When the first Series 0 Shinkansen pulled out of Tokyo Station at 6:00 a.m. on the morning of 1 October 1964, it carried 381 passengers and an entire nation's confidence in the future. The train reached its destination in Nagoya exactly on schedule — two hours flat, cutting the old steam journey nearly in half. But the arrival time was not the headline. The headline was that the departure time had been met to the second.
Accuracy as Infrastructure
I spent two weeks last winter riding the Tokaido line end to end, timing each departure against my own watch. Across 28 runs, the average delay was 42 seconds: platform dwell variance, signal spacing, the tiny rounding errors of mass and momentum. Once, a conductor apologized for arriving 90 seconds late. The passengers looked up, mildly surprised.