Gen Okajima is waiting for a train. He knows it will not arrive soon, not even in the next few years, but he is not feeling anxious or impatient. He says it will come once Australia is ready for it.
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Mr Okajima, general manager of the Sydney office of Japan's biggest railway company, is waiting for the day Australia builds a high-speed rail line between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the subject of a federal government study.
It is his job to see that when or if that happens, Australia uses shinkansen, the ''bullet trains'' that carry millions along Japan's great network of high-speed rail lines.
Mr Okajima said Japan was proud of its shinkansen technology, which was a world-class system. ''And Australia is such an important friend to Japan, we are looking to share its benefit.''
This partnership would include sharing research and development costs with the Central Japan Railway Company, Mr Okajima's employer.
But the company has been waiting 26 years for high-speed rail to come to Australia. It opened its Sydney office in 1988. For now its main line of business is exporting Australian wine and snacks such as beef jerky to Japan to be sold on the shinkansen.
''That way we can keep open this office without any income from high-speed rail projects,'' Mr Okajima said.
The company, which operates the world's busiest high-speed rail line between Tokyo and Osaka, has seen three high-speed rail proposals rise and fail since it came to Australia.
''In democratic countries it happens all the time,'' Mr Okajima said. ''It is such a huge project, it needs to have a long, wide range of commitments from government to taxpayer.''
The latest high-speed proposal for the east coast would cost $61 billion to $108 billion to build and carry 54 million passengers a year by 2036, according to the study's phase one findings. The second and final phase would assess its economic viability.
Mr Okajima said he was not sure if phase two would give the green light but said ''in the near future an Australian government will decide to build high-speed rail''.
He said the nation's appetite for it was growing.
The first push for high-speed rail in the 1980s was opposed by residents along the route and by environmental groups. But communities now saw high-speed rail as a ticket to economic growth, and environmentalists favoured it as a less fossil fuel-intensive transport mode than road and air travel, he said.
The biggest sticking point remained the huge cost of building it, but the government ''should not be afraid to borrow'' as Japan did in the 1950s to its ultimate benefit. ''The first stage should be some short distance, like Sydney to Canberra,'' Mr Okajima said. ''Then we will realise how it can play a role in building the nation.''
