Jul 4, 2018
Thoughts on shinkansen safety
I read one of the news articles on City-Cost this morning, about JR East planning to implement security cameras on shinkansens. This is happening in the wake of the recent knife attack committed by a passenger that ended up taking another passenger's life.
It's something that has been weighing on me since the incident was reported in the media, in fact. My family and I travel on the shinkansen quite a bit. We're fortunate that we have a shinkansen stop right in our small town, which heads to Tokyo in one direction and Niigata City the other way - so it's our lifeline for getting things done in the city, visiting family and friends, and so forth.
The part that scares me is that it's so easy to get on board a shinkansen that has several hundred other people on it, without any checks about what you're carrying on you. And sure, I might be making a mountain out of a molehill - in Japan the actual occurrences of violent acts happening on the shinkansen are thankfully rare. In my mind though, I consider the "what if's" and the fact that if someone did have bad intentions, it would be frighteningly easy for them to get aboard.
I think about airports, and how frustratingly draining some of the security procedures can be, from x-ray scanning your bags to worrying about the amount of liquids you've got packed in your carry on - but I get that the purpose is to keep people safe, and understand the necessity behind it. If I'm up in the air with 300 other people, I want to know that I'm going to get from A to B safely, even if that does mean waiting in extra lines to get stuff scanned. I'm surprised that there aren't more checks for the shinkansen, too - sure, we're not thousands of miles up in the air, but does that minor detail really matter if we're commuting with hundreds of other people at a time?
I don't know how feasible the implementing of airport-like security for the shinkansen would be - the costs, the logistics and such. Some reports I've read have suggested that at Tokyo Station alone, the number of commuters an hour is around 15,000 - 20,000, and those sources stated that as a result there's limits on security measures that can be provided. To me, those commuter numbers should be the exact reason why more security checks should be put in place.
0 Comments