The Tokaido Shinkansen is a cash cow. That and they're probably using their consistently shrinking existing debt as a means of securing loans of some sort. iirc they refused open government money though.
As shit as Japan's economy is, the 2 biggest railways don't look like they're going anywhere but slowly upwards any time soon.

The technology itself isn't too new though. They've just been holding along until they were confident enough to push forward. It's mostly the punching through faultlines underneath mountains part. But they have confidence in what they're doing and the large amount of in house operation is keeping the cost lower than it could be. Also bearing in mind that it won't hit Osaka until 2045.

>>132447

>they refused open government money though.

This is another thing I don't get. If JR Central refuses government money then why is Abe running around telling everyone that Japan will pay to build a maglev in their back yard? Does the Japanese government still directly 'own' some components of the SCMaglev project? And if the technology is fairly mature then why is no one biting? I would have thought that at least one of the denser East Asian or BRIC states would have bit the bullet and committed to building an SCMaglev line.

>>132448
It's relatively proprietary and completely incompatible with existing infrastructure in every way possible. Same way nobody wants to buy Transrapid despite it being around since the 1970s.

As for selling abroad, it's both tactical and because the companies and government are comfortably in bed with each other in some way or another. The idea being using it to promote ties and feed money. More on the former, the idea is that they sell the maglev first, then use conventional HSR as a "discount option".

>Oh that's too expensive? Why not buy this cheaper product from us instead and save $XX billion?

But in practice, nobody's actually going to buy it any time soon unless they build a fully fledged line in Japan to demonstrate it first. Never mind the cost. Then the same could be said for the Shinkansen. They (JR, as opposed to the train manufacturers) want to sell the Shinkansen as a whole package of both rolling stock and infrastructure because the trains are widebody. In the end, the closest they got to doing that was THSR, but really the non Shinkansen parts like signalling were due to the Eurotrain conflict.
The financing part? The Japanese government hardly has any wealth to loan from its own pockets. JR is owned by various banks and they're more than likely the actual source of money by proxy.

Also, Black Thunder is abe's guilty pleasure. Gotta show that austerity in some way!

>>132444
I just want to say that Maglev is friggin' ugly.

>>132461
Not ugly, just different.