I am not sure what conclusion can we draw from, as you said, two very rare incidents over a long period of time.

Reminds me of when Malaysian airlines crashed two planes in a short period of time. It was a good time to get cheap flights from Europe to south east Asia as long as you can withstand relatives thinking you are literally going to die in their third crash.

After reading Shogun, Cryptonomicon and watching plenty anime and documents about Japan (including Japanese rail system - still using the "pointing and naming" method I've learned from them) I would risk saying that Japanese do literally everything differently.

Spain basically does not do the required maintenance:

https://www.reuters.com/world/spains-deadly-rail-accidents-p...

They are two very different accidents: The second was insufficient/poor maintenance: Supposedly the train that checks for this had passed 2 months before, and someone will have to wonder whether it's just not passing often enough, or if the inspections are just poor in general.

The first was purely a matter of not upgrading the signaling in a very low speed section: The crash could have happened with regional trains too. Every engineer knew that it was unsafe and one distraction was enough to get someone killed, but Spain is still well in the middle of track expansion, so it's all the horrors of politicking. Unless you have a crash, not upgrading those signals costs nothing, but, say, the very expensive connection to Asturias was worth a lot, so iffy tradeoffs were made.

Hopefully better engineering-driven tradeoffs are made regarding track maintenance, but hey, this is Spain, not a place where we are good at efficient, reliable safety processes: See the failures in Valencia for the DANA, where the chain between the meteorologists seeing a risk that led to recommending evacuation, and the actual order of evacuation was so slow, so we ended up with 229 deaths.

A component here is the highly unfortunate timing of two trains crossing one another as one of the trains derailed. Both trains look like rigid HSRs, and usually when these derails they stay very stable and rarely have fatalities.

Perhaps there are less FSB agents blowing up sections of track with shaped charges in Japan.

Track maintenance?

Higher passenger count could imply ability to pass higher maintenance budgets?

Yeah. Japan really has better quality standards here overall.

Now - Japanese mentality is strange to me, but the quality standards and thought process, are convincing.

I think even more important is the seismic activity in Japan asa risk factor here

Could weather or some other geographic/similar aspect be a factor?

Japan has a culture of perfection.

> Santiago de Compostela derailment

Hey that infrastructure looks perfectly fine and new, ahhh ok... they were going 180kmh where the speed limit was 80kmh..

Short answer: Japan treats high-speed rail as a tightly controlled system, not just fast trains on tracks.

One major difference is infrastructure. Shinkansen lines are completely separate from conventional rail: no level crossings, no shared tracks, no freight, and no interaction with slower services. There are no cars, pedestrians, or animals anywhere near the line. In much of Europe, including Spain, high-speed lines are very good, but they still tend to interact more with legacy rail networks and inherit more constraints.

Another key factor is how strictly operations are controlled. Speed limits are enforced automatically rather than relying on driver compliance alone. If a train exceeds its permitted speed for any reason, the system intervenes immediately. The design assumption is that human error will happen, so the system is built to prevent a mistake from turning into an accident.

Maintenance is also handled with extreme conservatism. Track geometry, overhead lines, and rolling stock are continuously monitored, with very tight tolerances. Components are replaced earlier than strictly necessary because preventing failures is considered far cheaper than dealing with the consequences of one.

Japan has also invested heavily in detecting external hazards. Earthquake early-warning systems automatically cut power and apply brakes before shaking reaches the tracks, and the same mindset applies to weather, landslides, and other environmental risks.

Finally, there’s a strong institutional safety culture behind all of this. Procedures, training, and reporting of near-misses are taken very seriously, and lessons are applied incrementally over decades. The objective isn’t just to meet safety standards but to systematically remove edge cases.

It’s not a single piece of technology that explains the record. It’s the combination of dedicated infrastructure, automation, conservative engineering, obsessive maintenance, and a culture with very little tolerance for shortcuts.