DontCallMeMaybe

There's a good number of differences between "shithouse countries" and countries that care enough about the wellbeing of their citizens to have good, clean, and free public toilets.

We should definitely make not using that phrase one of 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".

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.

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.