I don't know for sure, but after living in Japan for 5 years now, whenever something in a Japanese business feels antiquated, inefficient, or just plain backwards and wrong, it's usually because some manager in an office who has been there longer than everyone else decided that it's good enough.
It probably sounds like I'm exaggerating, but loyalty to the hierarchy goes deep here. I don't know how many times I've had to hold my tongue and not state a fact because if I did, the manager would "lose face". Not an insult, a criticism, or even an open question, just a fact-- if I know it's contrary to what a manager thinks is the right way, he gets to sit back and keep his ego puffed up for no good reason.
Once my manager asked me to aggregate a list in excel to find a final count for a range of parts used in our blueprints. I used a pivot table in Excel. It took me about two minutes. He snapped back, "How are you doing this so quickly? It must be wrong. Do it like this:" and he proceeded to take a screenshot of each page of the sheet, send the screenshots to chatGPT, and ask it to aggregate them. Dear god I wish I was joking. It took him over an hour and still left room open for human error (or AI error I guess). I showed him the pivot table method, he just scoffed and walked away.
It really depends on industry and size - notably, it's ironic but smallish-medium businesses are the most stuck in old practices. They don't have shareholders or the org structure to change things, while the largest companies, makers, ad agencies, etc have largely moved forward to more outcome focused process. The hierarchy definitely still slows things down, requiring a lot of paper approvals to actually do anything. But holding your tongue in a meeting is frowned upon at at least many large cap.
I have a different opinion about this after visiting Japan for the first time this summer. I think they need to accommodate an aging population with technological advancements. It's a classic problem of making old systems work with new technologies. And this in itself is a great achievement if you look at it holistically. Yes, young(er) people can complain that is to hard to buy train tickets or have to interact over the phone for things that can be accomplished online, while old(er) people will probably have harder times adjusting to things like contactless payments, but in the end they managed to make the entire society, as a whole, function and move forward. It can be done better? Yes, definitely, but I think this is iterative and it will improve over time.
My experience was arriving by train company X to a large station, having bought what I thought was the correct ticket to continue with company Y. On the platform for company Y's train, there was a small sign in English reminding foreigners they actually needed two 'tickets' to use the train (just as the article mentions) and I'd only bought one of them. There was a machine just the other side of the adjacent ticket barrier to buy the missing part.
Except the custodian of the ticket barrier would not let me pass through to use the machine, since I had not entered through this barrier. He looked at my tickets, and said that since I had entered on company X's train, I must go to platform 48 or whatever and use the barrier there. I was on platform 1.
This was an enormous station, and I missed the intended train.
Another journey involved 7 printed tickets for a one way journey with a couple of changes.
But instead of simplifying this, the Japanese have invented a complicated ticket barrier where you can stuff in all 7 tickets together, and it clips the relevant one(s) and returns them in the correct order.
I already ranted a bit about this in my conclusion of this blog post [1], but I'm happy to rant again here: it's beyond my comprehension why planning a train journey in Japan has to be this messed up: you first have to figure out the route (and Google Maps doesn't have all the operators there), then you have to figure out how to buy the ticket for said route - which is an entire different system for each operator (e.g: JR East and JR West are completely different in their booking system). Then you have to deal with the consequences of Japan never modernizing (trying to use a credit card is painful, although things are improving a bit on this side). A few years back (less than 5) it was also impossible to reserve a train ticket using a foreign credit card (non Japan-issued Mastercard, with 3d-secure).
I always want to laugh and cry at the same time when I read their domain name for booking the ticket (because of course their app is only available in the Japanese Play Store / App Store):
https://e5489.jr-odekake.net/e5489/ibpc/CBTopMenuPC?LANG=en
Try any other variation of the above URL and you get... a 404.
I think it's cultural familiarity and resistance to change. My Japanese wife has no problem booking us tickets and it's been over 20 years since she left Japan -- the interface is probably the same as when she left Japan. People there are used to it and it's good enough for locals so no reason to change (even if it's more difficult for foreigners to use).
