Issue:
October 2024
The maglev shinkansen project, blighted by delays and rising costs, could be arriving woefully late
Last month, Shizuoka Prefecture announced it would allow the Central Japan Railway Co., known locally as JR Tokai, to proceed with a boring survey in preparation for construction of an 8.9 km section of tunnel in the prefecture for the company's high-speed maglev train line. The announcement was notable because the prefecture had been cited by the media and others as the main obstacle to the maglev project, since its previous governor, Heita Kawakatsu, had not granted permission over concern that tunnel construction would adversely affect water resources in the area. Kawakatsu resigned last May and since then the prefecture has endeavored to gain consent from affected municipalities for the survey.
Supporters of the maglev project, officially known as the Linear Chuo Shinkansen, have applauded the announcement, saying that construction can finally get back on track, so to speak. Although it seems highly unlikely that the route from Tokyo to Nagoya will begin operating in 2027, as originally planned, it may not be finished anytime soon thereafter, either.
Last May, policy analyst Kazuo Ishikawa, on his podcast Policy Literacy, talked about the difficulties confronted by the project. At the time, suspension of the Shizuoka tunnel construction was still in the news, but journalist Shinichiro Kaneda, a guest on the podcast who writes for Nikkei Business, questioned the need for the maglev, which will eventually connect Tokyo to Osaka, taking only 40 minutes to get from Shinagawa to Nagoya and 67 minutes from Shinagawa to Osaka.
Kaneda mainly discussed practical issues: how flights from Tokyo to Osaka have become more convenient and take 60 minutes; how far below the surface the stations in Shinagawa, Nagoya, and Osaka will have to be, thereby adding time to the journey; how the fact that 87% of the route between Tokyo and Nagoya is underground, thus complicating safety and security issues; how time-consuming transfers from the maglev to other train lines will be, since maglev stations will not connect easily to existing stations.
In the end, he estimated that actually using the fastest of the current super express trains on the Tokaido Shinkansen, the current high-speed option between Tokyo and Nagoya, will not necessarily be any less convenient when you factor in exigencies. Moreover, Kaneda sees the maglev as having limited appeal to tourists, since even the 14% of the line that isn't underground will not provide any views, as the elevated railway will be shielded to reduce noise pollution. It's essentially a long, straight subway line.
Moreover, Kaneda confided that he isn't entirely sure the project will ever reach Osaka given how many challenges it is facing just getting to Nagoya. Then there's the cost. Demand will decrease as the population drops. He doesn't see tourists using it, since it won't pass through the country's biggest sightseeing attraction, Kyoto. And business demand isn't assured since more and more interactions are being carried out remotely. He estimates that ridership will be about half that of the Tokaido Shinkansen, which means the operating cost for the maglev, about ¥400 billion a year, will be almost impossible to recoup. JR Tokai has consistently operated in the black thanks to the popularity and utility of the Tokaido Shinkansen, but the maglev will effectively push the company into the red, since combined revenue won't be enough to cover both lines. And if JR Tokai increases fares as a result, more travelers will choose to fly.
One of Ishikawa's purposes for holding the discussion was to counter media coverage of the maglev, which is invariably positive since it tends to repeat JR Tokai's talking points regarding progress. Another reason is that it is deemed a national public works project, which major news outlets tend to support. Though the central government has always been involved in the planning and construction of the Shinkansen super express network, JR Tokai has, from the beginning, claimed the maglev as its own, meaning it would plan, build, and pay for it all by itself. However, early in his second stint as prime minister, the late Shinzo Abe arranged for a ¥3 trillion government loan to JR Tokai as a favor to the company's former president, Yoshiyuki Kasai, who was a friend, in order to guarantee that the maglev was completed on schedule. One of the conditions of the loan is that JR Tokai does not have to start paying it back until 30 years after the maglev opens for business. Given that no one really knows when that will be, the country may never see this money again, thus making the maglev a de facto national project, something most media outlets now take for granted.
With Kawakatsu out of the picture, some of those outlets are beginning to look more critically at the maglev. But as freelance journalist Hideki Kashida, who has covered the project in more detail than any other reporter since its inception, pointed out, Kawakatsu was merely a convenient scapegoat for JR Tokai and, by extension, the media. Shizuoka isn't the only segment of the line where there have been construction delays, and some have been even longer due to tunnel collapses, equipment malfunction, and lawsuits filed by residents who live along the route. The overall thrust of Kashida's reporting, as well as Ishikawa's podcast, is that JR Tokai has never been prepared for a project of this enormity in terms of engineering and logistics. The scale is historical, and the company has had nothing in its experience to compare it with. At every juncture of development, JR Tokai has run up against problems it did not expect, and so delays have been compounded.
Most of these delays are connected to underground construction. Maglev technology requires routes that are straight and level in order to be effective, and since Japan is a mountainous country, tunnels have to be built. Japan has extensive experience with tunnel construction, but the 256.6 km of excavation needed to get to Nagoya is unprecedented. In addition, the acquisition of land, which is always time-consuming given Japan's weak eminent domain regulations, becomes even more difficult because of logistical requirements (industrial roads to tunnel construction sites, landfill sites for excavated soil and rock). In April 2001, the cabinet enacted the Daishindo (deep underground) Law, which limits property rights to 40 meters below the surface, meaning that when public works take place more than 40 meters underground, the parties carrying out the work do not have to gain permission from the landowners on the surface. Although the law was not enacted specifically with the maglev in mind, it has been considered essential to the execution of the project, since securing all the land necessary between Tokyo and Nagoya would have taken years of negotiations, not to mention billions of yen in compensation to property owners. Most of the time, tunnels for facilities such as subways are built under publicly owned property, such as existing highways or rivers. With the Daishindo Law they can be built anywhere, as long as they are at least 40 meters below the surface.
