On October 1, 1964, a sleek train, white with a blue stripe, pulled out of Tokyo Station on its way to Osaka. Traveling on specially laid tracks, the train reached speeds of over 120 miles per hour. Just over three hours later, it pulled into New Osaka Station. Japan's “bullet train” era had begun.

The image of the bullet train as a technological marvel and harbinger of the future was a powerful one. Indeed, the first trip of the bullet train coincided with the opening of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, which marked Japan's return to the world stage after the horrors of war. In this context, the Japanese government represented the technological achievement of the bullet train as the beginning of a new future for Japan—an economic and technologically powerful country, but a peaceful one. Along with expressways and a new monorail, the bullet train suggested the dawn of a new era for Japanese society writ large, a bright future after the dark valley of the wartime years.

This accounting of the historical significance of the bullet train has become the standard tale. But, as Jessamyn R. Abel argues, the bullet train stood for many things in postwar Japan. In Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train, Abel explores the different, often conflicting “dreams” that Japanese intellectuals, engineers, bureaucrats, artists, and ordinary citizens articulated about high-speed rail. From battles over land use to reimaginings of Japan's twentieth-century history, Abel argues that the historical significance of the bullet train lies primarily in the social and political conflicts that the bullet train created and exposed, rather than in the technological achievement of high-speed rail. Indeed, the technology for high-speed rail had been largely developed by Japan's South Manchuria Railway Company in Japanese-controlled Manchuria in the 1930s. What was new in 1964 was not high speed. It was the question of what high-speed rail could and should do for postwar Japanese society.

Abel approaches the cultural history of the bullet train in five different spatial and temporal frames, which proceed from the most concrete to the most abstract. Chapter 1 explores how local officials and residents in Kyoto fought with Japan National Railways (JNR) over whether and where a bullet train station would be located in Kyoto. Chapter 2 analyzes competing visions of how the bullet train would affect the physical and conceptual “spatial structure” of the Tōkaidō region (the heavily industrialized area on Japan's Pacific Coast between Nagoya and Tokyo). Chapter 3 examines the debate over how the bullet train might alter patterns of urbanization and the distribution of political and cultural power in Japan's postwar “information society.” Chapter 4 explores how commentators used the bullet train to depoliticize the historical connection between the technologies of Japan's wartime and postwar eras. Chapter 5 shows how Japanese officials used the bullet train as a tool for generating “soft power” in their efforts to establish an “equal partnership” with the United States in the 1960s. Throughout, Abel uses local government records, popular media, film, and literature to emphasize how the bullet train served as a stage for debates over the proper function of infrastructure in postwar Japanese society.

Dream Super-Express is at its most compelling when it analyzes cultural discourse in conversation with the facts on the ground. Chapters 1 and 2 are exciting and important contributions to the history of postwar Japan. Abel shows how the concerns of multiple local actors shaped the ultimate route for the bullet train's new tracks and the distribution and precise locations of stations along the way. It is rare that characters such as the mayors of Kyoto and Gifu, local JNR officials, Kyoto city assembly members, and sociologists are given center stage in a history about national infrastructure in Japan. Yet Abel's focus on the process and the competing interests involved allows her to explore some truly original elements of postwar Japan history, such as how government officials used rumor and silence as a political strategy to prevent local protest groups from organizing against specific plans. Likewise, while the historical literature focuses on the role of the electronics and automobile industries in postwar U.S.-Japan trade relations, chapter 5 shows how the success of Japanese rail engineering prompted the U.S. Congress to depart from the general trend of free-trade policy to subject rail technology to protectionist laws. The Mass Transit Act of 1964 required that cities and agencies using federal funds “buy American,” even though Japanese companies were prepared to provide bids for faster, more affordable, and ready-to-use technology.

Overall, Dream Super-Express is a compelling and insightful work that sheds new light on the significance of infrastructure in postwar Japanese history. Given the plethora of actors in the story, I would have liked more information about who actually rode the train and how they imagined its impact on their own lives. But this is a minor issue that does not detract from the book's overarching argument. Dream Super-Express quite impressively achieves its goal of showing the multiple visions of society and history that the bullet train stood for and the concrete conflicts that the train engendered. Well written and approachable, the book is suitable for undergraduate, graduate, and general readers. It will be of interest to anyone who seeks to know more about postwar Japanese history or the history of infrastructure and technology in Japan, or who just likes to read cool histories of cool trains.