Her mom complains when anything changes, it's been over 2 years since her favorite affinity card switched from in-person redemption to an online app and she still complains about the change.
Buying tickets is a pain. You have to buy two tickets, and physically stack them together at the same time and feed into the machine at the gate.
Some trains and buses in remote areas only take cash. Some only take EXACT fare and the driver does not have change and will refuse you. I asked my hotel for exact fare by exchanging my foreign 10$ USD bill. The staff informed me it was illegal for them to exchange money. Lo and behold I looked it up and it is indeed illegal as you need a foreign exchange license.
The stacking two tickets thing is pretty much a relic of the past now. Your first ticket (local fare) is your Suica/Pasmo card, and your second ticket (express surcharge) can be loaded into the same Suica/Pasmo straight from the smartEX app where you bought your ticket, meaning all you need to do is tap the card once.
It's admittedly a PITA to set up the first time around, but once you've done it, it's silky smooth.
Most of the machines will literally just print you both tickets if you select the right option.
Your complaint about the money exchange is wild to me, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone try to do that in my 15+ years being in and out of Japan. Why would you expect to hand over a non local currency to them and have that work…?
Exchange is illegal, but not making change. Perhaps because of the language barrier they thought you might want to pay with USD.
There is a change machine in nearly every bus/train with conductorless operation, you take a boarding ticket when you get on and you pay when you get off. They're used to tourists screwing up and just ask where you boarded.
I think a fundamental issue is just that there are so many train companies. I don't think many (any?) other countries have quite so many, even JR isn't just one company. Even when individual companies put some effort into a renewal making things easier, when the experience starts from first finding out even which company to book from, there's a huge barrier to entry.
I think it is possible to define a booking standard so a meta provider could handle things, like trip.com etc for flights, maybe someday.
When Norway (unfortunately) privatized and tenderized* the railway, they at least made a provision that every ticket should be purchaseable through a government owned entity. Which means you can use the government app ("Entur") to travel plan and purchase, even between operators and even modalities (trains, busses, trams, etc).
* (using the word wrongly), and it was a hack job. The existing operator is still owned by the government (NSB, renamed to Vy), but then had to bid on contracts to win their existing lines back. Which they of course were predetermined to lose most of, otherwise all that work from the right side government would have been useless.
Of course, NSB then also couldn't have any advantages having been the sole provider from before. So men in suits decided which IT systems they were allowed to keep, and which should be the basis for the Entur app/system.
I came in as a consultant at Vy to reimplement what got severed, without having any prior knowledge/advantage.
- yes you need to speak and read Japanese
- a lot of sites embed the information inside of images, not text, which is not that easy to translate automatically and your AI agent probably won't think to check it unless you use screenshot navigation by default
- a lot of the booking will be done or expedited by phone calls
- yes you need a Japanese phone number
- yes you need a Japanese debit/credit card most of the time for online systems (or pay at the conbini, aka physical locations in Japan, American credits cards also work usually)
Japan is what it is. It's not super friendly infrastructure if you're not living there. No they don't want to change it.
While I agree that online booking in japan can be difficult the frequency (especially between Tokyo and Osaka) allow you to book the same day easily. And especially first time going there limited express can be a bit daunting.
But once you get used to it; booking a ticket for shinkansen feel more alike buying a metro ticket than a airline ticket.
But having traveled around Japan extensively, I've had a very easy time buying train tickets in person, at the station. You can buy in advance if you want, but I've rarely had any need; just go, and buy a ticket for the next train.
So I guess I'm not too surprised to see that the website design is crappy: it's an afterthought.
JR East is currently rolling out a new, streamlined booking portal. However, in classic Japanese style, attempting to access it from a non-Japanese IP returns a 403.
There was also news earlier this year that all the major JRs will introduce a unified booking portal in 2027, but I was unable to find any proof of life that this is actually happening.
The general problem is how to ensure quality in a low-competitive-pressure environment, especially public services which are natural monopolies. Quality only appears randomly if the right people happen to be in charge.
