan had a multiplicity of experiences, responding to the constraints that they faced as individuals and groups ofindividuals. The story of the bullet train also brings home the extent to which the legacy of the war continued to casta long shadow while new possibilities were generated by economic growth and the policies of the Cold War. The
economic growth and technological superiority that was so closely tied to the bullet train was, as shown by the relianceon a World Bank development loan, in itself highly ambiguous. Was Japan in 1964 a technological leader or still adeveloping economy? In truth in the early 1960s it was both, as testified by visitors who witnessed for themselves thetoll exacted on many Japanese not only by the privations of war but by the harsh conditions of industrial andagricultural labor that continued to be widespread. The Shinkansen may have been the world’s most advanced railsystem, but the average income of the individual Japanese in the early 1960s was little more than a third of that of theaverage US citizen. Perhaps the most important contribution of Dream Super-Express, therefore, is to bring home therealities and tensions of this challenging period of Japanese history, replete with, to use the author’s words (p.228),
both the “potentials and failings of monumentalizing infrastructure.”

Janet Hunter
London School of Economics

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