Lovely story. Hats off to Japan Railways. I'm also happy that The Atlantic/Citylab decided to publish this story. And thanks 'hudibras for submitting it here!
They say that it's the money that makes the world turn, and love only keeps it together. It would be easy for the Railways to ignore that girl. There's no economical reason to keep that station open. It's a waste of time and resources. And yet, someone decided to make that random act of kindness, for a single passenger.
It's a symbol. It represents the best side of our nature. That even in this big and complex world, full of heavy machines and complicated systems, we're still humans, and we care for one another. That we aren't slaves to the processes we brought into existence.
Random acts of kindness like that are happening every day around us. I think that as a society, we need to pay more attention to them. They bring hope and inspiration, which is infinitely better than yet another outrage.
And that girl, she will have one hell of a story to tell to her future friends.
--
The article links to a Facebook page with some more photos:
The thing is, they (the headline) say "Japan", but this only happened because it's way out in the countryside where people have a "village mentality" of helping each other out (but the trade off is that everyone sticks their nose in your business). Japan railways itself split into several separate companies upon privatization.
This would never happen in Tokyo. As much as we think of the country as being monolithic (in many ways it is), there are great differences between different regions of the country (much like any country).
Tokyo is a place where a train being 2 minutes late causes ire (and a train conductor once killed himself for a mistake as trivial as this). It's a place where if a person jumps into the train to kill themselves, many will curse under their breaths about being late to work. It's a place where if you faint in the train concourse during the morning rush hour, no one will stop to help you. It's a place where young mothers with strollers are given stinkeye on public transit. If you ask someone (in fluent Japanese) to take a photo for you, you will often be completely ignored. Tokyo is cold.
I agree with you that this story represents the good in us all. But Japan is like a black box to those who don't live there. I would caution you against idolizing it on a national level as a result of stories like this.
I have trouble seeing it this way. The money spent running the train could save or improve many other lives instead. It's heartwarming and all, but consider the other people who are being left to die or suffer malnutrition or some other malady that could have been fixed with the resources used to get this girl to and from school.
It could be argued that the hope and inspiration and good feels justify it as a utilitarian decision, or that some portion of the world's energy should be diverted to these sorts of situations anyway - like some sort of lottery - or justified on non-utilitarian grounds. But I can't help but see it as an example of how major global problems continue because humans can't prioritize their caring towards those that need it the most.
Not only pay more attention to them, but learn from them and incorporate them into our everyday lives.
At some point (and I hope and pray that point is soon), efficiency as the end all be all of the world needs to die. It destroys humanity when efficiency is on the utmost pedestal.
Japan is very homogenous so it's easy to see everyone as family.
Not just racially, but also culturally. Though from what I heard, there are some issues with Osaka(?).
"And that girl, she will have one hell of a story to tell to her future friends." - No, she would be too embarrassed to mention it. "They ran a train twice a day just for me, I was the only rider, it was my personal limo-train."
"Random acts of kindness like that are happening every day around us." - It's not a random act of kindness, it's an example of the agency cost of bureaucracies who are more focused on image than the needs of all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, taxpayers, employees, and riders on other lines who are subsidizing the operation of the disused line.
It probably costs in the millions to keep that line running.
Only girl in the village? They are going to close the line when she graduates. Therefore we can surmise there aren't any other younger girls. So much for having a social life. There are parts of Japan where children just aren't around anymore. Towns are becoming extended retirement homes. That's the truly depressing side of this story.
At least this is happening today, when the few remaining kids in such situations can connect via technology.
Generally speaking, the population of Japan is going down and the population of the Greater Tokyo area is going up.
Once youth hits college or working age, they disproportionately head for the capitol.
But then there's a small counter current where younger (say, 30's) are moving back to their original prefectures as they realize that they might be able to afford a better QoL making less money but also paying much less in expenditures.
In Alexander's A Pattern Language pattern 68 contains a brave attempt to estimate the minimum community size for children age 0 to 5 to be able to make friends face2face. He makes the critical number around 64 households that need access to a green space and suggests a linear layout of houses along a green corridor. When I was a kid we just used the road (less cars then, over half a century ago in the North in the UK).
Pattern 84 looks at the transition from child to teenager in a qualitative way and suggests that teenagers '...should be encouraged to form a miniature society, in which they are as differentiated, and as responsible mutually, as the adults in the full scale society'. He sees the teenagers ranging more widely across a town or city.
I'm wondering to what extent distributed network tech can support that for sparse populations...
She she does travel to high school, so presumably she sees kids her age regularly. And presumably she also has access to the rest of the public transportation that does not go the the highschool (unless she is the only one in the town to use public transportation to go anywhere), so she can still socialize in other places.
