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We're leaving Tokyo - only for a couple of days though, so don't worry.
Plus, we're going to have some fun on the road as well.
We're going to Osaka, and to get there
we'll be taking the famous Shinkansen - a Japanese high-speed train.
We're at the Tokyo Station right now.
It's huge, there are 19 platforms just for the Japanese Rail
and 20 underground lines on top of that.
For people working rail jobs in Japan
becoming a Shinkansen driver is the biggest professional honor you could imagine,
You need to have an experience of at least 7 years driving different trains to even apply for this job,
so yeah, if you're driving one of those things - my friend, you are the man.
You can see our train already on the righ-hand sight,
we can't board it just yet, but we've got to move towards our carriage.
It'll be number 16 - this one here is 7.
Those trains are 16 passenger cars long each,
meaning they have capacity to carry over a thousand people, about thirteen hundred I think.
Here we have something peculiar, the asparagus-wrapped-in-bacon flavoured sticks.
The Tokyo-Osaka rail connection is the busiest one in the world
as pretty much everything here.
No need to worry if you miss your train
there's a dozen of them departing every hour.
* disclaimer: at least during peak hours
We made it safely to our allocated seats in passenger car number 16.
As you can see it's pretty spacious.
Fold up tables, for eating or procrastinating with your laptop purposes.
Some sort of hanger, a window blind...
It's quite comfy here.
Shocking news: we left on time.
Here, if your train arrives 2 minutes late
- I think it's even less with Shinkansen, about a minute -
they're considered as not arriving on time.
And when that's the case, you can come up to one of those
like, train station staff guys, and ask them to give you an official form
confirming that your train was, indeed, late.
So if you were to be late for work because of that, you've got a legit proof it wasn't your fault.
Taking the Shinkansen we could not forget about something called bento
(there will be a separate video on that topic)
The Shinkansen system, because it's so fast, efficient and well-timed
- and it was the same case with underground in Tokyo, being as efficient as it is, it's literally shrinking the distance -
- it's the same with Japanese train system, connecting faraway cities
in such an orderly way, that you can easily commute between them on a daily basis.
It's not a problem to hop on a train in Tokyo just to visit your friends in Hiroshima, for instance.
Train fare between Tokyo and Osaka is between 10,000 to 14,000 yen
depending on the train we're taking, or if the seats are allocated or not,
But for the tourists travelling through Japan there's this thing - Japan Rail Pass
it's a special ticket that covers one, two or three weeks of travel
It costs about 300$ for a week,
and the cool thing about it is that it works on all the trains operating on JR, the Japanese Railway
And it also works with Shinkansens,
so even when you only travel three times on a week-long pass, you're already saving money.
An easy calculation: if you were to travel across the Japan for, say 2 straight weeks
if you buy this train pass you'll be saving ridiculous amounts of money.
Such a good deal.
It doesn't make sense to travel by car here,
takes longer, is more expensive and more of a pain as well.
People here, even wealthy people, usually take the train instead.
By the way, there seems to be a huge sense of national pride about those... mechanical monsters.
Shinkansens that is.
Even at the stations, the pictures, the very distinctive design of those vehicles
is displayed everywhere, you can tell it's considered a treasure.
I mean, why wouldn't it be.
With the first routes being established back in the 1960's, they were the first high-speed trains in the world.
It can go as fast as 200mph!
The distance between Tokyo and Osaka is about 185 miles,
it'll take us around 3 hours, since we took a slower one
stopping at the stations in between.
So that's the one we took, it's called Hikari.
There's also Nozomi, the fastest one - only stops at the main stations.
Shinkansens are not the fastest trains in the world anymore
for instance French TGV is currently faster.
However, the Japanese have got another strong card to play
having started construction on a new line connecting Tokyo and Osaka
It won't be Shinkansen this time, but Maglev, utilizing electromagnetic power.
Travelling at the speed of over 310mph...
And it's not only going to be much, much faster,
but they came up with this clever little plan
to dig a tunnel through all those inconvenient mountains on the way,
cutting the distance between the cities by 60 miles.
So when the construction is complete - although that's going to take another 20 years or so
anyway, when it's done, the journey between Tokyo and Osaka will be less than 2 hours long.
I've just got to say that, just... Wow.
This has really impressed me.
And it's not usually my kind of thing, I'm not much of a train buff so to speak
but, man, when I saw them in action. The pure scale of it.
Sick.
A video a day keeps the doctor away.