I don’t believe – and I’m unhealthily interested by these things – that there’s a more well-ordered, well-run public transportation system on the planet than that of Japan. It’s almost a national obsession.
The Tokyo/Yokohama system – a mixture of public and private operators – is simply the only way to get a greater metropolitan area of 38 million people around with any efficiency. And it works so well partly because the people are so orderly as well.
There’s none of the scrums as doors on trains open that you see in London, Paris or New York. Those waiting to board stand politely aside within lines especially drawn for them, those alighting walk through the middle and are allowed to depart freely before others board.
It’s not some perfect world of course; one of the more distasteful elements is the need for women-only carriages on several lines because of regular sexual assaults.
It would be better surely if the miscreants were identified and punished, but Japan’s deferential habits and overbearing politeness means that no-one wants to rock the boat.
But otherwise Japan’s trains are magnificent, and none more so than the bullet trains or Shinkansen to give them their native name.
These are the hi-tech, high-speed trains that can do local routes – I’ll be commuting on one to and from Scotland’s new camp in Kobe this week – but mainly cut the time distance between the major cities to shreds.
There are the superfast Nozomi trains that the Scotland squad took yesterday and brought them the 330 miles from Tokyo to Kobe in two and a half hours. My rail pass only qualifies me for the slightly less superfast Hikari, which took half an hour longer but was still a fantastic ride.
Riding the Shinkansen is like being in an airliner on the ground, except with considerably better leg room and much better seats. The world races by out the side window almost as if it’s speeded up film.
It has none of occasional jolts of UK train tracks, instead you move smoothly along the Pacific coast, taking in the historic cities of Nagoya, Kyoto and Osaka, past the spendour of Mount Fuji.
Only yesterday Fuji’s peak was shrounded in cloud and you couldn’t see anything. Come on, Japan, you can organise almost anything, why not that?
Hard luck Hamish but good to get Magnus
The loss of Hamish Watson for the Scotland squad is a severe blow. This last year no player – not even Stuart Hogg or Finn Russell – has been more important to Scotland than the Human Pinball, our best ball carrier.
To lose him half an hour into the first game merely compounds what a nightmare Yokohama was. But at least it means that Magnus Bradbury is in the squad.
The squad was lacking a big ball carrier of the traditional sort, to make hard yards and suck in defenders. Bradbury does that well and he can play a fair bit as well.
I think they’ll need him in all of the next three games, including Samoa on Monday. But if the coaching team had wanted Bradbury they’d have picked him originally, so I wouldn’t expect him to play until the Russia game at the earliest.