They're not closing the line. There's lots of other stops on that same rail line, trains just won't stop at that station any more. Also there's a station about 3 km down the tracks.
Also who's to stay she's staying in the area after graduation.
As mentioned elsewhere, they're not closing the line, just this station.
It's also important to point out that it's not uncommon for Japan high schoolers to travel far to attend the school of their choice. So it's very likely that there's a high school in or near the village that most of the other kids go to, but this girl is attending a different one.
There have always been children living in isolated rural communities. Always. Japan is in no way special in this regard, nor is it special in having a low birth rate nor in it having a declining population. South Korea, for example, has a lower total fertility rate than Japan. But people love to focus on Japan and project their own values and beliefs on it, values which are not necessarily shared by the Japanese people, many of whom feel that their nation's population grew too large.
Japan keeps the entire island of Hokkaido running for too few people.[1] The population is dropping rapidly. Most infrastructure is funded nationally, and the rest of the country pays for Hokkaido. Partly because it's only about 12 miles from Russia at the closest point, and Japan doesn't want Russia moving in.
I'm Irish and out of interest I looked up the area of Hokkaido to see how it compares to the island of Ireland and they're actually pretty close - Hokkaido is 83,453KM2 with a population of 5.5M versus Ireland 84,421KM2 with 6.3M. So it is funny to me when you say "Japan keeps the entire island of Hokkaido running for too few people".
Of course, Irelands population is growing while Hokkaido's is dropping...
The rest of Japan also really, really loves Hokkaido. From dairy products to lavender to summer vacation to alpine skiing. Maybe not that many people call Hokkaido home, but tons of Japanese call it paradise.
As for me, I called it the hardest of four islands on which to find a vacant hotel room.
When I was little I lived in the country for a while. I was the only kid at my stop. But at least when I got on the bus it was full of other kids, most of whom were also the only kid at each of their stops. This girl is the only person on the train.
>“Why should I not want to die for a country like this when the government is ready to go an extra mile just for me,” one commenter wrote on CCTV’s Facebook page. “This is the meaning of good governance penetrating right to the grassroot level. Every citizen matters. No Child left behind!”
Ironically, the railway is a private one, i.e. Japan Railways Hokkaido[0] is private corporation, not a government agency. And yet the company executives, and to a lesser extent, the shareholders, okayed this arrangement. I can't imagine this happening anywhere outside of Japan.
There's a similar phenomenon in the UK called "ghost trains"[1] that's only superficially similar. Basically there's a ton of bureaucracy in closing down a line, so instead of actually closing a line, we just run an unscheduled and unannounced "ghost train" through it once a week.
Japan Railways Hokkaido[0] is private corporation, not a government agency
Notionally. In practice, their operations are fairly minutely controlled -- sorry, "guided" -- by various levels of government, which explains, among many other things, why the JRs continue to operate tons of lines that are loss-making.
"Ghost trains" in the UK are scheduled and announced, they're just easy to miss, as almost all are at the beginning or end of service, often the first train of the day out of the depot.
Heart-warming story but too much praise for the government for my taste.
What are the opportunity costs of not shutting down this platform years ago? And of getting the train delayed by 40s twice a day for who knows how many passengers plus some minor costs like acceleration, meetings to change the schedule etc. Considering all this it would almost certainly be cheaper to provide her with a taxi at the train cost, maybe only to the next train stop. Maybe given the choice of getting a taxi twice a day or getting the compensation in cash, the girl would even have taken the money and moved closer to school.
That's such a warm story and especially this is from the largest Chinese TV press CCTV.
Being as a Chinese, years ago the news of Japan were always about politics, island disputes, refusing to apologize for WWII etc. It is good to have something positive and nice about the neighbor.
Wish the world would become less biased to any country.
Wouldn't it be both cheaper, and friendlier to the environment to hire a person chauffeur for her? This is outrageously inefficient. Public transport only becomes worth it when it achieves relatively high ridership.
It could be. It depends on how the costs of that extra stop and related overhead (maintenance, management) compared to the costs of sending that chauffeur and related overhead. I suppose it is inefficient, but not outrageously so.
But you know what would be the most efficient option, from the point of view of the railroad company? Just ignoring the girl and closing down the station. That it didn't happen suggests that someone, at some point, decided that sometimes you have to sacrifice efficiency in order to be human.
(It's actually a general observation - in current highly optimized economy, being human and humane creates inefficiencies. Or in other words, we need to keep some things from being perfectly optimized, in order to avoid living in a misery. Compare to e.g. various laws protecting employees. They purposefully make businesses less efficient, in order to ensure that employees can work in safe and humane conditions.)
