What will Japan's growth engine be? Well, it looks like an international campaign to export locomotives, switches, and other components of the national Shinkansen "bullet train" system may be the thing that gets the country's economy back on the rails.
Just this week, leading bullet train operator JR Central touched off a worldwide rail revolution in which Japanese train technology may become as prevalent as Toyota and Honda on the global market.
The Financial Times reported on September 14 2009 that JR Central tech execs have been in London, boasting not only individual components of the Shinkansen but the entire system could be marketed to national and local governments worldwide.
That's a break from component sales that have dominated international rail transport transactions for the past several decades. With different geographic and population-based needs, train network development is pretty parochial.
Yet there are already companies like Siemens in Germany and Alstom in France that have inched into more integrated system sales in places far from their respective headquarters.
Swiss engineering conglomerate ABB produced switches for the light rail trains that run just down the street.