Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train by Jessamyn R. Abel

2023; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 49; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jjs.2023.0019

1549-4721

Yoshikuni Igarashi,

Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies

Reviewed by: Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train by Jessamyn R. Abel Yoshikuni Igarashi (bio) Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train. By Jessamyn R. Abel. Stanford University Press, 2022. xii, 289 pages. $90.00, cloth; $28.00, paper; $27.99, e-book. Fifty-eight years after its first run between Tokyo and Osaka, no one could possibly dispute the fact that the Shinkansen—the Japanese high-speed railway system commonly known as the bullet train in English—has become an integral part of the nation's economy, society, and cultural imagination. Six lines have been added to the original 515.4 km New Tōkaidō Line; together they extend from Hokkaido to Kagoshima and cover 2,764.9 km in total (excluding the two hybrid-type lines). In 2019 alone, they carried 415.5 million passengers (99 billion passenger kilometers). 1 One would be hard-pressed to imagine a Japan without the Shinkansen, which has stood as a symbol of the nation's technological prowess and industrial efficiency. Departing from the prevailing rosy images of the Shinkansen, Jessamyn R. Abel's monograph, Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train, takes the reader back to 1950s and 1960s Japan, where its cultural meaning was fiercely contested. By excavating the discursive battles over the newly planned and constructed high-speed railway line, the author produces far more complex and nuanced images of the Shinkansen. The five chapters of the book are organized in a concentric structure. Chapter 1 is closest to the infrastructure itself with the political contestations over whether the bullet train should stop at Kyoto while the subsequent chapters explore its cultural meanings in incrementally larger historical contexts. The chapters share approximately the same bifurcated structure: they first introduce the reader to the complex historical terrains through examination of diverse historical documents, ranging from Kyoto City Assembly records to internal memos of the Lyndon Johnson administration, and then substantiate the author's claim through careful reading of fictional works. Chapter 1 best exemplifies the contingent nature of history by examining the political process through which the Japan National Railways (JNR) reached the final decision to not only run the high-speed rail through downtown Kyoto but also make the super-express stop at Kyoto Station. As soon as they learned of JNR's original plan to construct the line south of the city so as to keep the train's running time to around three hours, city council [End Page 197] and business leaders launched political campaigns promoting Kyoto as an "international culture tourist city" (kokusai bunka kankō toshi), which deserved direct access to the new line. The city's new identity was forged through the city leaders' efforts to convince JNR of their cause, and the subsequent presence of new infrastructure in turn reinforced it. While the local campaign was successful, JNR's revised plan created challenges for the local residents who were either evicted or affected by the line. Though some communities successfully organized themselves and registered their protest, they ultimately failed to change JNR's final plan. Abel uncovers the emotional responses of the people caught in the whirlwind of Shinkansen politics through the fictionalized account offered by the writer Nishiguchi Katsumi, who actually served as a member of the Kyoto City Assembly at the time. In the second chapter, Abel expands the scope of her discussion to include the impact the Shinkansen had on the larger Tōkaidō region. The new intercity connections the high-speed train system would realize served as an impetus for people to imagine a larger geographical identity and reconfigure their relations with their own cities within a larger network of regions. This newly created intercity connectedness, for example, enhanced Tokyo's status as a central hub for the flow of people, commodities, and information though some pundits had predicted otherwise. The chapter then discusses several fictional works including Kajiyama Toshiyuki's 1963 detective story. The readings of these texts, however, seem to be concerned less about the newly forged Tōkaidō identity than local residents' anxieties about and resentment toward the...