JR东海磁悬浮新干线静冈路段障碍据称解除，但商业化仍在多年之后

Japan’s trains are getting much faster as the country embraces moonshots
At some still unfixed point in the future when the magnetically levitating Linear Chuo Shinkansen train makes its first 505km per hour journey across central Japan, it will streak through Shizuoka prefecture in a little under 64 seconds.
It has taken more than a decade of wrangling for Japan to be able to say that with confidence; it will be many more years before anyone is actually boarding the train itself and likely many more years after that before people genuinely think of central Japan as the “linear economic zone” imagined by the government that is seamlessly joined by the train.
But as of last Saturday, a legal and conceptual key has finally been turned and rail operator JR Central has agreed, at last, with the governor of Shizuoka that the maglev train will be allowed to pass through an 8.9km corner of the prefecture, clearing an obstacle that has delayed the entire, magnificently ambitious project since the mid 2010s.
With the long impasse broken over the last section of the route that had not been secured, the country can get on not only with building a train that will one day join Tokyo and Osaka in 67 minutes but also with the vital business of conceiving and enacting moonshot industrial policy: the slow-moving magic behind high-speed public transport and, perhaps, the key to Japan’s destiny in a more ruthlessly cut-throat global economy.
There is suddenly a very great deal at stake, beyond the maglev project’s $68bn price tag and the decades of political capital that a succession of administrations have funnelled into this train. It is symbolic of what must work for Japan to succeed. Even more so after Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi rolled the dice on Tuesday on an extraordinarily daring strategy for the world’s fourth-biggest economy.
Her cabinet approved a policy blueprint that targets a combined $2.3tn of public and private sector investment between now and 2040 in 17 chosen sectors. Ministries will be able to make budget requests without upper limits; budget construction, according to the document, will be “fundamentally” changed. Much of the blueprint is about economic security, but a refreshingly large amount is about growth. It all comes with an inherent criticism of Japan’s medium-term and recent past: its risk-shy companies have not, collectively, invested for growth and the window to do so is closing fast.
But possibly the most meaningful lines in the new strategy place Japan’s future efforts in the global context. “Among advanced countries, there is a big trend of the government and private sectors working together on large-scale, long-term industrial spending,” it read, in an observation that might at one time have referred primarily to China, but now very clearly includes the US and other countries. The government would strive, the document further promised, to meet the challenges of “the era of great global competition between industrial policies”.
On the same day that the blueprint was agreed, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry produced separate guidance for growth investment — an effort to encourage Japan’s 4,000-odd listed companies to shift more of their endeavours towards growth and a witheringly blunt critique of how matters are at the moment. Within Japan’s 350 largest companies (by sales), 65 per cent of invested capital remains locked in what it calls value-destructive segments, according to METI’s research. In the US, the equivalent ratio is 39 per cent.
Both Takaichi’s blueprint and the new METI guidelines are attempting a new version of industrial policy that not only seeks to spur growth, but places a huge bet on the government’s ability to encourage companies in a way that market forces have not.
It may take a suite of different stimuli to achieve that, but luck is suddenly on Takaichi’s side. She was not involved in the maglev’s planning, and does not appear to have been especially pivotal in convincing Shizuoka to play ball. But she is conveniently running the country at the precise point that Japan can finally dare to dream of riding a 505kph train.
The maglev’s long-term value to the economy may indeed be as huge as its proponents have been arguing for decades. But its value as a talisman, both now and in the future, is more immediate. The project symbolises ambition, of course, but also patience, commitment and, if the colossal bet it represents pays off, the ability of government to intervene successfully as an industrial policymaker.