This thread has had me looking through my set of back copies of the late "Continental Railway Journal" (expired 2013); which used to get a fairly steady trickle of reports from Japan, though these tended to focus more heavily on preserved / steam tourist workings, than on other aspects of the country's railways. Now and again, Japan reports in the Journal over recent decades, have hinted that all is far from well with rural rail passenger services.
I was struck by a rather melancholy report from a traveller on the island of Kyushu in 2002: telling of two-car DMUs serving run-down unstaffed island-platform stations, with the driver performing all duties, including checking fares paid; and meetings between country lines at forlorn remote junctions, with short periods of all-trains-connecting frantic activity, punctuating many hours of nothing happening. Another Kyushu line is mentioned as just surviving, with two trains each way early morning / mid-afternoon / early evening... all the foregoing, a strong parallel with the 21st-century way of things on rural local lines (where these have survived at all for passengers) in various continental European countries, rather than in Britain. Implications were sensed, of complete withdrawal in considerable numbers, of other rural rail pass. services.
