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…
It is great irony that it is posted on CCTV's Facebook page. Given that 99% of their audience can't access Facebook.
Plus the fact that China and Japan have never had the best of relations to begin with.
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 the…
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 produ…
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.
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
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…
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 (i…
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.
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, ma…
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.
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.
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. It made me smile though.
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.
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 (i…
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 statio…
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.
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.
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
That's not how Occam's razor works. Neither explanation - political connections vs kindness - is simpler than the other.
You're just using a more prestigious-sounding name for cynicism.