Before we dive into things this week, just one more reminder.

By the time you're hearing this, we will be one day from the 2021 Intelligent Speech Conference.

I'm very excited to be speaking.

I'll be on a panel talking about our experiences with academia and podcasting.

And I'm truly thrilled to be interacting with some talented, brilliant,

and just wonderfully interesting people.

If that sounds like your cup of tea, go to Intelligentspeechconference.com to see the

lineup, the schedule, and to pick up tickets.

It's only one day away, but there's still time left, so hopefully I'll see you there.

Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 387, The Iron Road, part four.

I'm going to start this episode off with a bit of a spoiler, in as much as anything that happened almost 40 years ago could be a spoiler.

As you may have noticed, if you've ridden, oh, basically any train in Japan in the last few decades,

there aren't many with JNR logos on them anymore. Really, there are none.

And that's because, just shy of 23 years after its greatest technological achievement in the form

of the Tokai-do-Shin-Khansen, JNR ceased to exist.

One of Japan's biggest state-run companies was broken up and privatized and remade into

something called J-R-G, the Japan Railways Group.

As you might imagine, such a momentous decision was not without its controversies, and

there were and are many people who insist this was a mistake.

So this week, for our final part of this mini-series, we're all about answering the question,

What Gives?

Why privatize rail? Reversing, in essence, a decision

...