Thanks to new shinkansen lines built over the past years, once off-the-beaten-path cities such as Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture, and Otaru, Hokkaido, are having tourism booms, proving high-speed trains can bring more cash to local businesses.
Well aware of this, leaders in Kyoto and Nara prefectures are increasingly engaged in a war of words over where to route the final leg of Japan's latest high-tech train, the maglev, as well as that of the Hokuriku shinkansen.
The current plans have the magnetically levitated train running between Tokyo and Osaka by 2045 or much earlier, slashing travel time to just an hour from the 2½ hours required by the fastest shinkansen.