Yoshiyuki Kasai, the honorary chairman of Central Japan Railway Co. who played a key role in privatizing Japan National Railways in the late 1980s, has died of interstitial pneumonia, the train operator said Friday. He was 81.

Kasai, who died Wednesday, was one of the three key figures along with the former presidents of JR East and JR West who led the reform of Japan's railway system and breakup of the state-owned operator in 1987. The privatization created six regional passenger and one freight rail operator along with several other private companies.

Joining the state-run railways after graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1963, Kasai worked in the corporate planning and labor divisions and became president of the privatized JR Central, which operates the Tokaido Shinkansen Line connecting Tokyo and Osaka among other services, in 1995.

The Tokyo native sought to sell the firm's high-speed railway systems such as maglev trains overseas, saying that its maglev technology would "take the lead in ultrafast transport services in the 21st century."

In 2010, Kasai and then-U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood took a demonstration ride on a maglev in Japan amid hopes to sell the system to the United States.

At home, Kasai pushed a plan for maglev trains called Linear Chuo Shinkansen to run at speeds of up to 500 kilometers per hour to connect Tokyo and Nagoya, located 286 kilometers apart, in 40 minutes, less than half the time taken by existing shinkansen trains.

But he was cautious about exporting Japan's shinkensen bullet train system to China out of concerns over the transfer of key technology to the country.

During his tenure, JR Central was listed on the former First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1997. Kasai became chairman in 2004, honorary chairman in 2014 and stepped down as a board member in 2020.

He also served on government committees, joining the National Public Safety Commission in 2006 and becoming head of the Committee on National Space Policy of the Cabinet Office in 2012.

==Kyodo

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