Jessamyn R. Abel, Dream Super-Express: A Cultural History of the World’s First Bullet Train Stanford CA: Weatherhead East Asian Institute/Stanford University Press, 2022. 302 pp. ISBN: 9781503610385

Japan's Shinkansen 'bullet train', which opened in 1964 in time for the Tokyo Olympics, achieved iconic status both within the country and in other parts of the globe.Nostalgic shots of the train passing in front of Mt.Fuji became one of the key representations of Japan's technological advancement and high-speed growth for contemporaries and remain familiar images into the twenty-first century.Previous scholarly work has offered significant insights into the economic and political context of the Shinkansen's construction and operation, as well as its technological advances, but Dream Super-Express breaks new ground in focusing on its cultural history, honing in on the imaginings and dreams associated with technological development and infrastructure building in post-war Japan.A project originally intended to solve a transportation bottleneck seen as impeding industrial growth thus becomes a window through which we view broader aspects of Japan's cultural, economic, social, and political history in the second half of the twentieth century.This story of the bullet train draws on a wide range of historical sources, makes clear its value-added in the context of the existing literature, and offers a coherent and well thought through narrative that allows the story of the Shinkansen to be embedded in a host of broader and significant issues.