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.
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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 understand what you're saying and I agree. I am definitely not going to define the entire country by this single act. And you're right - I think that keeping the station open for this girl was only possible because it was a rural area and not a large city. Villages generally tend to be more laid-back, there is a lot more of space to introduce little inefficiencies without causing a disproportionate economic loss. And the mentality probably takes a part too.
Since you and sandworm101 decided to ruin the sublime mood by calling attention to the ordinary reality, let me play along. I do believe there may be another layer to this story. As much as I want to believe in the most positive interpretation, the choice to keep that station open could be a result of e.g. her influential family using their connections to keep the train stopping there. Or something completely unrelated. Media reports tend not to be very accurate, and decisions in real life tend to be made slowly and with multiple inputs.
But we don't know for sure. I am not going to idolize a country for a single story, but I choose to assume the most charitable interpretation, that this is in fact an act of kindness to another human. And so I believe people involved should be praised for that. We need more of such kindness in this world. We already spend too much time getting angry at stuff. Let's be joyful for once instead.
For whatever reason this train stops for the girl, whether it's "village mentality", external influence or honest good will, the fact is that there is this huge metal machine, driven by even greater systems and processes of our economies, and that mighty machine stops for one girl, to let her continue her education undisturbed. She could have been ignored, but she wasn't - and that is heartwarming, if you let it to be.
Upon reflection, I want to apologize for the overly pessimistic and harsh tone I chose to use.
Japan is almost always presented to the West from a unbalanced, exaggerated perspective (which has irked me in the past), and upon reading your post, gleaming with optimism, I instinctively reacted by adopting an exaggeratedly grave perspective to attempt to balance it out -- which in retrospect was simply uncalled for.
Thanks for your optimism and hope for the good in all of us. I could use some of that too.
> Upon reflection, I want to apologize for the overly pessimistic and harsh tone I chose to use.
No worries. Your points were fair and your tone wasn't harsh.
> Thanks for your optimism and hope for the good in all of us. I could use some of that too.
I try. And it's hard, too. But I think we need to do it, we need to learn to refocus on positive things, because our own attitudes on individual and social level form a feedback loop that drive our outlook.
Agree. I see civil discussions like this one more often on HN than anywhere else.
And yet we have big shot VC's bashing HN as "Hater News" if the conversation doesn't support their narrative. When I see a HN thread turn predominately negative on a topic it's usually because it deserves it.
The things I've seen throughout my life have taught me that even if you'd have a community of saints, who are perfect and know no sin, there will still be people who will find all kind of negative things to say about that community, whether because of misunderstanding, different worldviews or just plain malice. It's best to not be quick to trust criticisms of third parties, especially when they try to paint a group in a very negative light.
Now might be a good time to link to Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch ( http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) , if anyone is in for some very accessible (but also very long, and thought-provoking) reading. It does a good job of helping one think about the forces for and against, say, a train station remaining open for a single girl.
I really likes this post for a few reasons. Having retrospect alone is great and then just posting to express it is even better. So thanks for posting your thoughts, I very much appreciate it. It makes me question my own words and how I express them. May you have a wonderful year!
the fact is that there is this huge metal machine, driven by even greater systems and processes of our economies, and that mighty machine stops for one girl
I don't see it as that big a deal at all. A single train in the middle of nowhere stops for 20 seconds. This is cute, nothing more.
See the many comments here that enumerate economical reasons for why not closing this station is a waste. They are totally right. And that's why I think this is more than just cute :).
Actually, there are not many, and some of them have misunderstood the story, so they are not totally right, making it seem the big deal it's being made out to be. I hope this line doesn't have as many reasons to stop between stations as British trains do, in which case the stopping is even less of a deal.
I was in Tokyo (Shibuya) meeting a friend and asked in Japanese a random kid (maybe 17) to help me find the Hachiko statue. He got really excited, ditched his friends, and escorted me all the way there. Similar story once when getting a train from Tokyo out to somewhere more remote -- the lady in the ticket booth said the train was coming soon, took me by the hand, and ran in her high heels to guide me to the proper track.
