Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in East Asian Studies
Episode: Jessamyn Abel, "Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World's First Bullet Train" (Stanford UP, 2022)
Description: Jessamyn Abel’s Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train (Stanford UP, 2022) is a history of Japan’s famous super-express (shinkansen) and “the bullet train imaginary.” In other words, it is both a history of infrastructure and mobility on the one hand, and a cultural and social history of the ways that the train was planned, interpreted, and built up as a symbol of a new Japan both at home and in the world on the other. The bullet train transformed the speed and volume of the flows of people and information across Japan, and became th...