This station is on an existing, operational line that would run trains on the tracks even if she weren't there (and this is what is going to happen once she graduates).
So the marginal cost of stopping at this station is actually not that large.
The train is already going past the existing station, so I would imagine the additional cost of supporting the station for the two times a day the train stops there is relatively small - additional brake dust in the air, some extra energy burned.
It wouldn't surprise me if the accounting/management, HR and maintenance overhead for the station was higher than the cost of having the train make an extra stop twice a day.
It is a little surprising the station appears to be staffed based on the picture of the train schedule, but there is something to be said for producing that extra job. I am sure the station master who resides in that office is really happy it still exists.
I'm surprised how many people are calling this "beautiful" and getting all misty eyed, this feels like an inelegant solution.
I would love to be wrong and hear that someone did the math and found that stopping the train wasn't any more wasteful than just sending this girl a taxi or something, but I have some doubts.
I am unfamiliar with trains, but seeing how cars are tuning themselves off at stop lights now to conserve energy and avoid pollution it really sounds very wasteful stop a whole train for one person. I have to assume that it requires a lot of energy to slow and accelerate a train weighing in at least the tens and likely the hundreds of tons.
It's a sweet idea, but it really does feel misguided to me.
There is a little used passenger train service here in NZ from Hamilton to Auckland, which is about ~150 km or so. It runs twice a day (Hamilton to Auckland in the morning, and back in the evening).
I remember reading a while ago that someone crunched the numbers, and they figured that it would've actually been cheaper to fly everyone up each day in a helicopter or two than it cost to run the train.
It would be even friendlier to the environment if she wasn't formally educated. Will educating her really provide that much for society to make it worthwhile?
Yeah, most developed countries are like that. I remember visiting England in 2010 for my company work and the city buses used to ply even with two passengers on board!
OTOH, in the country where I live (India), private vehicles won't ply unless they are compressed upto 70% of the capacity! That's the BEP where they could make even a meager profit!
This is similar in some parts of the Eastern German countryside, where population is going down and the pragmatic solution for transport is to have buttons in regional trains (like in busses in cities) that you can use to stop at old stations where basically nobody lives anymore.
This story, like many, brings warm feelings to me. I lived in Japan for 5 mo during a student exchange (Kyoto) and I can say, that even though there was at least 3-4 different train lines operated by different companies in Kyoto alone, it was still a joy to use (even though I did complain at why so many train cos on the region from time to time).
It's also a nice change of tone of the eminent doom of Japan written by so many. Like so many countries, Japan has its faults, but it also has a very bright side.
This is very nice and part of Japanese culture. People focus on asian cultures as being communal, but part of asian communal thinking is actually great respect for the striving of the lone individual.
The train stops here until she graduates and then the stop will be retired. It's a reasonable decision, even if not an economic one.
This story is another example of how mismanaged the Japanese rail system has become. It would be cheaper, and more environmentally friendly, to pick this girl up in a Escalade limousine, provide a tutor to review her lesson plan, and then have the car idle in the parking lot all day.
We can have a conversation about how changing demographics have created this situation. Whether or not the urbanization of Japanese society is a good thing. On the future role of trains in Japan. Why Japanese are giving up on sex and baby making (kinda hard to maintain and justify an infrastructure built for 150 million people when your pop. is shrinking at 0.7% annually).
But this story should not be lauded, as it is a symptom of the sickness of their society today.
Japan is exotic enough from a Western perspective that outsiders often have an exaggerated opinion of it, both positive and negative. The next time you see someone gushing about how wonderful Japan is or complaining about how the country never "paid" for WWII or how Japan is doomed because (old people, Fukushima, etc) please try to remember that it is a normal country with human beings living there that is pretty much like anywhere else in the world.
if they only want to serve her, it would be much cheaper to have a taxi or a shuttle bus drive for her morning and evening. To me this is another example of Japan's everlasting inefficiencies long after things stop making sense. Just like every company in Japan keeps fax machines at work just because, you know, they have to.
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
They say that it's the money that makes the world turn, and love only keeps it together. It would be easy for the Railways to ignore that girl. There's no economical reason to keep that station open. It's a waste of time and resources. And yet, someone decided to make that random act of kindness, for a single passenger.
It's a symbol. It represents the best side of our nature. That even in this big and complex world, full of heavy machines and complicated systems, we're still humans, and we care for one another. That we aren't slaves to the processes we brought into existence.
Random acts of kindness like that are happening every day around us. I think that as a society, we need to pay more attention to them. They bring hope and inspiration, which is infinitely better than yet another outrage.
