Sinobyte: China and technology

The key railway artery in Japan, the Shinkansen or "bullet train" line between Tokyo and Osaka, will introduce Wi-Fi by March 2009, Japan Railways announced.

These trains are already incredibly comfortable, primarily because they are clean and quiet, and they usually deliver you to a key central location in each city. Another perk is the on-platform food vendors who sell totally passable box lunches, sometimes including sushi, without much of a mark-up.

The main drawback to these trains is they're not cheap. And while the JR announcement (in Japanese) doesn't mention whether there will be a charge, I'm guessing they'd brag if it were free, and free Wi-Fi is pretty rare in Japan, at least compared to Chinese and U.S. cities, where coffee shops rarely have the infrastructure for paid connections.

The service is to offer up to 2 megabit connections, and will be built in cooperation with NTT, Japan's massive, partially government-owned telecom.

I can't wait to be in Japan and rich enough to tick off the minutes at high speeds online. Until then, riders will have to search for ambient signals at station stops to send and receive e-mails, something I've found works pretty well on downtown Tokyo JR trains, but can be much harder on the Shinkansen.

Via Ajiajin, and thanks Hose.

On the train in Japan, "green" does not refer to the environment. Nor to the color of money, as the extreme amounts necessary to buy "green" tickets there are colored in the generally neutral tones of 10,000 yen bills. Soon there will be "super-green" to take even more of your hard-earned gray.

East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) will introduce super-first class cars on a new extension to its bullet train routes in 2010. The luxuries, according to the Japanese paper Mainichi Shimbun, are to exceed the already comfy-looking green cars on the tracks.

The newer trains will also have a new maximum speed of 320kph (199mph). After a two-week trip enjoying the all-country JR train pass (which cost me, but was worth it), I wonder who could possibly need a more luxurious train than the already clean, orderly, and quiet cars I had on even the less expensive Hikari trains.

Then again, who pays for first class on Virgin Air?

I was wandering the Loft department store at Shinsaibashi in Osaka, Japan, last week when I found a display surrounding this video. Give it a watch and see if you can tell what it's advertising...

$16 pens at Osaka's Shinsaibashi branch of Loft.

(Credit: Sinobyte)

Well, did you get it? From the Pen Spinning Association Japan comes the Penz'Gear line of sticks to spin artfully in your fingers, complete with an instructional DVD to teach you techniques for the following techniques: Normal, Reverse, FingerPass, BackAround, Harmonic, and Tornado.

You're not going to catch me saying that this proves "the Japanese" are weird. On the contrary, I was the only one paying attention to this display in a very busy store. It is fun, however, to think about the folks who made the video and whatever process of retail selection (or payoffs) that might have given it this prominence.

I can only hope that this post brings out a subculture of people who are better at playing with pens than I am to explain to me how a properly weighted pen is essential to the art. As for me, I'm back to doodling.

Vacationing in Japan this week I accidentally rode on the world's first diesel-electric hybrid train in commercial service: The Kiha E200 running on the East Japan Railway's Koumi Line. Aside from being a new train, introduced in 2007, it seemed like any other, but the photographers camped out for a shot along the mountainous route told otherwise.

JR East's Kiha E200 hybrid train

(Credit: Sinobyte)

The train is a working prototype in use since July 2007 with the aim of gathering data for eventual mass production. Like a hybrid car, the diesel-powered engine is used during acceleration and the electric motor kicks in to maintain speed while collecting energy during braking.

As you can see in this YouTube video, the ride is smooth and quiet, and each train also includes a data screen near the bathrooms (that I didn't notice, since I'd gone at the station). The Koumi Line, according to the video caption (and Wikipedia Japan), is Japan's highest altitude train line at 1,375 meters, and it has spectacular views of the southern mountain range on the main Japanese island of Honshu, including Mt. Fuji. Developing highly efficient train transport will turn green mass transit even greener. Let's hope the test runs work out and other train companies get on board. Now, for the globally mobile, can I get a hybrid jumbo jet over here?

The existing bandwidth between Asia and North America is crowded. Following FCC approval of a U.S.-China link last month, Google and five other companies have announced a Japan-U.S. link to be completed in early 2010.

The $300 million fiber-optic cable will stretch approximately 10,000 km (6,214 miles) under the Pacific. "Google's partners in the consortium, dubbed Unity, comprises Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and Singapore Telecommunications," Yahoo News reported.

Internet users in East Asia are familiar with sometimes sluggish speeds on transpacific transmissions. In my experience, connections are for some reason faster in Beijing than in Shanghai, but everywhere I've gone in China there's been some lag. (Speeds in Tokyo were very fast when I was there in late 2004 and 2005.)

The previously announced cable, dubbed the Trans-Pacific Express, is scheduled to be partially operational before the Beijing Olympics begin on August 8. It will be the first direct connection between the United States and China.

[h/t: Kaiser]