Whenever I spot tourists lost in my town I do these sorts of things for them, so that I can set their understanding of my entire city from just my one interaction.
You have a vastly different experience and interpretation than me.
First off people will stop during rush hour in Tokyo to help people. Happens all the time. Tokyo is not cold. I've never seen anyone have trouble getting someone to take their picture, ever. I'm not denying your experience but I'm going to claim it's not common.
Second, while it's sad people feel the need to take their own lives it is arguably the height of selfishness to do it by jumping in front of a train and putting out 50k+ people. I see no problem with recognizing that and being annoyed by it. Especially in Japan where putting your problems on someone else is the height of rudeness.
And I'm sorry if you think mothers on strollers aren't a PITA on public transport in a city as busy as Tokyo. That sounds like a fully western (or maybe American POV). F everyone else, I have my needs and F you if they inconvenience hundreds or thousands of people.
After having 3 kids and going through a lot of strollers I can answer that a bit. A way to make a big improvement for yourself and for others is to buy the $50 basic stroller. Not the $500 "full-featured" one. Far better everywhere, and far more considerate of everybody else on pavement, public transport and everywhere else.
You'd think that a $500 stroller would be better, but after trying 3 of those it's just not true. A $50 one folds up to the size of large umbrella, and weighs 2-3 kg. A $500 one folds up to the size of a suitcase, weighs 20-30 kg. Even folded out they're smaller.
So it should be pretty obvious that a $50 one is far, far better anytime you have it with you and aren't using it as a stroller. Which is really quite often : in the car, on stairs, anywhere you're expected to sit down (from parties, at friend's houses, even cinemas). And truth be told, they're better when you're using them as well. They don't roll as nicely, but they're so much lighter. Also, you have zero issues with breaking them.
Assuming the stroller is synonym for a pushchair/buggy then the best alternative IMO, unless the parent is infirm in some way, is a sling and backpack.
> And I'm sorry if you think mothers on strollers aren't a PITA on public transport in a city as busy as Tokyo. That sounds like a fully western (or maybe American POV). F everyone else, I have my needs and F you if they inconvenience hundreds or thousands of people.
Wow. I feel sorry for disabled people in wheelchairs around you. And for your mother.
I was riding an express from the airport to central Tokyo in the last train car. At some station, everyone left the car, except for me because I needed to go further. Then some lady came back into the car and hurriedly told me to leave it and when I did pointed to the next one. Apparently the last car was to be detached at the station and if it wasn't for the help of random stranger (I'm pretty sure she wasn't station staff because she wore civilian clothes) I would've been left out. While it's just an anecdote, in my experience I didn't find Tokyo "uncaring" at all. People were perfectly willing to help me all the time.
A similar thing happened to me when I took the Tokyo metro by myself my sophomore year of college (in early 2007).
Everybody had exited the train, but I thought I had another stop or two to go - I absolutely couldn't read the station names. Apparently we had reached the terminal station (and the train was going to be taken out). A kind lady in her 60s or 70s returned to my car to gesture to me to exit. Who knows where I would have ended up otherwise.
Wow, Tokyo was nothing close to this for me. I only visited for two weeks but I was SURROUNDED by helpful people.
For example, on my second day there, right after getting off at my stop, I realized that I lost my phone on the bus. I waited at the stop and asked the bus driver on the next bus how I could retreive it. I speak zero japanese and he spoke no english. He asked over the speaker if anybody spoke english. A young girl came to the front and interpreted. He gave me a number to call. Then I gave the number to the woman at the front desk of our hotel. She said that the driver would DELIVER MY PHONE TO ME in the morning, and what time would I like to get it. I was flabberghasted. sure enough it was delivered the next morning.
