The objects of nostalgia are always receding. In the stories of Nagai Kafu, for example, electric trolleys (also called trams or streetcars) are viewed as ugly symbols of everything that is new and un-Japanese. His characters ride them out of necessity, but walk or take a rickshaw whenever they can. By the time Kafu died, in 1959, Tokyo's commuters could hardly have hired a rickshaw even if they had wanted to. The trolley was king, at least in the central city, until the 1964 Olympics brought the freeways and new subway lines and ushered in the era of its decline. If Kafu were writing today, in a Tokyo choked with cars, trains and buses, he would probably be waxing nostalgic about the dear old trolley system.

He wouldn't be the only one. In many cities worldwide, trolleys are by no means defunct. Occasionally, their continued existence does reflect a Kafu-like nostalgia. San Francisco, for one, has built an entire miniature tourist industry around its colorfully restored trolleys and cable cars, many of them survivors of obsolete systems in other American cities. Antique streetcars have even been brought from other countries to run on San Francisco's streets. Far from symbolizing the new and the ugly, they are touted as examples of the superior craftsmanship and more leisurely lifestyle of the past.

But in other places, the trolley is not so much a cultural-heritage issue (though it is generally that too) as an indispensable and very practical part of an existing public-transport system. The trams of Melbourne, Australia, have been running in one form or another for over a century; while it is true that tourists love them, commuters in the city's central business district would be stranded without them. The ubiquitous trams of colonized Asia did not long survive World War II, but efficient streetcar or "light-rail" systems still operate in scores of Russian and European cities.