Faster Than a Speeding Bullet : High-Speed Trains are Japan’s Pride, Subject of Debate

Toru Fukushima still recalls the pride he felt when, as a high school student during the golden autumn of 1964, Tokyo was host to the Olympics and the soon-to-be-famous bullet train made its first high-speed runs.

“The bullet train and the Olympic Games together were symbols of Japan’s economic growth,” said Fukushima, now a planning official with Central Japan Railway Co. “I sent my friends New Year’s cards with pictures of the bullet train. And I received many cards from my friends with its design. It represented the hopes of the Japanese people.”

While the bullet train is no longer the world’s fastest--that honor now belongs to the French Train a Grande Vitesse (TGV)--Japan’s love for speed on rails is still intense.

The nation is making a multibillion-dollar gamble on developing ever faster and ever more technically advanced trains that would improve service at home and, it is hoped, generate business abroad. Work is moving forward both on speeding up conventional bullet trains and on building futuristic levitation trains that will float above the tracks via electromagnetic power.

Yet the advanced, in-service model of the bullet train, Nozomi , has been engulfed in controversy since it was launched two years ago. Some critics say the risks in Japan’s aggressive development of faster trains--in terms of both finances and safety--outweigh the potential benefits.

Despite questions about the wisdom of this massive investment, it is clearly producing technical progress. And, with the Clinton Administration showing interest in high-speed rail, Japanese rail technology soon may be finding its way to the United States.

Magnetic levitation (or “maglev”) train technology is one area the United States and Japan cited as offering potential for research collaboration in a broad agreement signed in February by the U.S. Department of Transportation and Japan’s Ministry of Transportation.

“My understanding is that the U.S. government is most interested in superconductivity” for use in maglev trains, said Norio Mitsuya, director of international economic affairs at the Ministry of Transportation. “Maybe the Japanese government can help.”

Japan also “certainly will be ready” to cooperate in the upgrading of Amtrak’s Washington-New York-Boston (Northeast corridor) service, if the United States requests such participation, Mitsuya said.

Advanced Japanese rail technology also may figure in U.S. efforts to find commercial ventures for military contractors as procurement budgets shrink. For example, Grumman Corp.--which agreed last week to be acquired by Los Angeles-based Northrop Corp.--has conferred with a Japanese firm about building a relatively simple maglev train for moderate-speed service in U.S. cities.

Potential markets for advanced train technology also beckon in countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and China. The main international competition so far has pitted the bullet train against France’s TGV and Germany’s Intercity Express (ICE). South Korea has chosen the TGV over the bullet train for a planned Seoul-Pusan route.

Japanese engineers did feasibility studies in the United States about a decade ago, during an earlier wave of U.S. interest in high-speed trains. They looked at prospects for a Los Angeles-San Diego line and at projects in Florida and in the Chicago area.

Their conclusions--based partly on their own experiences getting around the United States--were not encouraging.

“Except for the Northeast corridor, high-speed rail projects in the United States are not (commercially) feasible, we think,” said Fukushima, whose company operates the bullet train service between Tokyo and Osaka. “Americans like to travel by airplane and rental cars. Many engineers who visited the United States know the convenience of this combination.”

Japanese interest in finding overseas customers for rail technology is based not only on the money to be made, but also very much on national prestige, Fukushima said.

“We have pride that the initial high-speed train was inaugurated in Japan,” he said. “We have pride that our system encouraged European railways that high-speed rail would be possible. Thirty years ago, other countries were very pessimistic about the future of rail. We have pride in the “

While skeptics say prestige has played too big a role in the never-ending quest for greater speed, Japan is aggressively pushing forward on four major technical fronts:

* The Nozomi, which runs at speeds up to 168 m.p.h., was launched in 1992. Service has not been trouble-free, however, and technicians are striving to resolve a variety of problems, many of them related to loose or weak bolts. Critics say that government-owned Central Japan Railway, creator of the Nozomi, rushed the light-weight, aluminum-body train into service without sufficient testing--a charge the company denies.

Test runs are being conducted on the next generation of high-speed bullet trains, based on the same basic design as the Nozomi. One of these prototypes, the STAR 21, set a new Japanese speed record of 265 m.p.h. in a December test run. That made it second in the world to France’s TGV, which has been clocked at 319 m.p.h.

* Central Japan Railway is developing a futuristic maglev train that hovers about four inches above the rails. This train depends on powerful superconducting electromagnets, which function only when cooled to very low temperatures by liquid helium. The United States is interested in this technology, although there is great uncertainty about its practicality for rail service.

A prototype, made of plastic, was destroyed in 1991 by a fire touched off by a flat tire. Another prototype, made of aluminum, has achieved speeds of up to 262 m.p.h. on a four-mile test track over the past year.

* Construction is under way on an 11-mile maglev test track that could become part of a super-high-speed Tokyo-Osaka route on which maglev trains would travel as fast as 300 m.p.h., but some residents along the proposed route have fought bitterly against giving up their land. Critics also charge that the train’s strong magnetic fields may pose a public health risk--and that the $3 billion already committed to the project will never be recovered.

