Yoshiyuki Kasai

There are railroad executives, and then there's Yoshiyuki Kasai — the man who made the bullet train his life's work and then decided that wasn't ambitious enough. He spent decades steering JR Central, the custodian of the Tokaido Shinkansen, arguably the most important railway corridor on the planet, and ran it with the kind of relentless conviction that tends to make people either deeply admire you or find you exhausting to negotiate with. But the maglev project — the Linear Chuo Shinkansen, floating on magnetic fields at 500 km/h — that was his real obsession, and it says everything about the man that he committed the company to something that won't be finished until after he was gone. Tokyo University educated, Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun awarded, and completely uninterested in half-measures. A builder's builder from Hyogo who thought in decades, not quarters.

Yoshiyuki Kasai (October 20, 1940 – May 25, 2022) was a Japanese business executive born in Akashi, Hyogo Prefecture. He was educated at Tokyo Metropolitan Nishi High School and graduated from the University of Tokyo. In 2014 he was awarded the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun, one of Japan's highest state honors, in recognition of his contributions to business and the economy.

Name (English)

Yoshiyuki Kasai

Name (Japanese)

葛西敬之

Reading

かさい よしゆき

Born

October 20, 1940 – May 25, 2022

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Libra / Dragon

Origin

Akashi, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

Businessman / Corporate Executive / Professor / Economist

High school

Tokyo Metropolitan Nishi High School

University

University of Tokyo

Awards & achievements

• 2014 — Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun (旭日大綬章)

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%91%9B%E8%A5%BF%E6%95%AC%E4%B9%8B
• Wikidatahttps://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q11620990

Tags

• From Hyogo Prefecture
• Businessman
• Corporate Executive
• Professor

Last updated

2026-06-02

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.