That is only one example of the two weeks I spent in a city with the kindest and most helpful people I've ever met. I have so many examples of people going out of their way to help me in Tokyo.
I lived in Finland for years and your description sounds closer to their culture, but even then they were not as cold as you describe, but just very hesitant to help.
> The rail operator will also send a large bill to the jumpers family.
Isn't this the case in most countries? I suspect they do it to discourage other jumpers, since if you jump you know you're saddling your family with a debt.
As a society we could avoid these things if we provided a legal path to requesting to be euthanised, a legal self-determination on the end of your own life. In my country you can request it, but you must be medically found by multiple doctors to be under unbearable and untreatable pain. If we made such a mechanism more inclusive, we could get rid of jumpers, as well as having an opportunity to turn the ship around for people considering suicide.
I don't think so. Personally, I only heard about it in Japan, because this particular method of suicide is so endemic there.
About US, on the other hand, I read a different story. Gun-inflicted suicides are more common there, and there are reports that often, police officers purposefully misreport those as "gun-related accidents", so that the family can still get life insurance of the deceased person.
It goes to the estate, but that is logical, and doesn't elicit as much emotional response, so the only people you hear talking about it are those who don't understand that distinction.
An estate is simply the legal term given to the net worth a person has after they die. There's a legal process that allocates the dead person's resources according to various factors. Generally a person's debts will be satisfied first. Then whatever's left gets divided according to the person's will, if any. If there is no will, a judge will divide assets up amongst surviving relatives. If there is nothing left after satisfying debts, then heirs get nothing. If there is no will and no heirs, the estate goes to the state.
Typically if a person's net worth is negative, debts are not passed on to heirs, leaving creditors to sue for relief. Again, jurisdictions vary, and I would expect there are many other factors at play in a country like Japan where keeping the family's social standing intact may be worth paying off those the deceased wronged instead of dragging the dead person's dirty laundry through the court system even if there's no chance of winning.
Jurisdictions vary, but I would imagine in a case such as the aforementioned, the state wouldn't take the whole estate, only part, after debts are satisfied.
A phenomenal article on this aspect of the "what happens after you die" question is this one:
The creditors have to sue the estate, not the relatives, and if the estate is empty, they are not going to get anything. If they sued the relatives, the suit would be thrown out rather quickly. Heirs are not liable for the deceased's debts. They can choose to, and sometimes do, satisfy them for their own reasons, but there is no way a creditor can force them to do that any more than they can force a random person.
Unless Japan has some unorthodox laws that make relatives of successful suicides liable for their debts to Tokyo Metro?
> The creditors have to sue the estate, not the relatives, and if the estate is empty, they are not going to get anything. If they sued the relatives, the suit would be thrown out rather quickly. Heirs are not liable for the deceased's debts.
That is definitely the case in the US, but I would hesitate before assuming it's that way everywhere else in the world.
I do know that there are cases in Japan where the deceased parents of suicides have had to pay compensation for the externalities of the suicide, in particular for the decreased property value of the apartment that they committed suicide in. I don't know how or why they had to do this, just that it is a thing that happens.
That's still the same issue, people confounding estate and family members, and it gets written that way because it elicits emotional response, not necessarily because it were true.
It looks like in principle it is the same as the English Common Law or the Napoleonic or Germanic law:
"[T]here are two ways for successors to consent how to inherit: simple consent (tanjun-syonin) and limited consent (gentei-syonin). Simple consent is to accept the whole inheritance, including debts and assets. Limited consent is to accept debts with a limitation up to the value of the assets."
In fact I doubt there is a legal system in existence that doesn't follow this principle. It would be ripe for abuse, as everybody would be getting loans secured on the wealth of their rich relatives.
> That's still the same issue, people confounding estate and family members, and it gets written that way because it elicits emotional response, not necessarily because it were true.
The article I linked was pretty clear in that the apartment owners sued the family, not the estate.
