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‘When I was a boy I was always up to some mischief,’ says Yoshihiro
Kyotani. Now at 67, and head of Technova, an independent technology development
foundation, the crystal radios and hand-wound electric motors which he built
in childhood are far behind him. Since graduating in mechanical engineering
from Kyoto University in 1948, he has helped design the first bullet train,
pioneered a magnetically levitated train and seen it take the world speed
record, and developed the first lift powered by superconducting magnets.
But despite all these successes, the itazura (mischief) persists.

Kyotani’s favourite occupation appears to be springing apparently impossible
ideas upon his colleagues and then making them happen. A few years ago,
for example, he wondered whether it might be possible to combine the advantages
of an electric car (quiet, pollution-free travel) with those of an electric
train (extremely fast, long-distance travel). A new idea was born: a vehicle
that ran as a conventional electric car for inner city transport and then
turned into a magnetically levitated car which could be whisked at enormous
speeds along special expressways built between cities. He presented the
idea at the annual international super-conductor conference in the US.
‘No one believed me. Well, I suppose it couldn’t be helped, so the next
year I took along a working model to the conference. It went well. In fact,
my hosts asked me to leave it behind!’

The idea hasn’t been taken any further yet, but then the maglev train
was once just a glimmer in his eye. Now it holds the world train speed record
(517 kilometres per hour) and the latest model is about to start a series
of tests on a new 43-kilometre test track in central Japan.

The story began back in the 1960s when Kyotani had just finished working
on the first bullet train. With trains running at over 300 kilometres per
hour, he saw that thousands of maintenance workers were needed to keep the
track in perfect repair, and even then, noise and vibration remained serious
problems for people living nearby. Why not overcome all these problems,
Kyotani speculated, with a smooth, silent, vibration-free train that floated
in the air? Linear motors could obviously provide the power to move such
a train, but how could it be made to float?

Kyotani was by this time deputy director of technology development at
Japan National Railways and was determined to find ideas in which Japan
could take the lead. ‘With the bullet train, we had foreign models to work
from. Once you have the model the job is more project management than real
technical development.’ He thought for a while about air-cushion vehicles,
but the French were already building an ‘Aerotrain’ and so he turned to
powerful superconducting magnets – the simplest way to lift the train high
enough for it to operate safely at great speeds.

Since then, Japan has been alone in developing superconducting magnetic
levitation trains: the first passenger prototype was ready in 1980. ‘I rode
it on the test track and we reached 400 kilometres per hour,’ Kyotani’s
says contentedly.

The big question now, is whether the special track will ever be built
to link Tokyo and Osaka. Kyotani is confident. ‘Nothing to worry about.
We have begun the latest experiments on time. When we have the data we’ll
investigate various routes. Soon after the year 2000 we’ll be using it
– we’ll be able to get to Osaka in an hour.’

While he waits for that high-speed trip, Kyotani has gone on to make
mischief elsewhere. He saw that if Japan ever built its cities in the sky,
lifts would be a problem. In a conventional lift shaft, there is one lift
and one lift cable. Imagine a single building with 100 000 workers: ‘The
shafts will take up all the area of the building, so, I thought, why not
turn the elevator shaft into a sort of train line. With lifts levitated
by superconducting magnets, there would be no cables and scores of elevators
could operate in the same shaft.’ Once again everyone thought the idea was
a joke, but he built a model. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries liked it and
in 1991 the company unveiled the world’s first superconducting linear motor
lift.

What next for Kyotani? He has a little cartoon poster of the city of
the future, full of new ways of using linear motors and superconducting
magnets; there are planes, ships. submarines, rockets and, of course, trains,
expressways and elevators. Is there anything Kyotani wouldn’t want to design?
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘Weapons. I saw enough of the war.’