[moju]

Your country is not even 250 years old. There are older cities with better infrastructure.

[mgolawala]

Exactly. You see the high speed rail in Italy, Japan or China and think about just how old those countries are. All have excellent high speed rail.

It isn't limited just to the outskirts either. For example, Rome itself has an amazing metro train system.

The problem isn't the age of the country. The problem is bureaucratic dysfunction.

[NikolaeVarius]

Firebombing tends to.tear down old infrastructure pretty effectively

[jbay808]

By the time they started planning the bullet train, that was long in the past. This is what the surroundings would have looked like when the bullet train started.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:0_series_Yurakucho_1967...