Think about it, how much is a college kid going to have in his estate? They have to sue the family, because they're the only ones that can make good.
I get virtually all of my reading material from HN or TheBrowser or ReadThisThing. I then save it to Pocket, getting back to it days or weeks later. I'm so far behind the curve that it doesn't make sense for me to submit anything.
As someone living in canada and visiting Tokyo for a week few years ago I complelty agree with you on "Tokyo is cold" statement,
however I don't think the original post was trying to idolize japan, at least I didn't see it that way. To me it was more of an observation that small acts of kindness happen all around us.
First train I took in Tokyo was the Narita Express. It was 20 minutes late so I missed the connection for the last "JR Pass"-eligible bullet train to Kyoto of the night. I had to buy a ticket for 18,000 JPY (~$150)
When was this? The NEX was notorious for suicides because of the speed it passed through stations along the way. I read a few years back that they did something to fix that.
If you had made a big enough stink about it they would have let you ride the Shinkansen using your pass. This is the country where rail operators give out "late passes" to workers if their train is more than a few minutes late after all.
I hadn't bought a ticket for the first one. I had a "JR pass" which gives unlimited access to a variety of lines, but not the one I ended up having to take.
That said, I didn't think to ask about getting a free ticket on the later train.
This comment is very odd to me. If I hear something positive about a country, I never hear: "Oh, but city X is not representative of the country." Until now.
To be honest, that comment is objectively right in doing this. It's very easy to take a single, localized event - whether negative or positive - and start generalizing from it, reaching wrong conclusions.
Still, if one is to feel ashamed for the bad things happening within a group one associates with (e.g. their country), it's fair to also feel proud for the good things happening within that group.
I don't believe that a positive story about Japan is going to mislead anyone into thinking the place is all rainbows. I don't believe it needs to be tempered by a negative story which I believe is more damaging and unfortunately more memorable.
> It's a place where young mothers with strollers are given stinkeye on public transit.
This happens everywhere. It's extremely rude (especially at rush hour) to take up 5x the space of everyone else just cause you have a kid. Either the kid is small enough to carry or big enough to stand.
I don't agree. A 10 to 14-months old baby weights 8-10kg on average, and often can't stand reliably. For many people, carrying that kind of weight for any significant time can cause health issues, especially if they're older and/or the ride is long.
As a son of a women with scoliosis (a chronic problem which affects 2-3% of the US population), I with people weren't so prone to assume laziness or selfishness.
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.
Yes, there are many ways this marginal money expenditure could be put to a better use. Most of those scenarios, however, would never happen, because human organizations are nowhere near that efficient. The most likely outcome of closing the station would be the money getting distributed between organizational overhead and bumping up someone's salary a little bit. Or maybe another company project would get finished little faster.
I agree that we should prioritize things and aim for maximum effectiveness of our help. But humans are complex beings - we react to examples and positive stories, which often encourage us to change our behaviors. If seeing positive stories like this can make some people even a little more kind, or inspire them to do some good, then those stories are of great value. And if we can encourage people to do good by praising even somewhat inefficient acts of kindness, maybe the next group will figure out a more cost-effective way. It definitely beats no one being inspired to do anything good at all.
Eliezer once wrote a very interesting article "Purchase Fuzzies and Utilons Separately"[0]. His point was that out of the things we get from helping others - warm fuzzy feelings, status increase and the actual results - "all three of these things—warm fuzzies, status, and expected utilons—can be bought far more efficiently when you buy separately, optimizing for only one thing at a time". I kind of agree with this approach, and I think story is mostly about buying fuzzies, not utilons. Yet we are just humans - we need some fuzzies too.
We create organizations because even for their bloat, they make things more efficient than having individuals doing their individual, uncoordinated things. So no. Also, Japan railways were in fact privatized and so the heroes of this story are actually people working for private companies. I'm not sure if tax money is even used here, and if so, then probably not much of it.