Look at what competition does in the AI model space. Imagine there was just OpenAI vs the actual case where there's Anthropic and others which pressure and copy each other.
I wonder if there's any solution to this, I couldn't think of any.
Japan has "Super Tickets" because it allows you to combine a shinkansen ticket with other rail journeys and use a single base ticket to connect between any two stations on the network, many with different infrastructure owners. It's very convenient once you grok it.
Often the Super is printed on the base ticket if you buy it together.
But maybe you use an IC card or virtual IC card and put the super ticket on it using the SmartEx app and reschedule or cancel with a few taps. Some people do that instead of whinging about inflexibility of legacy systems that still exist but no one uses.
The phrase “Japan has been living in the future since the future since the 80s” comes to mind. For a country so deeply rooted in the technological revolution of the last 50 years, it certainly doesn’t feel like it when your there. It’s a weird mix of culture, history, and a deeply capable people hamstrung by economic forces.
I think a lot of things stick around because they have a good bespoke manufactoring industry and maintenance practices. Old infrastructure and automations that were built during the bubble era still work and you can still get parts made for them.
Takes 30 seconds in Apple Wallet to issue a new card and put an initial load on it. Don't understand what the problem is. Buy it before you depart, put 2000 yen on it with a visa/mastercard, get on the train at the airport.
This isn't so much an example of "Japan is wierd lol" but "you're tapping it wrong".
A more puzzling aspect of it is, if you show up at a rural station near Akita, they'll sell you a multiple connection ticket to a rural station near Nagoya in seconds, using some hyperoptimized mainframe-terminal-style green-on-black text UI. A system that only requires you to know where you want to go does exist, maybe the problem is that every rail company has built their own version of such a system and there is an agreement to not compete online.
> The most frustrating experience I had was booking a ticket online, only to get a message after confirmation: “You’ll need the physical credit card to retrieve your ticket at the station.”
Most (all?) airlines require this. In practice, it's only checked if your name differs from the name in the credit/debit card.
Other than that, the user fails to explain why booking a train is harder in Japan? They have multiple operators/lines but that's normal for a big/dense city like Tokyo.
I've taken hundreds of flights in and between the USA and EU and never once had to show anyone my credit card. In a number of cases, the ticket was booked with someone else's credit card.
For (non-Schengen) international flights, I usually have to show someone my passport.
Didn't happen to me for a domestic flight with JAL recently. I was actually surprised how little they checked; just a QR code was sufficient (although my memory might be fuzzy due to the international flight just before it).
I was never required to book a flight ticket with a physical card while booking online. And even if that's a policy, I feel like being told that before booking would be nice.
It probably sounds like I'm exaggerating, but loyalty to the hierarchy goes deep here. I don't know how many times I've had to hold my tongue and not state a fact because if I did, the manager would "lose face". Not an insult, a criticism, or even an open question, just a fact-- if I know it's contrary to what a manager thinks is the right way, he gets to sit back and keep his ego puffed up for no good reason.
Once my manager asked me to aggregate a list in excel to find a final count for a range of parts used in our blueprints. I used a pivot table in Excel. It took me about two minutes. He snapped back, "How are you doing this so quickly? It must be wrong. Do it like this:" and he proceeded to take a screenshot of each page of the sheet, send the screenshots to chatGPT, and ask it to aggregate them. Dear god I wish I was joking. It took him over an hour and still left room open for human error (or AI error I guess). I showed him the pivot table method, he just scoffed and walked away.
Except the custodian of the ticket barrier would not let me pass through to use the machine, since I had not entered through this barrier. He looked at my tickets, and said that since I had entered on company X's train, I must go to platform 48 or whatever and use the barrier there. I was on platform 1.
This was an enormous station, and I missed the intended train.
Another journey involved 7 printed tickets for a one way journey with a couple of changes.
But instead of simplifying this, the Japanese have invented a complicated ticket barrier where you can stuff in all 7 tickets together, and it clips the relevant one(s) and returns them in the correct order.
