Looking only at connections to Tokyo is a bit reductionist (difficult to believe, but yes, there are cities outside of Tokyo that people go to!). As a mere matter of geography, there are unavoidably fewer trains to Tokyo (it's on the opposite side of the island). Using that same methodology, it would be good to see how many trains from Hamamatsu have a direct connection to the biggest metropolis near Tokuyama: Fukuoka. That way we can measure which city is the best for getting to the opposite side.

The total number of trains with a direct connection from Hamamatsu to Fukuoka is, at least based on all the info I can find, zero.

Or even a much closer city that people in Hamamatsu would frequently go to: Hiroshima. Also zero direct connections without a transfer.

People in Tokuyama can go direct to Fukuoka and Tokyo. They can do a transfer at Osaka in the case of non-direct trains. They're very much better set up than Hamamatsu.

The federal government has no influence. Prefectures approve their own construction. Japan's railways are built and operated by corporations, not the government, so the federal government has zero say in the matter.

People can live without a high speed train. They cannot live without a clean water supply

Seems to me that the priorities are correct

Good luck building a bunch of new interstates today. Opposition was already coming in at the end of the interstate system buildout. Drill down and you'll find various odd connections (or lack thereof) throughout the system that resulted from community opposition.

The 5th amendment isn't exactly recent. But a lot of factors make it harder--for better or worse--to exercise eminent domain today than in the past. You could probably never reasonably build the equivalent of the interstate highway system today. (Though even at the time, there were compromises made because of strong community pushback in some cases and there was less developed space than today as well.)

And you'd better be prepared to fight for it through the courts. Might take a decade or more if someone is really opposed to selling.

Grain culture vs rice culture.

Rice cultivation requires collective water management, so you get more collectivist cultures. Growing grain mostly depends on rain, so your harvest depends on your own work.

>In the US, we have had a pretty wide-open nation, for much of our history. Population density was low, and many folks were forced to be extremely self-sufficient. This has resulted in a fiercely independent national zeitgeist.

Australia is much less dense and more remote that the US (I drove 1,050 miles in Australia through the desert without seeing a vehicle or person, in the US you can’t get more than 100 miles from McDonald’s) but Australian’s work together and don’t have this “ fiercely independent “ nonsense that keeps everyone at each others throats.

Francis Fukuyama is now arguing that the US in now a substantiantively lower trust society than it was in 1995 when he published his second book "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity."

>In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.

>Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you.

https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-world-simply-does-not...

Most all of that old rail was done by private companies seeking to make a profit. Just like Japan. Look at nyc subway building rates after it was publicly owned. Almost zero expansion. Contractions even.