And that girl, she will have one hell of a story to tell to her future friends.
--
The article links to a Facebook page with some more photos:
https://www.facebook.com/cctvnewschina/posts/110978428906239...
[+] [-] hkmurakami|10 years ago|reply
This would never happen in Tokyo. As much as we think of the country as being monolithic (in many ways it is), there are great differences between different regions of the country (much like any country).
Tokyo is a place where a train being 2 minutes late causes ire (and a train conductor once killed himself for a mistake as trivial as this). It's a place where if a person jumps into the train to kill themselves, many will curse under their breaths about being late to work. It's a place where if you faint in the train concourse during the morning rush hour, no one will stop to help you. It's a place where young mothers with strollers are given stinkeye on public transit. If you ask someone (in fluent Japanese) to take a photo for you, you will often be completely ignored. Tokyo is cold.
I agree with you that this story represents the good in us all. But Japan is like a black box to those who don't live there. I would caution you against idolizing it on a national level as a result of stories like this.
[+] [-] qrendel|10 years ago|reply
It could be argued that the hope and inspiration and good feels justify it as a utilitarian decision, or that some portion of the world's energy should be diverted to these sorts of situations anyway - like some sort of lottery - or justified on non-utilitarian grounds. But I can't help but see it as an example of how major global problems continue because humans can't prioritize their caring towards those that need it the most.
[+] [-] verroq|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dikdik|10 years ago|reply
At some point (and I hope and pray that point is soon), efficiency as the end all be all of the world needs to die. It destroys humanity when efficiency is on the utmost pedestal.
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] quintin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seivan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaronchall|10 years ago|reply
"Random acts of kindness like that are happening every day around us." - It's not a random act of kindness, it's an example of the agency cost of bureaucracies who are more focused on image than the needs of all of their stakeholders, including shareholders, taxpayers, employees, and riders on other lines who are subsidizing the operation of the disused line.
It probably costs in the millions to keep that line running.
[+] [-] sandworm101|10 years ago|reply
At least this is happening today, when the few remaining kids in such situations can connect via technology.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|10 years ago|reply
Once youth hits college or working age, they disproportionately head for the capitol.
But then there's a small counter current where younger (say, 30's) are moving back to their original prefectures as they realize that they might be able to afford a better QoL making less money but also paying much less in expenditures.
[+] [-] keithpeter|10 years ago|reply
Pattern 84 looks at the transition from child to teenager in a qualitative way and suggests that teenagers '...should be encouraged to form a miniature society, in which they are as differentiated, and as responsible mutually, as the adults in the full scale society'. He sees the teenagers ranging more widely across a town or city.
I'm wondering to what extent distributed network tech can support that for sparse populations...
[+] [-] gizmo686|10 years ago|reply
Plus, she can socialize with people not her age.
[+] [-] rtkwe|10 years ago|reply
Also who's to stay she's staying in the area after graduation.
https://goo.gl/maps/cqZBrzvjJJk
[+] [-] hudibras|10 years ago|reply
It's also important to point out that it's not uncommon for Japan high schoolers to travel far to attend the school of their choice. So it's very likely that there's a high school in or near the village that most of the other kids go to, but this girl is attending a different one.
[+] [-] oska|10 years ago|reply
There have always been children living in isolated rural communities. Always. Japan is in no way special in this regard, nor is it special in having a low birth rate nor in it having a declining population. South Korea, for example, has a lower total fertility rate than Japan. But people love to focus on Japan and project their own values and beliefs on it, values which are not necessarily shared by the Japanese people, many of whom feel that their nation's population grew too large.
[+] [-] empath75|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrelaszlo|10 years ago|reply
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/2/5674448/nagoro-japanese-dol...
In Google Streetview: https://goo.gl/maps/ST3HuCEi1YS2
[+] [-] Animats|10 years ago|reply
[1] http://www.nippon.com/en/in-depth/a03802/
[+] [-] dermotbrennan|10 years ago|reply
Of course, Irelands population is growing while Hokkaido's is dropping...
[+] [-] jzwinck|10 years ago|reply
As for me, I called it the hardest of four islands on which to find a vacant hotel room.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcurve|10 years ago|reply
Everybody who is taking the train during the same leg as her, is essentially chipping in 1 minute of their time to support her transportation.
And I think that's just beautiful.
[+] [-] hkmurakami|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeswin|10 years ago|reply
b) Of course, way more expensive (operationally and financially) to run a train and maintain a railway line.
Add: This story made my day.
[+] [-] sandworm101|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] desdiv|10 years ago|reply
Ironically, the railway is a private one, i.e. Japan Railways Hokkaido[0] is private corporation, not a government agency. And yet the company executives, and to a lesser extent, the shareholders, okayed this arrangement. I can't imagine this happening anywhere outside of Japan.
