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The story
On October 8, 2026, it was reported that tunnel-boring work on the Chuo Shinkansen maglev line in Tokyo’s Shinagawa Ward had been suspended after the boring machine struck extremely hard rock and was damaged. On 5channel’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” (live-discussion) board, the news set off a wave of comments ranging well beyond the Shinagawa trouble itself — into construction problems reported all along the route, and into whether the maglev project is even necessary at all. Opinion is split between posters who think the whole thing should be scrapped and those who argue that, having come this far, there’s no choice but to push on.
Boring machine damaged, maglev construction halted — tunnel in Tokyo’s Shinagawa Ward
Published 10/8 (Thu) 17:09
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
How much of the route actually avoids deep boring, anyway?
Hashimoto–Nakatsugawa isn't really any different from a normal tunnel.
Though Hashimoto's pretty far out as it is.
Kawakatsu's been saying that this whole time
Wonder if I'll even still be alive by the time this maglev opens.
It's basically an old man's pipe dream, right?
China's already got a maglev running, so it's pride as a high-speed-rail superpower lol
Pretty much both
This thing won't be open even 50 years from now.
It's not so much Hashimoto — east of Kawasaki it doesn't go that deep, so it's probably fine
If budget actually got approved for a reason that flimsy, construction would've started back in the '90s and it'd already be open by now.
In fact the original plan had it finished sometime in the 2000s.
A maglev, at this point? lol (the trailing "()" stands in for a sarcastic laugh)
How long are they gonna leave the Tokyo–Osaka shortest route just sitting there?
When there's already a regular shinkansen?
It's almost entirely underground, right?
That kills any urge to ride it
That's not really the point.
China has a maglev and our country doesn't.
They're only building this because that stings ("wa-kuni" — sarcastic internet slang for "our country")
Doesn't Shinagawa overlap with shinkansen riders anyway?
It has to be somewhere downtown with open space underground or nobody will use it.
Places like Tokyo, Shinjuku, Shibuya already have subway lines running through, so avoiding them is a nightmare
If they can't quit, it'll be more rock like this down the line — 20 trillion, 30 trillion yen more.
Fare on a regular line: ¥1,000.
Shinkansen: ¥50,000 — the maglev will never actually happen
Even if they quit, it's not like fares get any cheaper
The cost-effectiveness is seriously way too bad
The call is that it's too late to stop now
Because feeling good about ourselves right now matters more than infrastructure down the road (self-congratulatory national-pride vibes)
Yamanashi Prefecture
– The rock in the South Alps is too hard to bore through. Considered impossible to penetrate with current technology
Kanagawa Prefecture
– Land acquisition has made zero progress, stalling construction of the train depot too
– Tried to build a contaminated-soil dump site under the guise of a "ranch," got caught, had to cancel
Tokyo
– After watching NEXCO's road construction cause ground subsidence in Chofu, the well-to-do residents of Denenchofu flipped to the anti-maglev camp (final boss)
– Shinagawa's ground is so unstable that any subsidence risks lawsuits from the businesses above, so they can't move a single millimeter outside state-owned land (hidden boss)
– Harmful gas bubbles believed to be caused by construction chemicals have shown up in the Meguro River and in Machida
Nagano Prefecture
– Residents furious after it came out that heavy-metal-contaminated soil was used for a bridge in Iida
– Well water is drying up
Gifu Prefecture
– 14 residential water sources have dried up
– The construction route runs straight into a uranium vein (secret boss)
Aichi Prefecture
– Turns out the ground in the soft-soil section of the Kasugai work zone is so bad there's a real risk of collapse. Impossible to build with current technology
Out of all that, the genuinely scary ones are
the uranium and the soft ground
There's no scenery, so riding it would be boring even if you did
If you want the shortest route, go look for it on a different line
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
The Chuo Shinkansen maglev line originally targeted a 2027 opening, but the schedule has been pushed back significantly because Shizuoka Prefecture (under then-Governor Heita Kawakatsu) withheld approval for construction over water-resource concerns at the South Alps Tunnel. The boring-machine damage in Shinagawa reported here is a separate, newly surfaced technical problem in the Tokyo metropolitan section of the line. In the thread, the single incident of “rock too hard to drill through” snowballed into a broader discussion of the water-source depletion, ground subsidence, and stalled land acquisition facing various prefectures along the entire route, with many commenters questioning whether the project should go forward at all. It’s worth noting, though, that the long rundown of regional problems (post 79) is an unverified summary circulating on 5channel, and specifics like the supposed uranium vein have not been confirmed by any official announcement. Disagreement over how to judge Kawakatsu personally runs in the background of all this, but this article focuses mainly on the facts of the construction itself.
*This article is compiled from excerpts and a summary of the 5channel (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Maglev construction hits absurdly hard rock in Shinagawa, and it’s seriously, truly over 😭“
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