シャドーイング練習: Why Does Japan's Shortest Railway Go Nowhere? - YouTubeで英語スピーキングを学ぶ
C1
Higashinarita Train Station The Higashinarita Train Station
264 文
文が短すぎたり長すぎる場合は、Editをタップして調整してください。
1
Higashinarita Train Station The Higashinarita Train Station
2
Oh hey, I didn't see you there.
3
That's because you're not there and I'm actually talking to a camera in this haunted train station.
4
join me today at Higashi Narita train station,
5
which is underneath Narita Airport,
6
the larger of Japan's two big international airports,
7
to the east of the city out in Chiba Prefecture.
8
There are plenty of odd things about Narita Airport.
9
They have funny little quiet rooms,
10
they have security robots, they have places to put your baby while you have a piss,
11
and they have an ongoing legal battle with multiple farmers and other citizens that has led to a home,
12
a shrine and a farm being trapped within the airport grounds.
13
But we're not here to film any of that.
14
Now in case you're worried about whether
15
or not what I'm here to film is thrilling enough to live up to all of those things,
16
never fear, for this is the terminus of the Shibayama Railway.
17
Actually now that I'm saying it out loud that's not a very exciting reveal is it?
18
Never fear, for this is the terminus of Japan's shortest railway.
19
Yay!
20
Due to an extremely complex privatisation process that mostly took place in the 1980s and 1990s,
21
Japan has literally hundreds, potentially over 200 different railway companies and they're split into a number of tiers.
22
At the top you have the JR Group East,
23
West, Central, Shikoku, Kyushu, Hokkaido and Freight.
24
These are the big boys of Japanese rail.
25
They're the remnants of the dismantling of the state-run Japanese national railways in 1987.
26
Collectively they own tens of thousands of miles of track and an ocean of rolling stock,
27
from Shinkansen to luxury sleepers to regular old commuter trains.
28
These four are privately owned,
29
East, Central, West and Kyushu,
30
and these three are government owned as they are far less profitable than the others,
31
Shikoku, Hokkaido and Freight.
32
Below them are the Ooteishitetsu,
33
which literally means like big private railway and I think there are 16 of them.
34
They're smaller than the JR boys though, they're still quite big.
35
And they range from about 500km in length,
36
in track length as per like the Kintetsu Railway to like maybe 14km on one of the smaller ones.
37
Well, it's a good job I had to retake that because the smallest is actually 42 kilometres as per the Sagami Railway.
38
Below them you have the mid-sized private railways which are the same thing but just smaller.
39
They go down to about 7 kilometres in track length, I believe.
40
But then below that we have the third sector railways,
41
the most interesting tier.
42
The ones below that are just subway and tram operators and aren't really relevant.
43
Where the two private railway tiers are fully profitable and thus privately owned,
44
Japan Japan is also covered in a mammoth web of quite unprofitable railway lines.
45
But because Japan doesn't like sacrificing basic public needs for the sake of the profit motive,
46
they didn't follow in the UK's footsteps in ripping up all these lines
47
and instead turned them into joint private-public operations called third-sector railways.
48
Because yes, Dr. Beeching, even people who live in rural communities deserve to have access to trains,
49
whether or not those trains turn a profit for shareholders or not.
50
Isn't that a radical thought?
51
There are about 40 third-sector railways in the country.
52
The longest, the San Riku Railway,
53
is about 160km long with dozens and dozens of so-called train sets shuttling up and down the coast.
54
And the shortest is right here,
55
the Shibayama Railway, with one train set running between just two stops about 2.2km or 1.4 miles away from each other.
56
Yes, that's an entire private-public partnership company set up for just one train.
57
Now this might seem to make sense to some.
58
Think of the Waterloo and City Line in London.
59
That's a tiny line at just 2.37 kilometres,
60
with just six trainsets in service at any one time.
61
But it serves a very important purpose,
62
directly connecting Waterloo with Bank,
63
the centre of the UK's financial sector.
64
The Shibayama railway, however, that's not quite so useful.
65
At one end of the line is Higashi Narita,
66
which is where I am now.
67
If you're a fan of Jetlag the Game,
68
you might have seen this station before.
69
Or if you're a fan of the late Vocaloid Master Wawaka and his extremely underrated band Hitorie,
70
they also filmed a music video here.
71
But yeah, this station is not hugely useful,
72
hence me being one of...
73
I was going to say there were two people sat there before.
