Amagasaki Rail Crash

China derailment reminded me of the derailment accident in Japan called the "Amagasaki Rail Crash".

In 2005, a train got derailed and crashed into an apartment building after tearing fences. The death toll was 107 people including the train driver.  The cause of this accident was over‐speeding. But there was another factor, it was  so called  “day service training”.


This phrase meant training that is done in the daytime.
In the case of train companies, generally employees work under Variable Working Hours System, but this training was done only during day time hence we call it as such.
But why only in day time? What is the training?

The training are for drivers, conductors and station employees that have made mistakes in work. After making mistakes, they are once taken back to their duties and trained again by their bosses to avoid making the same mistakes.  But actually, after this accident, the existences of power harassments and moral harassments during the training were revealed.
For example, a boss made his subordinate sit down for hours and kept abusing him saying “You are useless! ”.

This is torture to one’s mind.
There were many employees that developed mental disorder later on and what is worse, there were a few staffs who killed themselves.

Let's go back to the topic of the accident. At that time, the schedule had been delayed because at previous station the driver had overrun for 40m by mistake. Due to this overrun, he went back to adjust the platform that allowed passengers to get on and get off,  this had delayed the train time schedule. Yes, he was in such a hurry to make up for this delay. And he worried about the training.(of course he wanted to avoid undergoing this training). So he speeded much more than usual and it made him unable to cope with a curve then the devastating accident happened.

This accident occurred near my place and as I have said, many people died including my father’s co-worker and now a large number of the suvivors are still suffering from the trauma.

It was a really sad, shocking and devastating accident.
And we also have to focus on harassment issues that are rampant in many companies today.