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Why does it cost 37 cents to make Japan’s bullet trains run on time

Petty. Embellishment. Absurdity. There are many words that have been applied to legal clash focuses on an unnamed bullet train driver who arrives at a warehouse in western Japan overdue and his employer receives 43 yen ($0.37) from his salary.

However, the word that feels unclear in all of this is “bargain”.

Because of this case, fierce fighting on the narrowest of financial battlefields, teetering on the brink of overcapacity and revealing insights into the modern Japanese workplace, have also provided grant the country an unusually precise price for one of the great invisible nations.

That ¥ 43 – both miserable and miserable – is a measurable sign of negligence in a segment of the transportation industry that runs on absolute precision. In those respects, ¥43 has emerged as a small molecular cost for Japan to have a high-speed rail network whose punctuality and frequency make the world jealous.

The incident, related to which has been hotly debated in recent weeks, stems from an incident that took place last June, and (some argue critically, others say it’s indisputable). ) will not cause any inconvenience to any passengers.

A driver of the West Japan Railway Company (JR West), whose job that day was to take an empty train from the platform to the depot, realized that he was waiting for the wrong station. When he sensed the crisis, it took him a minute to race to the correct platform, and the delayed train transfer caused the entry to be another minute late before reaching the depot.

JR West, which operated 378 bullet train trains a day in fiscal 2020 with an average delay of 12 seconds for the year, withheld ¥85 from the driver’s salary to pay for the two minutes that, from the company’s perspective, , he’s not technically working. The driver, citing human error and arguing that he was never absent from work, complained to the local labor standards office and found the fine reduced to 43 per minute not working he was running between platforms and adjusting for his alleged error.

But the driver, still dissatisfied, is suing JR West not only for 43 but also for an additional 13 yen overtime and a heavier (though arguably rather modest) 2.2 million for the mental torment of the whole incident.

Many features of the story stand out. It is worth noting that, in an underground work culture that expects (or bullies) many people to work unpaid “service” overtime, JR West has chosen to measure work, or its absence, by the minute. Can the rest of the Japanese company decide what to do if a prolonged printer jam occurs or an elevator trip to the wrong floor is judged and penalized for downtime? And if the assessed minutes are large enough to be the units of the penalty, why are they still considered so small as the unit of the overtime bonus?

What’s far more interesting is that, despite driver protests and online howls of corporate cruelty, the question is why JR West would handle a mistake with such a modest punishment. so. The truth is that the driver accused of operating a vehicle built to run at 320km/h and on schedule made a mistake. This mistake happens without serious consequences but is made in an area where, obviously, others may not.

If JR West were revealed to have kept its employees error-free with an ironclad penalty system – like a month’s salary for an incident like this, for example – we could conclude that punctuality is outstanding. The sound is built on a fear mode. That regime could have survived well, but this incident shows that it needs only the smallest punishments to inflict the appropriate level of terror.

That leads to a harder problem to encourage – possibly explained by the fact that, in the land of robot makers, JR West (jointly with its counterparts in central and eastern Japan) consistently ranks highly among Japan’s most desired employers for school and university graduates. There is a feeling that the Japanese railway companies have long since turned that desire into obsessive perfectionism among their staff.

Over the past few weeks, railway companies have been able to insist that employees should feel grateful to work for them. Last week, JR East tested an autonomous high-speed train on commercial tracks, and it was deemed “nearly on par” with humans.

All of which might explain how the ¥43 fine ensures that the average annual tardy is measured in seconds. The driver’s loud outcry shows that microfinance sanctions – perhaps with some existential threat of being replaced by robots – are quietly doing the trick.

leo.lewis@ft.com

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