The exotic-sounding Shinkansen simply means “new main line,” a rail trunk line replacing the original, conventional train line running the length of Honshu. The Shinkansen are bullet trains, averaging somewhere between 200 and 250 km/h, connecting Tokyo and Kyoto, for instance, in about three hours. They’re really nice trains, too, sleek and futuristic-looking with spacious seating. The ride is so smooth that sometimes it was hard for me to tell I was moving at all, let alone moving at the fastest land speed of my life. Like all JR trains, the Shinkansen have snack and gift carts, and extremely clean restrooms with separate wash rooms; unique to the Shinkansen are in-train telephones. These may be largely a novelty feature in the age of cell phones (which, for that matter, arrived early in Japan), but it’s kind of impressive that you can not only place a call from a Shinkansen but actually place a call to a Shinkansen: you call a central dispatch number, give the operator the name of the train and the name of the passenger, and they connect you to the train’s phone and the conductor comes and summons the passenger to the phone.
Each Shinkansen has its own name; for instance, between Tokyo and Hachinohe we took the Shinkansen Hayate (in English, “Whirlwind”), which is a pretty neat name for a bullet train. Between Tokyo and Kyoto is the fastest conventional train in the world, the Shinkansen Nozomi. Nozomi apparently comes out to something like “hope” or “desire” or even “ambition.” I didn’t realize they favored the latter translation until I saw a Nozomi train, which bears the inscription “AMBITIOUS JAPAN!” Hmm… that philosophy didn’t really work out so well, once upon a time…
Think what the bullet train could do for America. Imagine getting from Boston to New York in two hours, or San Francisco to Los Angeles in three and a half, without any reservations or waiting. But, no, we just don’t understand trains.