Bullet train.

(しんかんせん) Known as "bullet trains" in the West, the literal translation of shinkansen is just "new trunk line". The fastest trains can reach speeds in excess of 300 kph. There are four shinkansen lines linking Tokyo with the rest of the country: the Tokaido Shinkansen, which goes to Osaka via Nagoya and Kyoto; the Nagano Shinkansen to, er, Nagano; the Joetsu Shinkansen to Niigata; and the Tohoku Shinkansen, which runs all the way to the northern tip of Honshu, with spurs off to Yamagata and Akita.

The is a network of high-speed railway lines in Japan operated by Japan Railways. Since the initial Tōkaidō Shinkansen opened in 1964, the network has expanded to link most major cities on the islands of Honshū and Kyūshū with running speeds of up to 300 km/h (186 mph), in an earthquake and typhoon prone environment. Test run speeds have been 443 km/h (275 mph) for conventional rail, and up to 580 km/h (360 mph) for maglev trainsets.