Given the variety of geological conditions throughout Japan, construction companies often have to figure things out as they go along. During the construction of an underground extension of Tokyo's Gaikan highway in 2020, a large sinkhole formed in the city of Chofu above the construction site. According to a 2021 article that appeared in the business magazine Toyo Keizai, the only purpose of the Daishindo Law was to obviate the need to secure land rights for underground construction. As the land ministry admitted, the law does not remove the liability of construction companies or relevant authorities for negative effects that the construction causes for people on the surface. Before the sinkhole formed, Chofu residents complained about the vibration and noise caused by the construction, not to mention evidence of subsidence. Thirteen, in fact, filed for a provisional order to stop the drilling five months before the sinkhole formed. Tunnel construction is still suspended because the relevant parties continue to hash out compensation.
This was bad news for JR Tokai because in 2015 a land ministry official assured the lower house land committee that the excavation method used for the maglev tunnels would have no effect on surface dwellers thanks to the Daishindo Law. The truth, as revealed during another committee meeting in 2021, was that the ministry didn't really know what effects these excavation methods would have, since they'd never utilized them at such a depth and scale. JR Tokai said it would study the matter further with regard to maglev construction. As Toyo Keizai points out, the depth of the tunnel over the 33 km distance between Shinagawa and Machida varies from 41 meters to 121 meters, depending on the topography, so the effect on the surface will also vary. But the magazine also notes that when the tunnel reaches the Nagoya area the depth becomes more shallow, and there have already been problems there, too.
There is also no stipulation in the law that requires the authorities to check and approve geological survey results carried out by general contractors prior to construction taking place. In the case of the Chofu sinkhole, checking and authorization could have saved a lot of trouble, since the company's boring survey of ground conditions was carried out at 900-meter intervals instead of the standard 100-200 meters. In a May 2021 upper house land committee meeting, the land ministry said it would "instruct" JR Tokai to "carry out a proper survey" for the maglev, but admitted it had no authority to "check the validity of the survey results." According to one engineering professor who wrote a book about the Daishindo Law, the only legal requirement for receiving the go-ahead for construction from the land ministry is for the relevant companies to hold a public hearing prior to the start of construction. The professor pointed out that by eliminating negotiations for procuring land for underground public works, the law effectively eliminates the opportunity of "reaching an understanding" between interested parties about what needs to be done before and during construction.
In July 2021, a group of residents living in the high-scale Denen Chofu neighborhood of Tokyo filed a lawsuit in Tokyo District Court against JR Tokai to make it halt tunnel construction, saying it harmed their property rights, in violation of the Civil Code. Basically, the same rationale was used by Kawakatsu, who cited JR Tokai's own survey that found the ground water local residents relied on would be greatly diminished due to tunnel construction. Although JR Tokai and the media blamed Kawakatsu for the delay, JR Tokai still had to solve the problem, and apparently they did to the extent that the prefecture will now allow the boring survey to proceed. In the Tokyo suit, the matter was moot, because, according to the Tokyo Shimbun, the massive excavation machine used to dig the tunnel in Tokyo Prefecture (the same one used for the Gaikan tunnel) broke down in early 2023 and wasn't put back into operation until May this year. As of July, excavation work on the initial section still hadn't progressed beyond Shinagawa.
In an article for Shukan Playboy last spring, Kashida enumerated other situations showing how JR Tokai has been stymied by unforeseen circumstances. Their failure to secure enough land for a train yard in Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture, where maglev rolling stock will be kept, has delayed completion of the yard by at least 11 years. Construction of the Number 2 Metropolitan Tunnel in Kanagawa Prefecture is behind schedule by 10 years. JR Tokai, at the time of publication, still had not contracted for construction work of two tunnel sections in Gifu Prefecture. The creation of emergency exit tunnels extending from the maglev tunnel to the surfaced, which are required every five kilometers along the route, has been delayed by almost five years in Aichi Prefecture due to equipment malfunction.
And Shizuoka isn't the only prefecture where tunnel construction has affected water resources. For the past six months, several media outlets have reported that land in parts of Mizunami, Gifu Prefecture, has subsided by as much as 2.7 cm as a result of loss of ground water due to underground tunnel construction. JR Tokai recently ran a survey of the area and found that the loss of water was real and promised to remedy the situation, though as of September nothing had been done.
And there are more lawsuits associated with the maglev. Kashida covered one for Shukan Kinyobi in June that had been filed by six residents of Yamanashi Prefecture against JR Tokai to stop construction of an elevated bridge that would run through their neighborhood. JR Tokai had offered to compensate the residents, but the plaintiffs said it was not enough to cover the cost of relocation, and there was little likelihood that, with the bridge, they could sell their land to third parties for any meaningful sum. The court rejected the suit because it couldn't find anything "illegal" about the construction. The plaintiffs might have been more successful if they had simply sued for more compensation. In any event, they plan to appeal. JR Tokai will probably have it resolved in their favor, but such processes still require time and resources, all of which add to delays and the overall cost of the maglev, and the delays affect more than just JR Tokai. Local governments along the route that are building new Linear Chuo Shinkansen stations at their own expense are promoting related development projects to take advantage of the stations. But it's hard to solicit commercial investment in such projects when you don't know when the stations will start seeing users.
Philip Brasor is a Tokyo-based writer who covers entertainment, the Japanese media, and money issues. He writes the Japan Media Watch column for the Number 1 Shimbun.
Sources
https://podcast.1242.com/polite/#2
