Il Giappone su un treno verso il Futuro: Ferrovie, Urban Humanities e Semiotica

The thesis proposes an analysis of the impact of railways on society and culture, drawing on Japan as an excellent example. The work is developed from a theoretical framework, supported by a comparative case study, which tries to correlate two different realities. On the one hand, the expansion of the Hokuriku Shinkansen Line to Kanazawa, a city that aims to broaden its influence on tourist flows and attract development opportunities, relying on its historical and cultural relevance. On the other hand, the creation of the new Linear Chūō Shinkansen, a Maglev railway that will link Tokyo to Nagoya, center of the industrial development of Japan's economic empire, home of enterprises, and beating heart of the national rail network. These two examples represent a trend of projects driven by the efforts to change Japan’s socioeconomic decline, and give hope to the over-aging society of one of the most powerful economies of our time. The slow decay of some aspects of the economic layout of Japan is a source of fear and debate that filled news articles, books and research papers for at least twenty years. The over-concentrated power of Tokyo, novel crossroad of the financial world, is gradually kneeling under the weight of economic crises and natural disasters. Accordingly, the rise of China through its opening up strategy, advantaged by its aggressiveness on a market that winks at its “Compitalism”, has become the harbinger of a new-globalization, and is partly responsible for the call to arms of politicians, economists, city planners and scholars of various nature that try to revive Japan. One of the prominent answers to the bleak period of the country, known as the “lost score”, is the decentralization of power and resources from Tokyo, and the revitalization of peripheral realities. As such, this is the main theme of this research, and as it is expounded, decentralization has the purpose of creating a new drive toward a more productive, equal and advanced society. The leading role of railways in the proposed analysis, as a symbol of the technological innovation that tries to rise once again the socioeconomic body of contemporary Japan, sparks from the assumption that technology is to be considered as a social product. This premise, further expounded later, is the cornerstone of the methodology of this research. The structure of the thesis is subdivided in two parts. At the beginning we identify how railways interweave with society in Japan. This is dealt with two different approaches. The first one, set forth in the first chapter, analyzes from the origins of rail networks how trains build up elements of a social structure in Japanese culture. Thereafter, in the second chapter, there will be a brief overview on the evolution of Shinkansen technology, the first high speed train, contemporary icon of Japanese railways, companion of the economic miracle and its fall, presenting the socioeconomic aspects that revolve around the “infrastructure-investment theory”, which is supported in this research. The presented theoretical framework, in this specific context, considers new rail technologies as a tool that can cure Japan's economy. In the second part, we can find the main body of the research, the comparative case study, that will compare two different realities of the Chūbu region, both in the context of a decentralization that goes toward the creation of a megaregion.