Japan

What the record shows

Start with the correction. Osaka's New Tram opened automated in March 1981 — but 'driverless since 1981' is not what happened. Staff stayed aboard until October 1991, unattended running lasted barely two years before a runaway train hit the buffers and injured more than 200 people in October 1993, and crews rode again until February 2000. Nineteen years separate the automated opening from the operator trusting the system alone — and that patience became the national method. When Nagoya converted its original 1957 subway line to one-driver automatic operation, it fitted platform screen doors at every station first, and the trains remain driver-supervised, not driverless.

What autonomy is for, in the newest entries, is stated out loud: keeping buses running where drivers are scarce. Yokohama's Futamatagawa–Sakonyama trial ran in early 2026 on a transport-ministry subsidy aimed explicitly at the shortage of bus drivers — and still needed a driver at the wheel: the vehicle runs at Level 2. The distance between ambition and permit is measured best by Easy Ride: Nissan's first public robotaxi test carried 300 groups in March 2018 and promised a full service in the early 2020s; when the brand returned in November 2025 it brought about 300 pre-registered riders, a safety driver and Nissan's own footnote calling the system equivalent to SAE Level 2 — the driverless version now promised from the 2027 financial year. The legal instrument exists — a 2022 amendment to the Road Traffic Act, in force since April 2023, lets the public safety commission with jurisdiction permit 'specified autonomous operation' with nobody driving — and where it has been used, the scale is honest: Haneda's shuttle, billed as Japan's first privately operated Level 4 bus, loops 800 metres at up to 12 km/h.

Expo 2025 stress-tested the difference between an approval and an operating record. Osaka Metro's full-size autonomous shuttle won Level 4 approval in February 2025 — the first for a large bus on ordinary roads, by the operator's own description — then carried Expo visitors with a supervisor aboard, steering itself only on the Maishima section; the service ended with the fair, and in the year to March 2026 the operator booked a 6.7 billion yen extraordinary loss after giving up on reusing the 190 buses. The OSAKAKO Vertiport tells the same story without wheels: a flying-taxi hub built for the Expo hosted only uncrewed demonstration flights after all four operators dropped passenger service over certification delays, with commercial flights pushed to around 2028.

What the Expo actually left behind sits at the ticket gate, and it is the boring option. On 29 October 2024, timed for the fair, Osaka Metro opened its gates to ordinary bank cards — Hankyu, Hanshin and Kintetsu switched the same day, 548 stations at once — and by September 2025 contactless taps across Kansai ran at roughly 1.96 million a month, about fifteen times a year earlier, on payment-platform figures. The spectacular alternative is documented too: Osaka Metro's walk-through face-recognition gates reached public service in March 2025 at 130 of 134 stations — opt-in, app-bought tickets only, no IC cards or commuter passes — and a reporter trying them in April 2025 saw no other passenger using them. At Umekita's platforms, the movable door its makers describe as a world first still guards one of four platform edges three years on, and the arch-shaped face-recognition gate was retired in February 2026 for ordinary gates with two cameras bolted on, chosen for accuracy at rush hour rather than for show.

The distinctively Japanese form in this record is the designated demonstration — a consortium disciplined in execution and thin in published results. The template is the Yokohama Smart City Project: the trade ministry selected Yokohama in 2010 as a Next-Generation Energy and Social System demonstration area, 34 companies spent five years on it, the partners reorganised 'from demonstration to implementation' when it ended in 2014 — and the city's own page publishes no result figures. A decade later the instrument was renewed: a 2020 amendment to the National Strategic Special Zone Law created 'Super City' zones, Osaka and Tsukuba became the two designations, and Osaka's produced ORDEN, a prefecture-wide data platform whose resident portal arrived in August 2024 and by mid-2026 had been joined by three of the prefecture's 43 municipalities. The private mirror is the developer's town, where the builder is also the measurer: Panasonic-led Fujisawa SST reports a 70% cut in CO2 emissions against a 1990 baseline and says it has hit its original targets — figures self-reported, with no independent audit located. Kashiwa-no-ha is the rare district holding an outside grade, LEED Platinum for neighborhood development in November 2016, and the newest heir is Toyota's Woven City, which opened its demonstration phase in September 2025 with Toyota employees and their families as the first residents.

Where measurement is wired directly to consequence, Japan holds the top rung: since 2018 the seven tide gates shielding the 21 square kilometres of western Osaka that lie below sea level have closed themselves on the national alert — a Japan Meteorological Agency tsunami advisory or warning closes every gate. That entry rests on peer-reviewed work, rare in a record graded overwhelmingly on operators' own reporting. Scale follows the institution: TEPCO swapped in smart meters for roughly 28.4 million households and businesses across the Kanto region, while the water bureaus of Osaka — 81 meters at 63 sites, full deployment targeted only in the 2030s — and Nagoya — six years of trials and no citywide rollout date — are still counting pilots. And when Japanese cities publish numbers, they publish the footnote too: Yokohama changed how it counts visitors to Minato Mirai and disclosed in the same release that the headline 101.8 million for 2025 was 8.3 million fewer than the year before measured the same way, and its open-data portal carries a Creative Commons licence on all 654 of its 654 datasets — a completeness almost no city in this atlas reaches. If Japan's entries agree on one lesson, it is this: an approval, a designation or a pilot ends on schedule, and what survives — the meters, the tide gates, the bank-card taps, a once-distrusted driverless line now in its fifth decade — is whatever a permanent operator is obliged to keep running.

Sources beyond the atlas

Facts above that do not come from a linked entry rest on these:

• Cabinet Office — Super City Initiative — the 2020 amendment of the National Strategic Special Zone Law (promulgated 3 June 2020, in effect 1 September) and Tsukuba and Osaka as the designated Super Cities
• Nagashima Ohno & Tsunematsu — Rulemaking developments for Level 4 autonomous driving — the 2022 Road Traffic Act amendment, in force from April 2023, creating the 'specified autonomous operation' permit granted by the public safety commission with jurisdiction