As a point of interest, I'll mention Tōgeshita station. A station in the middle of nowhere. Sometimes, a station would exist purely because that's where trains needed to pass one another. Tōgeshita was one of those.
Whenever I passed the station, it was strange, almost a creepy feeling. I think it could have been a great plot for a Japanese horror movie, something in a "Blair Witch Project" style... the old one car train slows to a stop. The door opens, no one dares get off there. Except you, with your portable camera, a cavalier exit from the train. The conductor casts you a side eye with a dead pan 'arigato goziamasu.' The creaky diesel train car slowly pulls away and you're left there stranded for the next few hours until the return train comes around. I wonder what I'll find in the forest just beyond those trees....
- Extremely low contrast typography
- Serif typefaces with body in sans serif
- Black + red/maroon color combo
- tiny, tiny typefaces
I also want to see if we have this information for Switzerland.
I noticed that most of the track was laid down in the 1920s and 1930s. Any ideas why?
"[Error] SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds"
Application error: a client-side exception has occurred while loading jivx.com (see the browser console for more information).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_closed_railway_lines_i...
Not sure if this was created with LLM help, but I suspect so? Not because the page is buggy (it is, though, crashed on my iPhone), but because they make data visualization so accessible. This type of presentation used to take days of work; now, if you find a unique piece of data, it's only a few hours of work to create a beautiful animated visualization.
I do think this would be more compelling with some additional context or data integration. Zoom, the ability to click and see the full details about each station, which company (my guess is that it's all JR?).
Ok final note: the intersection of Japan and trains is basically HN crack, and I love it.
They were originally built for military logistics to move troops, guns, and supplies around the country.
Lots of examples on x and on reddit of similarly styled apps made with the help of opus.
Maybe you meant Safari is buggy and crashed? I can easily get Safari to crash by zooming in and out a bit. Reports to Apple go ignored...
Meanwhile, there's more people in the city of Tokyo than nearly the whole continent of Australia :) Japan's population is concentrating into a handful of big cities. I mean, who wants to live in a small town when there are endless options for shopping, restaurants, etc in the big city? It's not like in the US where big cities are dangerous. There's not much of a positive tradeoff for choosing small town life in Japan. Maybe you think you want to be a big land baron as all Americans seem to desire, but then you find out that undeveloped land in Japan is heavily taxed with property taxes. If you are not doing something very productive with Japan's limited land, Japan wants you to move your arse off it and let someone with a plan work it. Anyway, as rural areas empty out, the local rail lines close. JR is however building lots of bullet trains to connect the big cities. There is a new bullet train line opening soon between Shin-Hakodate and Sapporo for instance. It will probably be extended from Sapporo up to Asahikawa after that.
I don't understand why people downvote your comment. It isn't like you're forcing them to have babies and do something about the world by stating the fact about Japan's decline
I've done each of the 3 for side projects below to pretty good effects.
> This website will be run by IE6 and Windows Mobile 6, so use no dependencies, semantic HTML, a 3-pane layout, and only use JS (es3!) where absolutely necessary (and where necessary, put the script at the end of the body).
When I'm not specifically targeting support for retrocomputers I do something like this, then iterate until it looks right.
> Go look at Dokuwiki, django defaults, and common web 2.0 color schemes, use those for UI inspiration. Keep a 3-pane desktop-first layout, but enable mobile responsiveness with media queries. Use semantic html5 and prefer older boring solutions like surgical jquery or htmx-style islands of interactivity where needed, otherwise do not bring in dependencies without my say so.
And finally, if I'm doing a web app that I'm vibing out with the web stack because I want it one-shotted and not trying to do a good rust core with strong ports/adapters API surface for web or native client callers, I do something like this:
> This is a local web app, the frontend, backend, and desktop are all on the same machine. Use naive and simple development patterns that you document the style as you go, pick a boring web framework and use it idiomatically, but remember that some tricks that are intended to keep network round trips down are not as necessary because network penalties are not as bad as real traffic.
Granted, the above I don't like as much, but it does produce more 'modern' looking sites by default.
https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/blob/main/plugins/...
But what I find works best is to point Claude at a design system documentation website (your own company's or another public source) and tell it to use that design style. It usually does OK, and the results are usually much more in line with that style and not as Claude-y.
I spent last summer in Toyohashi in Aichi Prefecture; I was a visiting researcher at Toyohashi University of Technology. While Toyohashi is not a small town by any means, it is far smaller than Tokyo. I found it nice for day-to-day living. Not crowded at all, and I found the bus service to be good; not world class, but comprehensive and ran frequently enough to be useful. It had plenty of grocery stores and department stores for everyday living. If I needed something unavailable in Toyohashi, Nagoya wasn’t too far away, and if I needed to be in Tokyo, I could get there in 90 minutes on a Hikari train on the Tokaido Shinkansen. I’d do it again; in fact, I’m going back to Toyohashi in a few weeks for another monthly stay.
