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.

“Why Japan has such good railways”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815395

Here's another slightly related topic I wrote on a while ago. Not my best writing but I'm fascinated by this kind of history -

https://culturecompiled.com/p/strong-state-capacity-is-a-pro...