* New efforts are being made to put into commercial service a relatively simple form of maglev train, called High Speed Surface Transport (HSST). Variations of this system carried more than 1.5 million riders at expositions in Japan during the 1980s.

This train hovers about half an inch above its track, suspended by conventional electromagnetic power. Appropriate for use within urban areas, it runs at speeds up to about 70 m.p.h. The technology is not controversial, but it has never been used commercially. Long Island, N.Y.-based Grumman has discussed cooperation in this technology with Japan’s HSST Development Co., created last year by 48 Japanese companies that wanted to promote its use.

Efforts to market conventional bullet-train technology based on the Nozomi model are headed by the Japan High Speed Rail Consortium, which includes more than 30 large corporations under the leadership of two trading companies, Mitsui & Co. Ltd. and Nissho Iwai Corp.

Still, controversy dogs the Nozo mi, the fastest train in everyday use.

Since it went into service, Japanese newspapers have carried dozens of reports about loose bolts, stones kicked up, cracked windows and other mechanical failures. The harshest criticism is that the Nozo mi, with 37 trains in operation, runs a higher risk of derailment than the slower--but thoroughly proven--Kodama and Hikari versions of the bullet train.

The experience of the French TGV, three derailments in the past 16 months, shows that high-speed rail accidents indeed can happen.

The first TGV derailment was caused by a broken axle, the second by the collapse of a covered World War I trench under the rail line and the third by colliding with a bumper that had fallen off a freight train. The TGV has special, jointed wheel sections and carriages tightly linked to form a single “backbone.” The design enabled the entire train to remain upright in all three derailments, so serious injury to passengers was avoided.

While Japan’s bullet train has never been derailed--earlier models have functioned largely free of mechanical troubles--the Nozomi has endured a seemingly endless string of embarrassing incidents.

In December, visiting Chinese Railway Minister Han Zhubin was stuck on the Nozomi for nearly three hours due to a power outage. While top Japanese railway officials waited at the next station to welcome the Chinese delegation, 45 other trains were canceled or delayed, affecting 45,000 passengers.

In an earlier incident, a four-foot-long exterior part fell off the Nozomi as it headed into a Tokyo depot.

“If the train were going full speed and that part came loose and hit people, it would be terrible. People would die right away,” said Keiichi Namba, 43, a Nozomi maintenance worker who is a leader of the Central Japan Railway Workers Union, a relatively small, left-leaning group that has spearheaded criticism of the Nozomi.

One of the Nozomi’s most prominent critics is Kiyoshi Sakurai, an author with a doctorate in nuclear physics who, in recent years, has specialized in writing about the risks and problems of high technology. Sakurai presented a sharp critique of the Nozomi in a book published last year, “The Day the Myth of Bullet Train Safety Collapses.”

His basic argument is that--compared to previous bullet trains--the Nozomi has been redesigned and lightened in ways that make it less likely to withstand the stress of vibration encountered at higher speeds.

For example, he said, the train’s central axles were solid metal in previous models, but are now hollow tubes.

“In a case of extreme vibration, the train could crack apart and derail. That’s one scenario,” he said. “Another scenario is that if bolts come loose, the big and extremely heavy motor could fall onto the unprotected spinning axle, cut into it, break it and cause a derailment.”

The rail agency’s managers acknowledge that all the bad publicity about the Nozomi has not been helpful to overseas sales efforts.

But they also point out that bullet trains, including the Nozomi, have carried more than 3.4 billion passengers--an average of 27 trips for every person in Japan--without an accident that caused passenger injury. The Nozomi suffers only routine start-up problems that pose no risk to this enviable record, management insists.

“After actually using the train at high speed, there were places where the stress was greater than we expected,” Akira Isozaki, head of technical research and development at Central Japan Railway, acknowledged in an interview. “So there are some places where it has proven necessary to put on thicker bolts, or more bolts. But it’s not a matter of the train itself having been weakened by being made lighter. . . . The great majority of these problems are extremely insignificant things that have no impact on how the Nozomi runs.”

Criticism of the Nozomi stems partly from the high standards set by a nation that has made bullet trains a part of its culture, according to Fukushima.

“If you see some of the calendars in Japan, for April you see the picture of the Nozomi running . . . with cherry blossoms in full bloom and Mt. Fuji covered with snow in the background,” he noted. “I think this is very typical.”

When the TGV derailed in December--the incident involving the World War I trench, Fukushima said--a French newspaper ran a headline emphasizing that because of the train’s special design, it had not overturned. If such an incident happened in Japan, there would never be such a positive spin on the story, he said.

Instead, he said, “People would say, ‘Why didn’t you find the big trench?’ ”

While some passengers express dissatisfaction with the Nozomi, complaining that it shakes too much because of its speed, many others are happy with the fast service.

“I take the Nozomi because the ride is shorter,” said Haruo Fukuda, a businessman who was about to return from Tokyo to Hiroshima on a Nozomi. “I don’t care about the troubles. Machines cannot avoid having troubles. I don’t think they’ll cause an accident.”

Times researcher Chiaki Kitada in Tokyo contributed to this report.