Japan's system is almost entirely private and is best in the world by nearly every metric. We (the people) do know owe support to depopulated areas. If you choose to live in the boonies the government is not required to build roads, sewers, power to your place.
Japan's private system works because the government mostly got out of the way and let them build and run complementary businesses. Most other countries either make them public, and then they eventually are underfunded and are prevented from expanding, OR, if they do let them be private they find some other way to cripple them like by disallowing other interests.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-japan-has-such-good-rai...
> SecurityError: Attempt to use history.replaceState() more than 100 times per 10 seconds
If it has anything to do with babies, you have your cause and effect reversed. Autos are a cause of declining birth rates...
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/731812
So a reduction in trains causes a reduction in birth rates, not the other way around.
Haha, my experience is people buying cars feel poorer, not wealthier. Car payments, maintenance, insurance, taxes, fuel... and as soon as you finish paying it off, it's basically EOL. Time to start paying for the next one.
I would suggest checking out this project for a boost in design skills:
The average age of a car on the road in the US today is now more than 11 years. The average new car loan is just less than 6 years. Beyond that, it's all just a different set of trade-offs. Aside from living somewhere truly dense with fantastic public transit and only going places reachable by said transit, owning a car means less time spent on transportation, and infinitely more flexibility on where you go. Lots of people prefer the lifestyle. Even in Europe cars remain quite popular.
I personally find driving very stressful and wasteful of my time so I hate cars. Even when I had one from work. In fact that was worse because they only give you a work car because the job involves loads of driving. Even though the tax man wanted lots of money for something I didn't even want in the first place.
Because joke’s on you, my browser gets so slow that I know when a page is a SPA, even when it uses History API.
The thing is in the US cars are traditionally a huge part of the economic engine. So they get preference. You see something similar in Germany though not nearly as bad.
Eki · 駅
On a June morning in 1872, Japan’s entire railway was a single line between Shimbashi and Yokohama. A century and a half later the map carries more than nine thousand stations. Press play and watch the country fill in — one opening at a time.
9,321
Stations mapped
154
Years
1872
First line
Meiji 明治Taishō 大正Shōwa 昭和Heisei 平成Reiwa 令和
18726 of 9,321 stations open
1872 — Japan's first railway. Shimbashi to Yokohama opens — 29 km of British-built track. The country's entire network begins as a single line.
Play with the map
Pick a kanji and the map repaints: every station carrying that character lights up. Japan’s rail map is secretly a map of rice paddies, rivers and mountains.
How to read it
Every dot is a railway station, placed where it stands and lit at the year it opened. Drag the slider or press play to move through time; the counter and the chart below the map keep pace. The tall bars are the building booms — and the shape of Japan emerges not from a coastline but from the stations themselves.
The boom
The first decades are sparse: a spine up the Pacific coast, a few lines around Osaka. Then, between roughly 1900 and 1930, the map erupts. Private railways race the state to every valley and suburb, and Tokyo and Osaka thicken into the dense knots you can still see today. By the time the boom cools, the skeleton of modern Japan is already on the ground.
The first line
1872
Shimbashi to Yokohama — the whole network begins as 29 km of track
Busiest year
1929
272 stations opened in a single year
On the map today
9,321
stations with a recorded opening date, 1872 to the present
Source & method
Stations, coordinates and opening dates come from Wikidata (CC0): every item that is a railway station in Japan with coordinates and a date of official opening, taking the earliest opening year per station. A station blooms at its opening year and is never removed, so closed and relocated stations remain on the map. Of the source set, 96 stations were left off for a missing or unusable opening date, or coordinates outside Japan. The coastline is a simplified Natural Earth outline.
Download the data (CSV, 9,321 stations).
You just watched 150 years of stations appear. These are the words you’d use to ride them today — from the 駅 you start at to the 乗り換え in the middle.
駅えきstation電車でんしゃtrain路線ろせんline / route乗り換えのりかえtransfer切符きっぷticket新幹線しんかんせんbullet train開業かいぎょうopening (of a line)
Learn the vocabulary of the rails →
You just watched Japan’s rail map grow for 150 years — and the kanji riding on it are closer than they look:
駅えきstation電車でんしゃtrain路線ろせんline新幹線しんかんせんbullet train
JIVX turns a fascination like this into real Japanese: short daily sessions of whole sentences, graded the way a teacher would — not flashcards. Free to start, at your own level.