Here's Why Japan Keeps This Station Running For Just One Passenger - Jaipur Women Blog

Sunday, August 28 2016, 10:28:17

Himanshu Roy

JWB Blogger

Here’s Why Japan Keeps This Station Running For Just One Passenger

JWB Post

January 13, 2016

Would you believe if you were told that there is a railway station, from which there is always picked only one passenger? Oh yes, you heard it right!

However, we may talk about bullet trains or women’s education, all of us could be silenced by just the fact that Japan didn’t close a deserted station simply so that a girl could go to school.

Kami-Shirataki is a defunct railway station in Japan where only one train takes a halt and that too to pick up only one passenger. Every day, a little girl is the only passenger to board the train that takes her to the school.

Seems quite unbelievable, eh? In our country where it’s unimaginable to think that a train would reach a station in time without being late, that the expenses of an entire station are borne by the government just to ensure that there are no roadblocks in the education of a little girl.

The Japanese government had noticed that there are no passengers that board from the station and was on the verge of closing it permanently when this little child managed to change their mind.

It was suddenly that the railway authorities discovered that every day, heavily wrapped under woolens, a little girl comes to this remote station, which mostly remains covered in ice. The sole passenger every day has the same routine of boarding the train that takes her to the school.

Well, what happened? It was decided by the Japanese railway authorities that the station will not be closed down. Instead, they also released a special schedule of the train, custom-made specifically for the girl, so that she can reach her school in time every day without fail. It has been decided that that once the girl completes her school and gets done with her graduation, the station will be finally closed down.

But before that, the station will function, exclusively for the girl.

Now after hearing about this decision, isn’t it obvious that why irrespective of its minuscule size, Japan is one of the leading superpowers. Well, folks, it seems that in this small gesture of the Japanese government, there are countless lessons for us to learn. In our country, where education is still not easily accessible for women in rural areas, stories like these need to be heard.

C’mon guys, we might be not able to keep an entire station running just for one, but maybe we can keep a train running to take little girls from villages to their schools so that they don’t miss out on their education!