GoKawiilOn my first trip to Japan, I brought along a JR Rail Pass to take advantage of the subsidized rail transport for tourists. After riding the JR Yamanote Line and the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, I assumed JR must be a single national train system.
But I soon learned it’s far from that. The Yamanote Line is run by the East Japan Railway Company — JR East — and the Tōkaidō Shinkansen by JR Central. And each of these JR companies is part of a group of associated but entirely separate companies — four now publicly traded, three overseen by a government agency — that each bear the JR mark.
So tens of thousands of vehicles across Japan carry this JR mark and often interoperate on each other’s routes, yet they’re run by independent systems. And the mark has remained unchanged for nearly 40 years, giving off the air of a stable institution.
And the truth is that it didn’t need to happen this way.
What was being dismantled
Rail transport in Japan was originally run by Japanese National Railways (JNR). Like many state-owned corporations, it was starting to struggle in the 80s with mounting debt. JNR was losing its advantage over other transport, in both passenger and freight. In the ’80s, the Japanese government began pushing to privatize its state-run monopolies — to reduce the national deficit and improve efficiency across these sectors.
In 1985, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) was privatized. Two years later, a similar decision was made for the railways. The main rationale for splitting up the system was that each region could be managed more efficiently by attending to its own conditions.
And so six passenger companies and one freight company were created as the JR Group. Normally, each new company would have chosen its own logo and corporate identity. But existing JNR employees felt that “even if we’re splitting up, there ought to be at least one thing that stays the same”.
And so the new corporate identity was commissioned as a single system that would apply across all the companies. In just 124 days — beginning with the passing of railway reform bills — the new JR companies launched across Japan, with new branding applied to every vehicle.
Yamanote line in 1987. Image courtesy of NDC
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