I've always thought the JR logo looked like 駅, the kanji for “train station”, and assumed it was deliberate. Perhaps that was a factor in them settling on the JR name?
A factor not mentioned is Japan's cultural sense of duty and honour. I don't think employees in the West generally feel such dedication or perfectionism towards their company but in Japan it helped make all these efficient and meticulous changes possible, and avoids issues of privatisation like neglecting maintenance / short term profit maximisation.
In the west the employee / employer social contract died sometime in the 80s. It's rare, especially in tech, to have employees with decades of tenure. You see Microsoft trying to buyout older employees recently.
Pre-Carly Fiorina Hewlett-Packard was a great example of an old-school Silicon Valley company, long before the era of “move fast and break things” and of Zuck, Elon, and Altman. I used to work for a Japanese company until I left a few years ago to teach, and when I read about the HP Way, it reminds me in many ways of life at my former employer:
While in college, my advisor / professor I worked for took me to HP Labs off Page Mill. I recall entering and seeing a sea of cubicles. That said, I enjoyed hearing the stories of those that worked there.
And the concept of company families, of client corporations beholden to larger/older ones. They dont work together because of financial incentives or contractual obligation. The work together because they are fraternal organizations.
Here a link to the best recent HN-featured long-form article on Japan rail network. Probably spent more time with this than any other item posted here in months.
Although Japan also has extensive highways, and they're privatized in a similar way to JR (NEXCO East, West, Central) and are all tolled - if you're driving alone, it's often the same price in tolls alone as a ticket on the Shinkansen (but the equation quickly flips when you more people in the car)
The German rail network is chronically underfunded and Germany is completely incapable of building new lines. Per capita spending on rail pales in comparison to e.g. Switzerland and Austria.
It’s not just about size. Much of the U.S. would be cheaper to build rail networks because there is a lot of open, relatively flat land without dense building on it. Japan is very mountainous and has a lot of dense development, and it has to be more resilient in case of earthquakes.
Civil planning on that scale isn’t about feasibility but about what direction you want to shape the county in.
A sparse railway system would leave parts of the country less populated by design as it’s simply harder to get to them. People would bunch up into cities and towns because they had to.
Nakanishi was opposed to treating corporate identity as just a logo and a logotype; instead, he created a framework splitting it into three layers. MI, or Mind Identity, is the philosophy, values, and vision behind a company. BI, or Behavior Identity, is how the company and its people act in the world — the kind of service they provide. And VI, or Visual Identity, is the visual expression of how the mind and behavior identities are manifested.
Reading this article, I get the feeling that a nationally inefficient infrastructure is made to be perceived as a stable one through a single JR mark. Privatization forces people to bear inefficient and high train costs due to misguided policies, but the value of a well-designed brand logo and branding offsets all of that. Looking at the content of the article itself, there are some unsettling points, the dissolution of the national railway, the split into companies, and regional profitability gaps. In other words, that signals regional inequality within Japan. It seems like the question is how the dismantled national railway, broken up for the benefit of traditional construction companies, can be perceived as stable through a single brand. I always think that it's not always the good ones that win; even if it's inefficient, you can learn a lot from how you brand it. It's a good article
I think you probably wrote that comment because you assumed I was engaging in some kind of ideological axe grinding. But you're only reading the superficial part of this article — the observation that the logo design provides consistency. What I was actually thinking about was why that consistency in the logo design is being emphasized in the first place. It's clearly no longer a single national infrastructure, but rather a corporate one now, and yet it still carries the branding of a 'national' entity. That's what struck me, and it's simply a different perspective
Doesn't this article exactly make that point? Because it shows how JR was split apart, yet the brand logo still makes it appear as if it's a single unified group, doesn't it? Here's the passage I'm referring to:
>'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.'"
The article mentions 'improve efficiency,' and that's the part I was looking at. Then it goes on to explain the strength of the brand logo. So the overall point here is, 'How can something that has been broken apart still appear as one?' And I was simply saying that, despite the inefficiencies in that process, the fact that it still comes across as so stable shows that the branding strategy is good.
https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/publications/me...
“Why Japan has such good railways”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815395
https://culturecompiled.com/p/strong-state-capacity-is-a-pro...
Truth is that nobody funds multiple competing transportation network. Japan chose rail, we chose highways.
I tihnk that helps explain the feasiability of train on each country more than inherent choices
A sparse railway system would leave parts of the country less populated by design as it’s simply harder to get to them. People would bunch up into cities and towns because they had to.
A nice framework for all types of communications.
>'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.'"
The article mentions 'improve efficiency,' and that's the part I was looking at. Then it goes on to explain the strength of the brand logo. So the overall point here is, 'How can something that has been broken apart still appear as one?' And I was simply saying that, despite the inefficiencies in that process, the fact that it still comes across as so stable shows that the branding strategy is good.