The story
Founded by Government of Japan on Jun 1, 1949, in Tokyo.1
The term Kokuyū Tetsudō "state-owned railway" originally referred to a network of railway lines operated by 17 private companies that were nationalized following the Railway Nationalization Act of 1906 and placed under the control of the Railway Institute. Later, the Ministry of Railways and the Ministry of Transportation and Communications took over control of the network. The ministries used the name Japanese Government Railways (JGR) to refer their network in English. During World War II, many JGR lines were dismantled to supply steel for the war effort.
On June 1, 1949, by a directive of the U.S. General HQ in Tokyo, JGR was reorganized into Japanese National Railways, a state-owned public corporation. JNR enjoyed many successes, including the inauguration of high-speed Shinkansen service along the Tōkaidō Shinkansen line on October 1, 1964. However, JNR was not a state-run corporation; its accounting was independent from the national budget. Rural sections without enough passengers began to press its management, pulling it further and further into debt. In 1983, JNR started to close its unprofitable 83 local lines (the closure continued three years after the privatization).
In fiscal 1980, JNR recorded a deficit of about ¥1 trillion.
By 1987, JNR's debt was over ¥27 trillion ($442 billion at 2021 exchange rates) and the company was spending ¥147 for every ¥100 earned.
Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, an avowed advocate of privatization, strongly supported breaking up JNR and in August 1982 launched the JNR Reform Commission to officially begin the process. By an act of the Diet of Japan, on April 1, 1987, JNR was privatized and divided into seven railway companies, six passenger and one freight, collectively called the Japan Railways Group or JR Group. Long-term liabilities of JNR were taken over by the Japanese National Railway Settlement Corporation. That corporation was subsequently disbanded on October 22, 1998, and its remaining debts were transferred to the national budget's general accounting and then to the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency. By this time the debt has risen to ¥30 trillion ($491 billion in 2021 dollars).
JNR dismissal lawsuit
Many lawsuits and labor commission cases were filed over the decades from the privatization in 1987. Kokuro and the National Railway Locomotive Engineers' Union (Zendoro), both prominent Japanese railway unions, represented a number of the JNR workers.
Lists of workers to be employed by the new organizations were drawn up by JNR and given to the JR companies. There was substantial pressure on union members to leave their unions, and within a year, the membership of the National Railway Workers' Union (Kokuro) fell from 200,000 to 44,000. Workers who had supported the privatization, or those who left Kokuro, were hired at substantially higher rates than Kokuro members.
There was a government pledge that no one would be "thrown out onto the street", and so unhired workers were classified as "needing to be employed" and were transferred to the JNR Settlement Corporation, where they could be assigned for up to three years. Around 7,600 workers were transferred in this way, and around 2,000 of them were hired by JR firms, and 3,000 found work elsewhere. Mitomu Yamaguchi, a former JNR employee from Tosu in Saga prefecture who had been transferred to the JNR Settlement Corporation, later stated that their help in finding work consisted of giving him photocopies of recruitment ads from newspapers. This period ended in April 1990, and 1,047 were dismissed. This included 64 Zendoro members and 966 Kokuro members.
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Twenty-three years after the original privatization, on June 28, 2010, the Supreme Court settled the dispute between the workers and the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency, the successor body to the JNR Settlement Corporation. The agency said it would pay 20 billion yen, approximately 22 million yen per worker, to 904 plaintiffs. However, as the workers were not reinstated, it was not a full settlement.
Baseball team
Between 1950 and 1965, JNR indirectly owned a professional baseball team named Kokutetsu Swallows (国鉄スワローズ, Kokutetsu Suwarōzu). Swallow was a symbol of JNR as it is the English equivalent of the Japanese Tsubame, the name of a deluxe train operated by JNR in the 1950s. JNR sold the team to the Sankei Shinbun in 1965, and called the Atoms from 1966 to 1973; the team is now the Tokyo Yakult Swallows and has been owned by the Yakult company since 1970.
From Wikipedia’s article on Japanese National Railways, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3