(ã—ã‚“ã‹ã‚“ã›ã‚“) Known as "bullet trains" in the West, the literal translation of shinkansen is just "new trunk line". The fastest trains can reach speeds in excess of 300 kph. There are four shinkansen lines linking Tokyo with the rest of the country: the Tokaido Shinkansen, which goes to Osaka via Nagoya and Kyoto; the Nagano Shinkansen to, er, Nagano; the Joetsu Shinkansen to Niigata; and the Tohoku Shinkansen, which runs all the way to the northern tip of Honshu, with spurs off to Yamagata and Akita.