74
I was going to say hence me being one of three people here
75
but everyone else is just passing through now so it is just me really.
76
But it wasn't always.
77
The construction of Narita Airport was first announced in 1966 with an opening date of 1971 scheduled.
78
But a genuinely frightening public backlash now known as the San Rizuka struggle
79
which saw farmers and local residents violently oppose any attempts to break ground on the airport
80
delayed the completion of the airport by seven years.
81
So the airport eventually opened in 1978.
82
And what does a new airport need? at least in functional countries,
83
a nice new train link.
84
Part of the plans for Narita Airport involved the construction of a new Shinkansen line,
85
the Narita Shinkansen, which would zip riders from central Tokyo to the airport in no time.
86
The line began construction in 1974
87
but it was not remotely close to completion by the time
88
the airport opened in 1978 due to a mix of construction costs and the Sanrizuka lads kicking off again.
89
But into the 1980s the government persevered,
90
trying to make the Narita Shinkansen a reality and clearing space for the new line.
91
Meanwhile, since the 1930s, Keisei Electric Railway,
92
one of the Ote-Shitetsu, or big private railways,
93
had had a line that happened to head out east from Tokyo to very near where the airport was due to be.
94
And so once the airport opened,
95
Keisei asked to extend the line a little bit further to
96
the airport to take advantage of the huge passenger transport that would follow.
97
The airport authority said sure,
98
but the new station needed to be away from the terminal buildings,
99
as the Narita Shinkansen, once completed,
100
would be given its own station at a prime spot in the heart of the airport.
101
But until that was open,
102
this little station had to do.
103
It was opened along with the airport and was known as Narita Airport Station,
104
and it was the airport's main terminus,
105
despite the fact that you had to get a bus to the terminal once you actually got here.
106
Oh well, it's better than nothing.
107
The Sanrizuka lads reached their zenith of violence in the late 70s and early 80s,
108
and while it failed in stopping the construction of the airport,
109
it did actually succeed in derailing the Narita Shinkansen .
110
The project was put on hold in 1983 and formally cancelled in 1987,
111
leaving a bunch of half-finished track infrastructure and stations in its wake.
112
Keisei took one look at the remnants of the failed Shinkansen project and said to the airport,
113
please, can we use it?
114
And the airport said, do whatever you want with it,
115
as one solitary tear fell from its cheek.
116
So in 1991, with the Shinkansen all but a memory at this point,
117
Keisei completed works on what was supposed to be the fancy new Shinkansen station in the heart of the airport,
118
and called that Narita Airport Station,
119
renaming the old one that we've already seen to Higashi Narita.
120
And just outside the airport grounds,
121
they created a new little branch line that went into the new station.
122
So what do you think happened to the old one?
123
That's right, despite the fact that some Keisei trains still stop there,
124
almost nobody bloody uses it anymore.
125
But the story didn't stop there.
126
In the early 1980s, at the height of the Sanrizuka lads losing their share,
127
Narita Airport offered a compromise to local residents of the town of Shibayama.
128
One of the main issues the residents had had was
129
that the airport would cut off their access to Narita and massively increase their transport times if they headed west.
130
And so the airport offered to build a tiny little railway line to appease the locals and lower their transport times,
131
setting up the Shibayama Railway Company in 1981.
132
But negotiations over how the line would be formed,
133
along with the complications from the collapse of the Shinkansen line meant
134
that it took 15 years for the plans to even be finalized
135
and then the line didn't open until 2002 when we finally got the Shibayama railway.
136
So as I said earlier,
137
this is the shortest independent railway line in all of Japan.
138
There are some shorter lines operating but they're like branch lines of larger lines
139
or they're owned by companies that also own loads of track.
140
This 2.2km stretch from Higashi Narita to Shibayama Chioda is the entire extent of the Shibayama railway.
141
And this train is about to leave and if I don't get on it,
142
I'm going to be stuck here for about 40 minutes.
143
The line's one little 1970s train,
144
leased from Keisei, leaves Higashi Narita every 40 minutes and snakes its way under the airport.
145
One of the main reasons it took so long to finalise the line is
146
that right in front of the exit of Higashi Narita station is a small house
147
and farm stuck within the grounds of the airport.
148
You might have actually heard about this man in the news.
149
And when Narita Airport was under construction,
150
they tried to relocate him,
151
but the Sanrezuka boys kicked off and he was allowed to stay where he was.
