So says Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times ("Sometimes you just gotta fake it"), who concludes that Japan's obsession with being on time ultimately caused Monday's train accident that killed 94 people and injured hundreds of others. Railway worker Yasuyuki Sawada agrees:
"If you go abroad, you find that trains don't necessarily arrive on time," Sawada said. "This disaster was produced by Japanese civilization and Japanese people."
Earlier this month, the railway issued a memo stating that delays would "betray customer confidence". All the more reason to run said train at a ridiculous rate of speed. At the time of the crash, in which the train jumped the rails on a curve and ran into an apartment building, it was running 60 seconds late. It didn't help that the building the train hit was no more than three feet from the tracks. (In a country as densely populated as Japan, it's hard to make everything fit. Sim City it ain't.) The engineer, likely among the dead, is ultimately to blame, but leave it to the Japanese to look big-picture.
"The Japanese people are responsible for this accident, too," said Toshinami Habe, 67, a chief of sales at a company here. "This is a society of free competition; there's no flexibility. That's why with even a one-and-a-half-minute delay, he had to try to make up the time."
Two points:
I'm not the most punctual person in the world. If anything, I run late according to my personal schedule, but if it's a work thing, I usually arrive early if not right on time. But if I'm really running late, and I need to drive somewhere, I'll speed a little bit. Maybe not 30 miles over the limit, and certainly not enough to jeopardize my life and the lives of my fellow drivers (my short attention span is enough of a roadway menace). But no amount of pressure would force me to put the lives of 850 people in jeopardy, as was the case in the train accident, and certainly not for the sake of 90 seconds. Japanese rail passengers demand that their trains run on time, and the engineer felt he needed to satisfy that demand. (I'm sure Mussolini would be proud.) Americans would say he sped because he was afraid of losing his job, and while that may have been the case here (he was previously disciplined for overshooting a platform by 100 meters), you'll never get the Japanese to admit it.
No, this is a case where the best of intentions backfired in a big way. The same nation that would rather lie to someone's face than disappoint will tell you with a straight face that 89 people died as a result of one engineer's dedication. As much as I admire and appreciate many facets of Japanese and Asian culture, that logic is seriously fucked up.
Second point, and it's mentioned briefly in this article, the competition aspect. JR West is a privatized off-shoot of the former Japanese National Railways. Think of JR West as a private, regional version of Amtrak, that gaping money-pit disguised as an American national rail service. Were JR West still under the auspices of a national railway system (read that: monopoly), competition would not be an issue, and engineers could concern themselves more with safety and less with "customer confidence". Oddly enough, because of the small difference between rail fares and air fares in Japan, the railways view airlines as direct competition.
When I board a plane, I am generally confident it will get me there in one piece, but hey, shit happens. And I'll accept that inept, poorly-trained, sleepy or even drunken pilots (or air traffic controllers) are to blame for such misfortunes. But as cut-throat as the airline industry can be, the actual flying of the plane is no place to flex competitive muscle by cranking it up a few m.p.h. (Besides, in the case of Amtrak, lack of competition and being on the government dole doesn't seem to make it a better rail service.) Forgive the crude comparison, but on 9/11/01, when the first plane hit the World Trade Center, no one thought to themselves, "Wow, that plane must have been running late!". Americans just don't think that way. The Japanese not only acknowledge they're in a rat race, but they're lucid enough to blame both the race and the innocent rats when tragedy occurs, if you can even call it "blame". I'm not saying Americans understand cause & effect better than the Japanese, but we do understand it differently.
For the record, if public obsessions can't be punished, a stock price can. JR West stock has dipped 6 percent since the accident, and as this article indicates, the crash couldn't have happened at a worse time.
Comments