HN comments aren't really the place for "me too" responses, but this story gave me some warm fuzzies. It was a nice story, despite the obvious inefficiencies that'll be ending very soon anyway.
It's not actually money spent running the train - the train would run anyway, and will continue to run - it's just a matter of whether it stops at that platform or blows through. You wouldn't think the marginal cost would be much.
"The Japan Railways Group, more commonly known as JR Group (JRグループ Jeiāru Gurūpu?), consists of seven for-profit companies that took over most of the assets and operations of the government-owned Japanese National Railways on April 1, 1987. Most of the liability of the JNR was assumed by the JNR Settlement Corporation."
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Railways_Group
In short, they just agreed to give up a small bit of their own profits.
Hopefully with your great compassion for others you will be donating most of your income to stop this malnutrition and suffering in the third world that would otherwise be stopping this girl from getting to school.
And similarly, hopefully anyone applauding this train situation would gladly pay to keep it running themselves, instead of reveling in the incredible human capacity for being generous with other people's money.
I'd hoped it wouldn't need to be stated, but I'm definitely glad they're doing something valuable with the resources. I was just pointing out an alternative reaction to the article. Of course it's far far better than if the money was being spent in a worse way - e.g. funding some irrational government policy to further some incumbent's chances of reelection. (Not living in Japan I'm not aware of a good relevant example from that country.)
I'll skip inundating the thread with some personal defense of whether I'm a hypocrit or not. I agree with what TeMPOral said about it being a positive symbol, and was just pointing out another way that it's a negative one. "We've come a long way but we still have a long way to go" sort of thing.
You have a good point and it is definitely not hypocritical. I addressed it in the response to your comment upthread, but let me do a tl;dr of it here: I came to believe that you simply can't expect 100% efficiency from humans. We're not wired that way. If too much is required from us - like being asked to donate all surplus beyond sustenance level to charity - we simply stop caring at all. On the other hand, a positive emotional nudge can make us care more. Helping effectively means taking into account our own psychological makeup.
I see it more as a neighbor helping a neighbor out in their area of expertise. Train companies are, presumably, good at running trains so the best sort of charity train companies can offer to its customers and potential customers are train services. It is a heartwarming act on top of being good PR. Similar to the way a restaurant or grocery store might donate food or a barber give free haircuts. Of course, they can also donate money, but offering ones skills and time often seem to have a more direct impact.
I'm afraid I don't see it that way at all. This sort of thing is dealt with all the time in the rural US, but in the relative absence of big government public transportation systems, the school district will get the one girl to school by negotiating a year of discounted rides (bulk purchase) from a car or van service with some reimbursement from the state. No more parties need to be involved, making it fairly efficient.
Japan should be doing it that way, too. Train companies in Japan aren't small businesses with kindly old proprietors; they are VERY complex businesses enormously tangled in cross-company ownership (our system owns 40% of yours, yours owns 40% of ours), government ownership, heavy government regulation with negotiated compromises (you have to serve these needs or we won't let you share that track), heavy union obligations, negotiated right-of-way through communities (if you won't service this line, we won't let you stop at the main station), etc., etc.
After living in Japan for many years, I'm afraid this sounds to more like a situation where keeping the train running for one person, though extravagantly wasteful, probably solved multiple practical problems simultaneously (fulfilling union employment agreements, rural service agreements, etc.) along with perhaps the greatest benefit: getting things done in Japanese bureaucracies requires so much negotiation among so many parties that just continuing to do what you have been doing (just keep running the train) is just SO much easier than changing the system--the system has so much inertia--that just letting it go on a couple of years longer was probably the easy way. The fact that it wasn't close to the cheapest way wouldn't necessarily matter to governments, unions, corporate managers and others spending Other People's Money.
I'm not implying anything about Japanese kindness. The Japanese do very kind things all the time, but this doesn't seem like one of them. I don't think kindness has much to do with it, because a private car service would be just as kind as making her stand alone twice a day on a freezing Hokkaido train platform and dramatically cheaper.