152
As a result, it took ages to negotiate how the line should be laid out in order to avoid his property,
153
so the lines got this slightly wobbly shape.
154
Initially the Shibayama Railway was supposed to be a tiny little narrow gauge line with small people mover type trains.
155
But can you guess what happened?
156
That's right, the Sanrezuka boys absolutely lost their shit again and the train got upgraded to a proper standard gauge line.
157
of Higashi Narita station, it races out of the tunnel
158
and reaches a surprisingly high top speed of like 53 miles an hour or about 85 kilometres an hour.
159
And about two thirds of the way down it leaves the tunnel
160
and becomes an elevated railway that ends at Shibayama Chiyoda station just up here.
161
But why was this chosen as the site of the other terminus of the line?
162
Shibayama, the actual town is all the way down here,
163
and this station is still within the airport grounds.
164
So why here?
165
Well, it's because the railway was never really a compromise to help the people of Shibayama,
166
it's just the minimum the airport could do to appease the
167
citizens nearby without having to buy up loads more land and encounter further legal issues with the San Rizuka boys.
168
So rather than running down to Shibayama proper,
169
it just stops here at the edge of the airport in what is sort of a big industrial estate,
170
full of cargo facilities.
171
So it's used a lot by airport staff and maintenance staff rather than,
172
well I say it's used a lot by them,
173
but I mean, the video you're seeing begs to differ.
174
So, what's it like?
175
Oh my God, if you ever come down here, remember to bring cash.
176
It's down an incredibly long corridor.
177
You can still access it,
178
but it's down this very long corridor.
179
And they don't accept card.
180
I should have known, and there's no ATM near here.
181
I had to run all the way back to the terminal and get cash.
182
Oh my God, that was exhausting.
183
So occasionally you do still see people here.
184
Case in point, because the Kesei train still stops here,
185
but the Shibayama train often arrives with literally nobody on it.
186
So yeah, I'm gonna go take it now, I guess.
187
Please touch the button of your choice.
188
Thank you.
189
The next step is to get to the next step.
190
It's a short little ride,
191
it's quite comfortable, it's a bit rickety,
192
really annoyingly I was trying to film the Shibayama train,
193
its own train service, but I happened to catch a Keisei line train that was passing through Higashinarita to Shibayama Choda.
194
So I'm on that instead,
195
which means it's hard to film.
196
But I guess we should go and see what the station's like.
197
Editing Gabe here.
198
I'm not 100% sure what I meant by that,
199
by saying it was hard to film, because it wasn't.
200
It's the same as a normal train.
201
But yes, this is Shibayama Chiodo Station.
202
I didn't have very long there because the train went back almost immediately,
203
so I guess we're also going to head back and instead take a look at Higashi Narita Station,
204
which is the more interesting of the two anyway.
205
One thing that I would say is pretty surprising,
206
apart from just how dead this station is,
207
is that there are other platforms that look like they haven't been used in probably decades.
208
There also are advertisements over there that I think must be from the early 2000s.
209
Yeah, it's very creepy, this place.
210
And it's not helped by the birdsong that they keep playing.
211
I assume they probably meant for it to be like,
212
oh, it's a nice calming sound that reminds you of the outdoors and that you're not stuck in this liminal space.
213
But no, it just makes it more creepy.
214
There's also a sink here.
215
What's that doing?
216
It works.
217
There's definitely a lot of stuff left over from the 70s here,
218
obviously with this being a 1978 station and airport.
219
Yeah, it's very surreal and I don't like it.
220
Maybe I do like it and I'm just not being honest with myself.
221
Set 3540 of the EMU 3500 series,
222
dating from 1973, is the only train set that runs on the line,
223
trundling back
224
and forth from Higashi Narita to Shibayama Chiyoda every 40 minutes from just before 6am to about half past 11 at night.
225
All day, every day.
226
Sometimes when the Shibayama Railway is inoperational,
227
set 3540 has a little holiday over to the adjacent Keisei electric line,
228
where you can tell it apart from the others due to its red-green colour scheme
229
and the little Shibayama Railway logo in the top corner.
230
So in the end we're left with a tiny,
231
slightly wonky railway line that cost a fortune,
232
took two decades to negotiate,
233
was only built to pacify furious farmers
234
and now mostly shuttles airport staff from a ghost station to an industrial park about 2km away.
