Super Fun Nerd Time, GO!!!

Take a moment to pity Holly, the wife. She has patiently been dragged to all manner of horribly educational places because of me, her husband, under the guise of going someplace nice, like Charleston. She can eat, drink, and see all the nice houses she wants, so long as I get to see the Hunley and Fort Sumter. Don't pity her too much, of course; after all she did have a choice in the husband department and likely thought marrying me was a good idea at some point. Also, I haven't subjected her to some of the really evil ones, like Sloss Furnaces; and on the plus side, Fort Sumter does involve a nice scenic boat ride to get there. My long suffering brother has actually had it worse; Holly just has to put up with me, he had to put up with me and my Dad. At a time he was beginning to think about gurlz and other such things important during your formative years, he instead was being dragged all around the United States visiting innumerable ghost towns, mining museums, and train museums. The first two probably weren't so bad, because they were usually located in scenic mountainous parts of Colorado and he could at least pretend he was there with a pretty lady instead of two dorks talking about mining equipment; but the last...well, there's no way you are going to enjoy a train museum unless you just really like trains...or are a kid, at which point liking trains is kinda automatic. I really like trains, always have; love 'em, in fact. From a very young age steam engines were the pinnacle of human achievement to my eyes. I had model railroads, but to be perfectly honest they weren't enough, they weren't actual steam engines. I like big, noisy, smoke belching locomotives. Period. I was pretty sure Holly had no real opinion about trains, not that she doesn't like them, but an ambivalent attitude towards trains at a train museum very quickly turns to boredom. I had seen this happen to my brother many times. There was no helping it, though, there was one place poor Holly was getting dragged in Kyoto and there was no way in hell I was going to miss it: Umekoji Steam Locomotive Museum.

If there's one thing Japanese history will tell you its that the Japanese are very quick to spot a good idea and get on with it. Trains are no exception. Trains weren't particularly old by the time of the Meiji Restoration, but they had come a long way in the century and a half since the introduction of the first practical working steam engines, ones that weren't laboratory curiosities or nifty toys. Primarily, they were built to replace horses, so it should come as no surprise, therefore, that engines to this day are rated in "horse power". You would think a horse is a fairly cheap thing to have running your machinery, but this is not in fact true. Horses need to be fed, they usually need a person or few to take care of them and make sure they are applying power where, when and how its needed, and in the end you are still relying on something as fickle as a living thing to reliably and continuously provide power. The first engines were built to do the tasks that needed to be repetitively and reliably accomplished, pumping water, blowing air, running a large quantity of other machinery.  Men being men, it wasn't long before someone looked at a steam engine and said, "I bet that would be awesome on wheels", and the locomotive was born. Key to this process was a man named Richard Threvithick, he advocated the use of high pressure steam engines and had a tendency to build an engine for some purpose like operating a mill, but before installing it would throw some wheels on and run it around on a track, or down the road, or to a pub, really. These early engines weren't very efficient and were still compared to horses, even being routinely put up against horses in head to head competitions like races an' such. This may all seem rather pointless and unrelated, and perhaps most of it is, but Richard Threvithick, Father of the Locomotive, is important to our story for one more reason than just that achievement, he had a grandson also named Richard who we will come back to in just a little bit.

In the years immediately following the Restoration, the Meiji government sent citizens, tradesmen and professionals all over the world to learn what they had missed in the years the country was closed. Some were sent to schools all around the globe to learn about modern concepts of science, math and engineering; others were sent as ambassadors to represent Japan's interests and learn about other forms of government; and another group was sent on a mission to visit America and Great Britain and learn about this "industrial revolution" thing everyone was talking about. When they returned, they brought the message that for Japan to be able to compete, or even just survive, in the modern world it would need to move from an agrarian based economy to one built on industry and manufacturing. What was really at stake was an attitude that to be able to achieve a position that could free them from unequal treaties and the danger of foreign pressure and influence, they needed to be seen as a country on par with the West. Modernization was not just a means of improving the nation and the lot of its citizens, but a necessity for preserving the nation as an independent institution. This is why the leadership dove into the process with such zeal, and why those underlying fears allowed the process to be easily hijacked in later years by Nationalists and Militarists. That future would have been irrelevant, of course, if the Japanese hadn't been able to so dramatically change the nation's course in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration. What is amazing is how quickly they pulled it off, and the railroads are a great example of how well they did. In 1868 there was nary an inch of rail in Japan, yet the first scheduled rail service began just 4 years later. Through fits and starts and the work of public and private rail companies by 1889 there was 1600km of lines, 3000km by 1893, and 7600km by 1906. At first, everything was imported: engines, rolling stock, rail, everything. This even extended to the engineers, conductors, and machinists to run and maintain it all. These people were not brought over to stay, they were brought over and paid well to teach. Japan would not be contracting out its own industrial revolution, that would have put them at the mercy of the foreign specialists. Instead, the Nation would move into the future with the help of those that had already learned the hard lessons about the newest technologies and then the Japanese would step in as they absorbed those lessons. Many things the Japanese trainees picked up remarkably quick, but locomotives were, at the time, some of the most complicated machines in the world and required far more practical and precision engineering skill than a train carriage. Despite the fact that large scale mechanical engineering did not exist in the country just a couple decades earlier, nor had any Japanese so much as seen the equipment needed to make such things, even that hurdle was rapidly surpassed. The first tentative steps involved modifying imported engines for different tasks, but eventually attempts were made to build an entire homegrown locomotive. In the "its a small world" department, this is where the grandson of Richard Threvithick (Father of the Locomotive, as you may have heard) re-enters our tale. Of the many Britons that went to Japan under contract was Richard F. Threvithick, and it was under his supervision at the Kobe Works that the first Japanese engine was built in 1893. That first engine used castings and components imported from England, but soon entire engines were being built under the supervision of the grandson of the inventor of the locomotive. Hell, get the best I say. Engine technology would grow by leaps and bounds from that point, the Japanese learning about the latest advances from America, Germany and England and then building their own engines, and it wasn't very long before they were looking very modern indeed.

