Many happy returns: 60 years of the shinkansen

Since the first bullet train left Tokyo Station six decades ago, it has become an icon of speed, style and national identity.

- Leo Lewis

Five minutes before its scheduled departure at 6.16am, the Hokuriku Shinkansen pulls into Tokyo Station - with absolutely no right to look this good so early in the morning. The rising sun, splintered by a hundred office windows, dances on the blue and gold of the train's arcing, aquiline nose cone. The carriages, gleaming in pearl white and shaped by the man who designed the Ferrari Enzo, come to a millimetre-accurate stop at the platform gates. Doors slide apart to the welcome of soft reclining seats, inviting you to sit down, open a perfect egg sandwich bought on the platform, and enjoy it at 260kmh.

On Tuesday, Japan will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the first bullet train's inaugural journey. It's also three decades since my first shinkansen experience, but 10 minutes into my trip from Tokyo to Nagano it all still feels a bit like cheating. There's a nagging sense that I am exploiting the obsessiveness and largesse of a benevolent maniac. Japan, in its glorious, gadgety folly, has decided it must have this extraordinary thing, and it's joyously ours not to reason why. It really shouldn't be possible, for less than the equivalent of £42 (S$72), to travel 200km into the mountains in this style, in a vehicle of this exquisite grace, at this speed, at this smoothness, in a system this supernaturally efficient and with so very little fuss.

The train leaves central Tokyo. Then slips out of its immense suburban splurge with a progression of views that cannot ever tire because of how constantly Japan's architecture is built, torn down and renewed. Look, and you will always see something new. After Oomiya, in northern Saitama prefecture, the tunnels that make all this straight-line speed possible begin to carve their way into ever longer stretches of mountain.