The aging elves of the Bullet Train

The problem, when it comes to crafting the nose cone of a bullet train, is that there generally isn't an overly gushing abundance of requirement for them. In fact, each generation of the Shinkansen requires only something between fifty to a little over one hundred of the gracefully curved creations. After all, these cutting edge technological marvels aren't exactly popping out of the woodwork. And so it would seem to be an extremely expensive proposition to tool up and manufacture for such a limited production run. Which is precisely why they don't.

As with the (possibly apocryphal) story of NASA spending millions to develop the space ready ballpoint pen and the Russians saving their development dollars and issuing their cosmonauts with pencils, Japan dispatched with the high-tech approach and reverted to that simplest of tools, the humble hammer. And in the small town of Kudamatsu, in the western prefecture of Yamaguchi (the mouth of the mountains if you were wondering), Yamashita Kogyosho tap tap away, shaping and creating the pointy architecture that cuts through the air in front of some ten billion passengers and counting.

This cottage industry solution to a modern day problem has been so successful that its reach has extended to both Korea and China however there is a cloud to this silver lining. As with most cottage industries, the worker bees are showing the signs of age and with an apprenticeship of a decade or more there may soon be a bottleneck in the production cycle of these future high speed marvels. And so, in these days of uncertainty, if you're looking for job security, it might just be time to invest in a little magic hammer.

Thanks Marty.

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