235
It's not only Japan's shortest independent railway line,
236
but also possibly its most useless.
237
And yet it still runs like clockwork every 40 minutes,
238
because in Japan, even if a railway line or station serves one person,
239
it gets kept open.
240
Because that's what trains are for, serving people.
241
The Shibayama Railway is a monument to stubbornness and protest and compromise,
242
and it's an interesting slice of Japanese history and culture in
243
that it shows that they really do believe that Everyone deserves a train,
244
even if it's not financially viable to do so.
245
But also, it gave me something fun to film.
246
But the Shibayama Railway, I had to email them in advance to ask
247
if it was okay to film at the station and on the train.
248
And they were like, yeah,
249
go for it, as long as you're not getting in anyone's way.
250
Which I don't think I am.
251
So thumbs up to the Shibayama Railway.
252
I've got to get off here,
253
or else I'm going to miss my flight now, actually.
254
I've waited around in this creepy ass railway station for ages to see
255
if I can actually see one of the Shibayama railway trains rather than a Keisei one
256
And I think this should be one Yes,
257
it is it's got the logo Ohayou gozaimasu This is it this is the train
258
I started filming it
259
and then I thought I didn't really get a very clear shot of the logo
260
so I should probably go down to the front and do that.
261
So I started running but then the train started leaving
262
and I didn't quite make it to the front
263
so I gave up and the video is going to end on me saying...
264
Thank you.
アプリをダウンロード
話したすべての文をAIが採点
TRENDING
人気動画
このビデオで話す練習をする理由は？
このビデオは、日本の短い鉄道がどこにも行かない理由を探るもので、興味深い話題が盛りだくさんです。話題の選び方から、視聴者との対話を想定した説明スタイルが特徴です。こういったビデオを利用することで、実際の会話に近い形で英語を話す練習ができます。
特に、「Higashi Narita Train Station」という特定の場所についての詳細を聞くことで、地域に根ざした英語表現や文化的背景を学ぶことができます。このような具体的な事例を通じて、日常会話に必要なスキルを向上させることができるため、YouTubeで英語学習を活用するのは非常に効果的です。
文法と文脈における表現
このビデオでは、いくつかの重要な文法構造や表現が使われています。ここでは、その中から特に目を引くものをいくつか解説します。
- 現在形：スピーカーが実際の出来事について話す際に使われており、現場のリアルタイムな状況を伝えるのに役立ちます。
- 関係代名詞：特定の説明を追加する際に使用され、情報をより詳しく伝える技術が身につきます。例えば、「which is underneath Narita Airport」といった表現です。
- 過去形：歴史的なコンテクストを回想するために使われており、過去の出来事に対する理解を深めるのに役立ちます。
- 条件文：仮定的な状況を言及する際に役立つ文法で、「if」の使い方を学ぶことができます。
これらの構造を通じて、IELTS スピーキング対策にも有効な基礎が築かれます。
一般的な発音の罠
このビデオでは、発音の練習に役立ついくつかの難しい単語やアクセントが含まれています。特に注意が必要な点をいくつか挙げます。
- Higashi Narita：確かに日本語の「東成田」に由来するため、外国人には発音が難しい場合があります。強調される音に注意しましょう。
- Shibayama Railway：このフレーズでの「Shibayama」は、子音が続くためにしっかりと発音することが重要です。英語の発音を良くするためには、シャドースピーチの練習が有効です。
- complex privatization：こういった複雑な言葉も、連続音に注意して発音練習を行う必要があります。
これらの発音練習は、shadowing siteを利用する際にも非常に役立ちますので、ぜひ参考にしてみてください。
シャドーイングとは？英語上達に効果的な理由
シャドーイング（Shadowing）は、もともとプロの通訳者養成プログラムで開発された言語学習法で、多言語習得者として知られるDr. Alexander Arguelles によって広く普及されました。方法はシンプルですが非常に効果的：ネイティブスピーカーの英語を聞きながら、1〜2秒の遅延で声に出してすぐに繰り返す——まるで「影（shadow）」のように話者を追いかけます。文法ドリルや受動的なリスニングと異なり、シャドーイングは脳と口の筋肉が同時にリアルタイムで英語を処理・再現することを強制します。研究により、発音精度、抑揚、リズム、連音、リスニング力、そして会話の流暢さが大幅に向上することが確認されています。IELTSスピーキング対策や自然な英語コミュニケーションを目指す方に特におすすめです。