There's a similar phenomenon in the UK called "ghost trains"[1] that's only superficially similar. Basically there's a ton of bureaucracy in closing down a line, so instead of actually closing a line, we just run an unscheduled and unannounced "ghost train" through it once a week.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokkaido_Railway_Company
[1] http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150723-why-britain-has-sec...
[+] [-] jpatokal|10 years ago|reply
Notionally. In practice, their operations are fairly minutely controlled -- sorry, "guided" -- by various levels of government, which explains, among many other things, why the JRs continue to operate tons of lines that are loss-making.
[+] [-] Symbiote|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hngiszmo|10 years ago|reply
What are the opportunity costs of not shutting down this platform years ago? And of getting the train delayed by 40s twice a day for who knows how many passengers plus some minor costs like acceleration, meetings to change the schedule etc. Considering all this it would almost certainly be cheaper to provide her with a taxi at the train cost, maybe only to the next train stop. Maybe given the choice of getting a taxi twice a day or getting the compensation in cash, the girl would even have taken the money and moved closer to school.
[+] [-] han_stimme|10 years ago|reply
Being as a Chinese, years ago the news of Japan were always about politics, island disputes, refusing to apologize for WWII etc. It is good to have something positive and nice about the neighbor.
Wish the world would become less biased to any country.
[+] [-] c3534l|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TeMPOraL|10 years ago|reply
But you know what would be the most efficient option, from the point of view of the railroad company? Just ignoring the girl and closing down the station. That it didn't happen suggests that someone, at some point, decided that sometimes you have to sacrifice efficiency in order to be human.
(It's actually a general observation - in current highly optimized economy, being human and humane creates inefficiencies. Or in other words, we need to keep some things from being perfectly optimized, in order to avoid living in a misery. Compare to e.g. various laws protecting employees. They purposefully make businesses less efficient, in order to ensure that employees can work in safe and humane conditions.)
[+] [-] hkmurakami|10 years ago|reply
So the marginal cost of stopping at this station is actually not that large.
[+] [-] ayuvar|10 years ago|reply
It wouldn't surprise me if the accounting/management, HR and maintenance overhead for the station was higher than the cost of having the train make an extra stop twice a day.
It is a little surprising the station appears to be staffed based on the picture of the train schedule, but there is something to be said for producing that extra job. I am sure the station master who resides in that office is really happy it still exists.
[+] [-] canthonytucci|10 years ago|reply
I'm surprised how many people are calling this "beautiful" and getting all misty eyed, this feels like an inelegant solution.
I would love to be wrong and hear that someone did the math and found that stopping the train wasn't any more wasteful than just sending this girl a taxi or something, but I have some doubts.
I am unfamiliar with trains, but seeing how cars are tuning themselves off at stop lights now to conserve energy and avoid pollution it really sounds very wasteful stop a whole train for one person. I have to assume that it requires a lot of energy to slow and accelerate a train weighing in at least the tens and likely the hundreds of tons.
It's a sweet idea, but it really does feel misguided to me.
[+] [-] toomanybeersies|10 years ago|reply
I remember reading a while ago that someone crunched the numbers, and they figured that it would've actually been cheaper to fly everyone up each day in a helicopter or two than it cost to run the train.
[+] [-] xyzzy4|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rms_returns|10 years ago|reply
OTOH, in the country where I live (India), private vehicles won't ply unless they are compressed upto 70% of the capacity! That's the BEP where they could make even a meager profit!
[+] [-] linhchi|10 years ago|reply
http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/remote-hokkaido-t...
[+] [-] elcapitan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmiller2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baldajan|10 years ago|reply
It's also a nice change of tone of the eminent doom of Japan written by so many. Like so many countries, Japan has its faults, but it also has a very bright side.
[+] [-] droithomme|10 years ago|reply
The train stops here until she graduates and then the stop will be retired. It's a reasonable decision, even if not an economic one.
[+] [-] irixusr|10 years ago|reply
We can have a conversation about how changing demographics have created this situation. Whether or not the urbanization of Japanese society is a good thing. On the future role of trains in Japan. Why Japanese are giving up on sex and baby making (kinda hard to maintain and justify an infrastructure built for 150 million people when your pop. is shrinking at 0.7% annually).
But this story should not be lauded, as it is a symptom of the sickness of their society today.
[+] [-] rangibaby|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmadsen|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyant|10 years ago|reply
Train stops 7am and 5pm, sure schoolchildren have long days in Japan.
[+] [-] Aandre|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]