Overview
Six Japan Railways Group (JR) companies, state owned until 1987, provide passenger service to most parts of Hokkaido, Honshu, Shikoku, and Kyushu; the seventh JR company carries freight. Many private rail companies rank among the top corporations in the country. Regional governments, and companies funded jointly by regional governments and private companies, also provide rail service.
There are 27,268 km of rail crisscrossing the country. JR (a group of companies formed after privatization of JNR) controlled 20,135 km of these lines as of March 31, 1996, with the remaining 7,133 km in the hands of private enterprise local railway companies. Japan's railways carried 22.24 billion passengers (395.9 billion passenger-kilometres) in fiscal 2006. In comparison, Germany has over 40,000 km of railways, but carries only 2.2 billion passengers per year.
Fukuoka, Kobe, Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka, Sapporo, Sendai, Tokyo and Yokohama have subway systems. However, unlike Europe, the vast majority of passenger traffic is on suburban commuter trains that criss-cross metropolitan areas. In addition, many cities have streetcar and monorail networks.
Japan pioneered the high-speed "bullet train" or "shinkansen", which now links Japan's largest cities at speeds of up to 300 km/h (186 mph). However, other trains running on the conventional line or "zairaisen" remain relatively slow, operating at fastest 160 km/h and mostly under 130 km/h.
Japan's railways carried 51.9 million tons (23.2 billion tonne-kilometres) of goods in fiscal 2006. The share of railways in the national logistics is as small as 0.84% (2005).
Read more about this topic: Rail Transport In Japan