Dis­cov­er the Japan­ese loco­mo­tive thriller that inspired Speed

In 1975, when Jun­ya Sato’s The Bul­let Train (Shinkansen daibakuha) was released, Japan’s Shinkansen, or ​‘new main line’ – the world’s first high-speed train sys­tem – was only 11 years old, even if, in the decade since its open­ing in 1964, it had been extend­ed across the coun­try. These Bul­let Trains were a sym­bol of Japan’s rapid progress – the bar­relling momen­tum with which the nation was advanc­ing, both tech­no­log­i­cal­ly and economically.

Yet there were losers as well as win­ners in the post-war recov­ery. As Tet­suo Oki­ta (Ken Takaku­ra) sees his small busi­ness bank­rupt­ed by an increas­ing­ly cen­tralised rail indus­try, lead­ing to his finan­cial ruin and divorce, he joins forces with down­trod­den Hiroshi Oshi­ro (Aki­ra Oda), who has recent­ly been mis­treat­ed by anoth­er com­pa­ny after a work­place acci­dent, and with one-time rad­i­cal stu­dent rev­o­lu­tion­ary Masaru Koga (Kei Yamamo­to), to exe­cute the per­fect crime, which will allow them to extort five mil­lion dol­lars and leave behind for­ev­er the coun­try that they feel has already left them behind.

Hav­ing spent years build­ing pre­ci­sion instru­ments for trains before his busi­ness failed, Oki­ta has a char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly metic­u­lous plan for a blood­less revenge in which one of his own dis­con­tin­ued prod­ucts will be key. For under­neath the Spe­cial Express 109 trav­el­ing from Tokyo to Haka­ta, he has attached dyna­mite to his own tachome­ter, so that the train, with its 1500 pas­sen­gers, is primed to explode if its speed drops beneath 80km per hour.

“He turned the train into a time bomb on wheels,” as the prin­ci­pled Kuramochi (Ken Utsui) puts it from the train company’s con­trol room. Kuramochi is the moral cen­tre of The Bul­let Train, and about as close to a pro­tag­o­nist as we get in a film that divides its atten­tion between a large ensem­ble of characters.

On board the train there is the stressed, sweaty dri­ver Aoki (Shin’ichi ​‘Son­ny’ Chi­ba, cast very much against action-hero type) and his put-upon con­duc­tor Kikuchi (Rai­ta Ryu), var­i­ous pan­ick­ing, mutiny­ing pas­sen­gers includ­ing a rock band and the film crew doc­u­ment­ing them, the heav­i­ly preg­nant Kazuko Hirao (Miyako Tasa­ka) and, under police escort, the con­vict Shin­ji Fujio (Eiji Go) who by chance is rather famil­iar with the bomb­ing gang.

Mean­while on the ground is a large team of train com­pa­ny offi­cials, net­work oper­a­tors and police, all rac­ing to locate both the bomb and the bombers while keep­ing the train in motion and the pas­sen­gers alive. And then there are the crim­i­nals them­selves, drawn with some sym­pa­thy even if, for all the pre­ci­sion of their plan­ning, they prove to be losers no less now than they were in all their pre­vi­ous endeavours.

In The Bul­let Train, the police are extreme­ly effi­cient at track­ing the per­pe­tra­tors down via some high­ly ten­u­ous clues, even if coin­ci­dences work as much against them as in their favour. In one sequence, for exam­ple, a uni­ver­si­ty judo team hap­pens to be in the right place at the right time to help stop one of the bombers, while in anoth­er, a ran­dom fire that breaks out at a café pre­vents the police get­ting their hands on cru­cial instruc­tions left for them by Oki­ta (“What? It’s unbe­liev­able!” com­ments the ever exas­per­at­ed Aoki, his dis­be­lief mir­ror­ing the audience’s at this improb­a­ble happenstance).

Here things go wrong as much as they go right, as plans con­stant­ly have to be revised, moves impro­vised and risks tak­en, adding to ten­sions that are already high-speed to the point of explod­ing. There is a lot going on, all at once, and Sato, co-writ­ing with Ryuno­suke Ono, deft­ly keeps the dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tives run­ning along their par­al­lel tracks.

It is easy to see the influ­ence of The Bul­let Train on Jan de Bont’s Speed (1994), with its sim­i­lar premise of a bomb that will explode when the vehi­cle on which it has been placed trav­els beneath 50 miles (80 km) per hour, even if Speed’s writer Gra­ham Yost has insist­ed that he was in fact inspired by Andre Konchalovsky’s Run­away Train (1985) instead – itself based on a Japan­ese screen­play from the 1960s by Aki­ra Kurosawa.

Yet sev­er­al of the essen­tial ingre­di­ents which this big-bud­get Toei pro­duc­tion has, Speed decid­ed­ly lacks: an earnest­ness that pre­cludes com­e­dy or romance, a moral messi­ness that refus­es to paint things in black and white, and a prin­ci­pal antag­o­nist who, for all his flaws, is no car­toon vil­lain. No sur­prise then that Sato’s film also appears to have had an influ­ence on Michael Mann’s noirish action thriller Heat, espe­cial­ly in its cli­mac­tic sequence on an airport’s tarmac.

“How I miss the old steam loco­mo­tive days,” com­plains Aiko at one point, in nos­tal­gic resis­tance to the onrush of the new. ​“You’re not on the old loco­mo­tive,” replies Kuramochi over the radio. ​“It’s a bul­let train. This is a real test of the new con­trol sys­tem.” Viewed today, The Bul­let Train may seem dat­ed by Okita’s exten­sive use of now out­mod­ed pay phones to con­tact the author­i­ties – but the high-speed trains which were at the fore­front of Japan’s mod­erni­sa­tion in the 1960s and 1970s still seem cut­ting-edge today, espe­cial­ly by the stan­dards of the Unit­ed Kingdom’s rail ser­vices. Once the train has been safe­ly brought to a halt after an ordeal last­ing many hours, the net­work boss tells its extreme­ly stressed dri­ver: ​“We can restart the train in 30 mins. Take a nap until then.” Evi­dent­ly there can be lit­tle stop­ping progress.

The Bul­let Train is released on Blu-ray by Eure­ka!, 24^th April, 2023