Umekoji was opened in 1972 as part of a celebration to mark 100 years of Japanese railroading. Located not far from modern Kyoto Station, it consists of two main buildings. The museum proper, the old Nijo Station, was built in 1904 and moved to Umekoji in the late 90's. Its chockablock full of stuff, a good proper lot aimed at kids, as it should be, but there's a good selection of live steam models and railroad brickabrak like a coal shoveling trainer, which woulda been fun to get Holly to try (its also got a decent gift shop where I got to buy my very own N-scale D-51). The other main building is the old roundhouse (or "Fan Shaped Locomotive House", as the brochure calls it) which houses all the museum's engines as well as a large variety of big kid nerd artifacts from the heyday of steam, like sectioned displays of engine components and the patterns used to cast them. Cool stuff. There's also usually an engine under steam that you can take for a short ride, and as soon as we arrived were informed it was about to depart so we should go get tickets.

As train rides go, well, its sorta short which isn't too surprising considering its located in the middle of a modern train yard. Pretty much, the engine reverses a couple hundred yards down a piece of track, stops, there's a short talk in Japanese about rail history which for some reason inexplicably ends with the theme song to One Piece, then its back to the station. But hell, whaddya expect for 200円.

Anyway, that's just fine. I would prefer if it really got to stretch its legs, but an engine under steam is an engine under steam, and there is just nothing that sounds, feels and smells like it. I'm normally pretty reserved and considerate in museums, but when I get around trains I get a stoopid grin and revert to my 12 year old self; snickering and getting too close to exhibits, steaming up the glass display cases and getting scolded by museum staff. Except not here, Umekoji is absolutely top notch and is staffed by friendly and enthusiastic people who seem to get a kick out of anyone who has a genuine interest in trains.

Honestly, to me it was a bit unexpected that Umekoji exists at all. In a country that puts such an emphasis in modernity and progress, it actually came as a bit of a surprise to find out there's a fairly dedicated and established rail history crowd, and there are actually a decent few museums and tourist lines running old engines. A large part of this is due to that fact that a good number of these engines ran well into the 60's and made it to the era of a growing awareness of the importance of preservation.

And truly, aside from my love of steam engines, there's good reason to preserve these archaic contraptions and what they accomplished, especially in Japan. In the times before the Restoration most transport was along the coast, by sea. Despite being master builders in wood, the Japanese were never very good at building roads or bridges, so given Japan's topography overland transport of people or goods was difficult at best. This was fine in the late Tokugawa Shogunate, because the government didn't want too many people moving around on their own and they were more than happy to control the coming and going of trade as much as possible. After the Restoration, however, the trains changed all that. With the coming of the knowledge and ability to build the railways, engines and cars, came an ability for people to move around, for whatever reason. This was radical stuff. For centuries you and your family would be born and die in the same place. Going somewhere was a concept very few people got to experience. The trains also changed and improved life in myriad other ways. In bad times the trains eased food shortages, because you could easily move resources from places with surplus to places stricken. In good times it meant you could ship your surplus to a greater variety of markets and buyers, and a greater variety of goods and materials were available to you. It meant labor for the new modernizing society could be more fluid, people could move off the farms to the cities to work in shipyards and factories or move from one city to another to find a better job or education. In many ways the railroads were a greater unifier of Japan than the Shogun or Emperor, allowing the spread of a common Japanese experience in a way never before possible. Not that it has been all smooth sailing and glamorous travel, of course. There were fights over nationalizing the railroads, the role of private "light" railroads, and of course the intense disruptions caused by the Second World War. Even when back on a solid post war footing, led by Allied reconstruction and a return to quasi-public control the railroads have had a challenging time in a changing world. Cars and planes have been a source of competition to Japanese rail just as they were here in the States, but not quite to the extent that they drove the trains to extinction, as happened to virtually all rail traffic outside of our city commuter lines. But even as the country moves through another time of transition, the trains still suit Japan, and are something the Japanese can rightfully be proud of. As much as any of the other symbols and artifacts of Japan's continuous forward progress, the trains are perhaps the only ones you can still use and not just venerate. That's why the rail heritage is important; its a chance, perhaps, to pause and take a look back at the breakneck pace of change over the past 150 years, its relevance underscored by the Shinkansen that rolls by every few minutes. I ended up with a couple other guys watching the museum crew retubing a boiler. Holly was nowhere to be seen, the others guys seemed to have abandoned their families to the AC'd museum as well. To a certain extent there was no point watching a boiler being re-tubed, its a lengthy process and just one of many steps to getting an engine restored. Its not like the crew was gonna wrap it up and take the engine for a spin in the next 20 minutes. It was more about watching these guys who get to do this all day, saving something important, playing with trains. Its the ultimate little kids dream. It was mine. Perhaps there was a touch of envy watching those guys, and that's okay, I'm still just a little kid when I get around trains. To look to my side and see a couple Japanese guys like me just intently watching, probably wishing that could be their job, too...that in itself was worth the trip to Umekoji; but to be a grown-up, and watch actual little kids run around these big wheezing dinosaurs and remember what it was like when I saw my first train, that was almost worth a trip half way around the globe, right there.