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.
Confused: wasn't it just keeping a stop on the schedule, and not actually running a line for one person? Total cost would then be in time spent stopping/restarting.
It's 'aaronchall that is confused. They were supposed to decommission a particular station on the train route, but they decided to wait a few years for that lone girl to finish her school. They reduced the amount of times the train stops at that station to twice a day, and adjusted them to the girl's schedule. The line itself is working normally, carrying many passengers between other stations. The issue was only with a single stop on the train's route.
So, as you say, the total cost (or rather, the amount they didn't save by decommissioning the station earlier) is just the train stopping and starting twice a day + whatever maintenance costs are required to keep the station in proper shape.
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.
With the country’s record-low birthrate, aging population, and the threat of losing a third of its population by 2060, Japan faces a number of crises...
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few decades. Many European countries have similar problems with low fertility rates, but Japan has the additional disadvantage of being extremely xenophobic. While other countries may be able to bolster their populations with immigrants and refugees it seems unlikely Japan's culture will allow that.
Your harsh judgements of Japan's trajectory make assumptions that are not evidently true (to me).
What do you mean, "problems with low fertility"? That looks a highly desirable outcome to me, a blessing in disguise.
Sure, most governments run Ponzi-like schemes and depend on "exponential growth" all around to finance themselves (pensions), but that's an economic snafu. Ultimately unsustainable in any case.
Not sure where this mentality of "more is always better" comes from. You could argue Japan would still be overpopulated even at half its current population.
Random thought: being "extremely xenophobic" seems desirable (necessary?) for such reversal process to stand a chance. Otherwise the country would be overrun by people who simply procreate more (aka race to the bottom when it comes to quality of life). Should maximum procreation trump everything else?
I completely (and unfortunately) agree. This population pattern manifests in so many countries. The United States would be in this situation if not for our immigration inflow. South Korea actually has an even lower birthrate than Japan. China has a smaller population base in its youth vs its middle aged segment as a result of their one child policy [1].
I wonder... will all developed nations engage in a war for productive immigrants in order to prevent a population pyramid based collapse of their economies?
Count Europe out of it for now. If I'm to believe the things I see and read all the time, most of the EU population is rapidly turning against immigration. It's a huge issue on the continent now, and it causes tensions between people and local governments - the latter are being painted as giving out free aid to immigrants while not being able to care for their own people. Population pyramid is a distant concern, when the commonly held fears are that a) immigrants are trying to "steal our jobs", and b) the whole Europe will get slowly converted to Islam if we keep letting them in.
The perception of scarcity of wealth (for lack of a better term) and things being zero sum between nationals and immigrants is truly regrettable. And SV is not immune to it, considering engineers' general opposition to increasing H1B quotas.
It seems to me that the labour market issues we face would exist regardless of how many immigrants are let in. In the long term jobs are at risk from automation. We have fewer middle income people who can afford or are willing to pay high income tax rates.
True - but machines tend to sneak in unnoticed, while immigrants, and for us especially Muslim immigrant, are obvious boogeymen. They are human, they are there on TV and newspapers, you can point your finger at them and say "it's their fault!".
It's yet another topic that lets public avoid having a discussion about real, coming issues.
The places where the immigrants are coming from are getting richer and their birth rates are dropping so there won't be enough immigrants to grow developed nations' populations.
People will just have to learn to run countries with a stable population.
Developed countries are all dropping below replacement fertility rate, sustained only by immigration and the higher fertility rate associated with recent immigrants.
I haven't seen any evidence for a stable point of population - it looks like it will grow, until it begins to decline in the not-too-distant future. Then does it ever stop declining?
Does it stop declining at a point we can sustain a technological society, much less technological progress?
That's my vote for resolution of the Fermi paradox.
