Nine days before he declared the 1964 Tokyo Olympics open, Emperor Hirohito presided over a ceremony that witnessed the first white-and-blue ‘bullet’ train streaking from the Japanese capital at 210km/h (130mph) past Mount Fuji and on to Osaka in record time. Sprinting along a brand new, dedicated high-speed passenger track, featuring the fewest possible curves and shooting through 67 miles (108km) of tunnel and over 3,000 bridges, this was no one-off exercise to publicise the international games. The Tokaido Shinkansen (-New Trunk Line’) would become not just the world’s fastest and most advanced, but also its most intensely used main line railway. Today, the latest, snake-like, 16-car Shinkansen trains leave Tokyo for Osaka up to every three minutes, each offering comfortable seats for 1,323 passengers and cruising at 270km/h (168mph). From last year, trains on the Tohuku Shinkansen, one of the six high-speed lines opened over the past fifty years, scythe through sections of Japan’s mountainous landscape at 320km/h (199mph). Japan’s renowned bullet trains have made domestic flying all but redundant between major cities. Not only are they very fast, frequent, spotlessly clean and on time to the second, but their carbon footprint is 16% that of cars making the same journeys according to the Japan Railway and Transport review. And since Hirohito waved that first train away from Tokyo in 1964, there have been no fatalities on the network. In 50 years, two trains have been derailed, one during an earthquake in 2004, another in a blizzard last year, yet the Shinkansen’s safety record has remained unimpaired. Shinkansen made every other main line railway seem old-fashioned when the first line opened on 1 October 1964, at the height of Beatlemania and when the fastest British trains could manage 100mph (160km/h) over short sections of upgraded Victorian lines. Japan’s bullet trains – named after the distinctive streamlined nosecones of the first O-series Shinkansen – set the pace for France’s TGVs, Germany’s ICEs and Italy’s Pendolinos, although these were not to appear for many years. Back on track Japan had stolen a march in railway technology that was part and parcel of its remarkable economic and cultural revival during the 20 years following its political and military collapse in 1945. Then the very same Emperor Hirohito who declared Shinkansen and the 1964 Olympics open had addressed the nation over the radio – it was the first time people had heard his voice – to announce, after the dropping of Atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.” Visitors to the 1964 Olympics discovered a re-energised country and a compelling culture, sporting radical new architecture, motorways, motorbikes, cinema, cameras and so much else alongside the spectacular and world-beating trains. Japan became intensely fashionable again, with musicians from Ella Fitzgerald to The Beatles soon on their way to Tokyo. And, yet, these remarkable achievements and world-leading new designs were presented as part of Japan’s venerable and highly distinctive culture. Publicity shots for the Tokaido Shinkansen depicted the mercurial trains fleeting through landscapes adorned by cherry blossom as well as snow-capped peaks. It was a heady and thrilling fusion of old, imperial and new, democratic worlds