Free high school education is Nippon Ishin no Kai’s signature policy, and party co-leader Seiji Maehara is pushing for it hard in budget committee hearings. Though the effort pits him against Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, the political rivals are actually on good terms with each other personally, thanks to a shared love — and deep knowledge — of trains.
“Maehara-san and I take various trains together. We're not trying to make trains that just run aimlessly. We want to make trains that people want to ride,” Ishiba said while sharing a train to Kyoto's Mount Hiei together with Maehara in 2020.
Ishiba, who was then considered an outsider in the Liberal Democratic Party, was offering his views on how to make Kyoto trains more attractive to tourists. He said he liked Kyoto’s introduction of a nihonshu train to bring more people on board. Maehara, then a member of the Democratic Party for the People, is from Kyoto and represents a district there.
In 2022, the two met in a train-themed restaurant to discuss their longtime love affairs with locomotives, reminiscing in detail about the types of trains they had ridden in the past, including long-ago bullet trains with dining cars.
They also touched on the future of trains in regional Japan, including plans to extend the Hokkaido Shinkansen to Sapporo and the Hokuriku Shinkansen to Osaka via Kyoto.
However, when asked about the prospects of a new San’in Shinkansen that would run along the Sea of Japan coast through his home prefecture of Tottori, Ishiba replied that, given future demographic projections, it was more important to be realistic rather than romantic about such a plan.
“A San’in Shinkansen would probably open in the 22nd century. By then, the population of the San’in region (mostly Tottori and Shimane prefectures) is expected to be half of what it is now. What’s the point of having a San’in Shinkansen that runs at a speed of 300 kilometers per hour?” Ishiba said.
Currently, Tottori and Shimane are two of the country's prefectures with the lowest populations.
Ishiba, instead, proposed a slower train for the region that could run at about 180 kph and easily switch to other local lines where trains run at about 130 kph.
During their 2022 discussion, Maehara, a former transport minister, acknowledged the need for cost-effectiveness but also stressed that it shouldn’t be the only factor in determining whether to build new train lines or not.
“It is easy to say, ‘The population will decrease,’ or ‘We don't have the money, so we can’t build it.’
“But politics is about giving people dreams, and a railroad is something that makes people dream,” Maehara said. He added that if people believed it was necessary, they also had to be prepared to assume the cost burden though.
The two party chiefs' common interest in trains was a factor in Maehara being chosen as co-leader in early December after former leader Nobuyuki Baba stepped down. This came after only two months of him joining the party.
The shared passion could play a background role in keeping the LDP and Nippon Ishin's parliamentary negotiations over free high school education on track, and ensure the ruling party continues to chug along toward securing the opposition votes it needs to pass the fiscal 2025 budget.
The head of the LDP's junior coalition partner, Komeito, is also a densha otaku. On his website, Tetsuo Saito, who assumed leadership of Komeito in November, lists his hobby as “a self-professed train enthusiast.” Like Maehara, Saito has a good grasp of Japan’s train policy.
This could benefit the LDP at a time when it is having more differences with its junior partner over issues such as Japan's participation as an observer in a conference seeking to ban nuclear weapons — Komeito is in favor of this while the LDP is not.
Saito has called on Ishiba to show leadership in reaching agreements with not only Komeito, but also opposition parties such as Nippon Ishin and the Democratic Party for the People.
With the budget needing to be passed by both houses of parliament before the end of March, Ishiba now needs as many leaders on board his political train as possible — and quickly — regardless of whether they share his personal passion for the real thing.
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