I blame young women, who don't want to get married and don't want to have children. Sigh. It may be that western culture will collapse on its own when it reaches a certain point.
I hope some move back. From what I've seen/heard, the countryside is suffering radical population shifts. The following article has some great graphs to illustrate the point. There is a giant dip in the 20s (school) and a terrifying peak in the 55-60 range. But the greatest disparity is that there are many many more old (70s) than teenagers in the countryside. Across the nation those two groups are roughly equal.
Japan has a immense centralization of jobs in Tokyo (and to a much lesser extent Osaka). It's "go make your fortune in New York", but 10x as extreme.
They've been talking about the need to decentralize for decades now. The earthquake showed the risk of centralization and having a single point of failure for the economy and the government (famously, some foreign companies moved HQ and/or datacenters to Osaka). Nothing has changed though. If anything things are becoming even more centralized.
There has been minority political endeavors talking of introducing the concept of "States" to Japan to structurally support this sort of decentralization. At times attempts have come close to fruition (most recently Hashimoto's attempt in Osaka), but none have borne fruit.
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.
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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.
No, Japan is unique in this regard. Yes, South Korea, China and much of Europe is following along the same trend lines, but Japan is good couple of decades ahead of everybody else and is thus the world's guinea pig for population decline:
The lines are the country's % of working-age people. As you can see, Japan is already collapsing rapidly, while South Korea is just starting to plateau out and China is still climbing.
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.
Consider also the energy it takes to do those maneuvers. And that the station needs to be maintained; even though it doesn't seem to be staffed, the cost of keeping it in shape over many years was likely nonzero. I am not a train expert, but I suppose that stations require additional infrastructure - like lights and semaphores - which also needs to be maintained and regularly tested. Then you can start pricing in the opportunity cost of the land that could be sold or put to different use. And the organizational overhead of adjusting schedules to match the girl's lesson plan. It adds up to some considerable costs, of which the company management was surely aware...
...and yet they chose to ignore it. That is indeed just beautiful.
They were already paying it though. It wasn't an additional cost they had to make. It was a cost they chose not to cut for a period of 3 years. I agree with you, it is beautiful.
Technically it just says the station is closing. It's possible the line will remain operational. (The train might be going by there anyway.) Although it did say the schedule was adjusted for the student, so maybe not.
Edit, ah, so I guess a bunch of trains go by, and adjusting the schedule basically means deciding which trains stop at that station, not changing when trains run.
Looking at Google Maps the change won't be terribly drastic in reality [0] unless the station just over 3 km further down the line closes too. For a person walking it's a decent distance but for the rest of the passengers there would be very little change. Of course the same could be said for pretty much any station that closed between there before now.
Unfortunately my source is second hand as well from a Japanese discussion thread, so my information may be faulty.
One possibility is that the station 3km away is already out of operation (and I do recall someone posting that a nearby station did already shut down).
In either case I think you are right that for 99% of the passenger life will go on as it always has.
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.
Maybe something is being lost in translation, but the article starts with:
"The train makes only two stops—one when a lone high-school student leaves for school and the other when she returns."
The train makes two stops, rather than "the train stops here only twice". Both may be true, but the initial statement describes actions of the train rather than the station.
>“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.
The last Amtrak flag stop in the USA that I knew of was Green River, Utah. Until a few years ago, you could flag down the California Zephyr and get aboard there any day of the year. Otherwise it would pass through town without pause.
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.
> Heart-warming story but too much praise for the government for my taste.
I found it weird too after I Googled some more and learned that the Japan Railways[0] is a group of companies that were the result of privatization of national railway system. But I've seen a similar phenomenon in Poland - even though our rail system has also been mostly privatized, people tend to think and talk about it like it's still a government service. I guess that it's because in some places, the concept of "infrastructure" generally pattern-matches to "government".