I always want to laugh and cry at the same time when I read their domain name for booking the ticket (because of course their app is only available in the Japanese Play Store / App Store): https://e5489.jr-odekake.net/e5489/ibpc/CBTopMenuPC?LANG=en
Try any other variation of the above URL and you get... a 404.
[1]: https://blog.denv.it/posts/goodbye-travel-agents-hello-ai-ag...
Many of these used to be/still are phone numbers as well.
Her mom complains when anything changes, it's been over 2 years since her favorite affinity card switched from in-person redemption to an online app and she still complains about the change.
Some trains and buses in remote areas only take cash. Some only take EXACT fare and the driver does not have change and will refuse you. I asked my hotel for exact fare by exchanging my foreign 10$ USD bill. The staff informed me it was illegal for them to exchange money. Lo and behold I looked it up and it is indeed illegal as you need a foreign exchange license.
It's admittedly a PITA to set up the first time around, but once you've done it, it's silky smooth.
Your complaint about the money exchange is wild to me, I don’t think I’ve seen anyone try to do that in my 15+ years being in and out of Japan. Why would you expect to hand over a non local currency to them and have that work…?
There is a change machine in nearly every bus/train with conductorless operation, you take a boarding ticket when you get on and you pay when you get off. They're used to tourists screwing up and just ask where you boarded.
I think it is possible to define a booking standard so a meta provider could handle things, like trip.com etc for flights, maybe someday.
* (using the word wrongly), and it was a hack job. The existing operator is still owned by the government (NSB, renamed to Vy), but then had to bid on contracts to win their existing lines back. Which they of course were predetermined to lose most of, otherwise all that work from the right side government would have been useless.
Of course, NSB then also couldn't have any advantages having been the sole provider from before. So men in suits decided which IT systems they were allowed to keep, and which should be the basis for the Entur app/system.
I came in as a consultant at Vy to reimplement what got severed, without having any prior knowledge/advantage.
So much weirdness, and so much waste
But once you get used to it; booking a ticket for shinkansen feel more alike buying a metro ticket than a airline ticket.
But having traveled around Japan extensively, I've had a very easy time buying train tickets in person, at the station. You can buy in advance if you want, but I've rarely had any need; just go, and buy a ticket for the next train.
So I guess I'm not too surprised to see that the website design is crappy: it's an afterthought.
Obviously there are bad websites in the US or broader West as well, but the average in Japan feels a lot worse imo.
IE6, ActiveX controls, and mandatory keyloggers for online banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_So...
"there are so many fraudsters and scammers around, let us install our own keylogger"?
https://go.jreast.co.jp/
There was also news earlier this year that all the major JRs will introduce a unified booking portal in 2027, but I was unable to find any proof of life that this is actually happening.
Look at what competition does in the AI model space. Imagine there was just OpenAI vs the actual case where there's Anthropic and others which pressure and copy each other.
I wonder if there's any solution to this, I couldn't think of any.
Japan in 1980 was 2000
Japan in 2000 was 2000
Japan in 2020 is 2000
Often the Super is printed on the base ticket if you buy it together.
But maybe you use an IC card or virtual IC card and put the super ticket on it using the SmartEx app and reschedule or cancel with a few taps. Some people do that instead of whinging about inflexibility of legacy systems that still exist but no one uses.
Clearly once great and really ahead, but a little dated, by modern expectations.
I think Japan take this too far
This isn't so much an example of "Japan is wierd lol" but "you're tapping it wrong".
Just entering a code later in a ticket machine was enough to get it printed.
0. https://www.jreast.co.jp/multi/en/
Most (all?) airlines require this. In practice, it's only checked if your name differs from the name in the credit/debit card.
Other than that, the user fails to explain why booking a train is harder in Japan? They have multiple operators/lines but that's normal for a big/dense city like Tokyo.
For (non-Schengen) international flights, I usually have to show someone my passport.
Did you mean most/all airlines in Japan?