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.
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.
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.
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 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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
IE6, ActiveX controls, and mandatory keyloggers for online banking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_compatibility_issues_in_So...
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.
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.
Japan in 1980 was 2000
Japan in 2000 was 2000
Japan in 2020 is 2000
Clearly once great and really ahead, but a little dated, by modern expectations.
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?