About your second paragraph - the most heartwarming thing I could imagine about this story would be learning that the company did in fact take into account everything you wrote and then decided to just ignore it. We are homo sapiens, not homo economicus. We have a capacity to care about other people, and caring is an economical inefficiency.
Social equality has value. Other people might be resentful if she were given cash or a taxi. Keeping the station open is a strong signal of support for treating people equally. People who approve of this will have an improved opinion of Japan Railways, and that goodwill has value too.
I'm not sure I follow. I understood it that they're keeping the station open solely for her and stopping the train to align with her schedule.
They're not (to my knowledge) doing this for anyone else, so it seems to me like she's being given extra special treatment that has a net negative (albeit small) effect on the other users of the system and the environment.
Being a high school student, presumably she didn't choose to live there. If the station closes it looks like she's being punished for something that wasn't her fault. It seems unfair/unequal because none of the other riders are being treated that way. The "unfairness" of making the other riders wait is much less salient because they were doing it already and it's only a short wait. Looking it at from a purely utilitarian point of view gives results that conflict with common human intuition (technically you could assign monetary values to "image of fairness", "social harmony", etc. but that's rarely if ever done because it's so difficult). I'm not the only person approving of keeping the station open despite the cost, so I can't be the only person to value these vague/intuitive social values.
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.
I was under the impression that it was the line that was underused, not just a stop on the line. I suppose that makes things pretty different, especially since I think Japanese lines tend to go out farther to pick people up in general.
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.
It is an inelegant solution. It's not something you want to scale up. It's not something "right" by Kant's categorical imperative. The lesson to take from this story isn't "keep every train running, no matter how little economical sense it makes it". Such an attitude, universalized, would indeed be a disaster for the world.
No, the lesson is that when running and optimizing systems, we should not forget why are we having them in the first place. They are there for us. Our willingness to make an occasional exception to cater for another human in need, at the cost of efficiency, is what makes us human.
Think of all those tourists who regularly get injured or lost in the mountains and have to be rescued by helicopter S&R teams. From purely economical perspective, this is burning money. We should leave them to die, because the costs of fueling a chopper and risking its destruction, not to mention lives of highly-trained personnel, are great and the money could be better spent elsewhere. And yet we train S&R teams and fly the choppers, because we chose to. Ruthless economic efficiency is not the end goal.
My entire opposition to this is based on the idea that slowing an accelerating a train is grossly more inefficient in terms of pollution and fuel waste than just finding a way to get her to the next station on a transport that does not weigh as much. If I'm wrong about that I'm happy to go back to feeling nice about this.
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.
BBC covered a similar situation in Britain. One of the arguments for keeping them running: inactive lines quickly fall in to disrepair (physically or legally/procedurally), which could actually end up costing more, assuming demand is projected to increase and the line would have to be reopened.
Also, the cost of actually closing a station is not negligible. From the same article:
Closing down a line is cumbersome. There must first be a transport appraisal analysing the effect of a closure on passengers, the environment and the economy. The proposal is submitted to the Department of Transport and at that point its details must be published in the press, six months ahead of the closure. Then comes a 12-week consultation period, during which time anyone is welcome to protest; public hearings are sometimes held, especially if the closure is controversial. Then, finally, the plans are submitted to the Office of Rail and Road, who decide if the line closes.
As a result it often costs less – in terms of time, paperwork and taxpayers’ money – to keep a line running at a bare minimum.
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.
Japan need mass third world immigration, you can't stay so homogenus for this long. Not acceptable for a first world country to do. They must take responsibility like Sweden, there is war now and they must accept refugees from Syria and rest of the middle east.
Please use Occam's razor: student that can maintain her anonymity in the face of this report + bureacracy that maintains a service for /one/ person = Political connections
Occam's Razor would imply someone with "political connections" would have the wherewithal for more convenient alternatives, such as moving closer to school.
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.
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The article links to a Facebook page with some more photos:
https://www.facebook.com/cctvnewschina/posts/110978428906239...