Tokyo Just Works. It is inspiring to see a well-functioning civil society. Most emblematic of this is the trains that always arrive on time, are always clean, and rarely get delayed. There is still so much more potential to be had around the world.
The cleanliness was a big part of it, but also just how non-abused everything was. I was there for a week and didn't once see a tag carved into the seats or walls of a train car or smell urine on a platform. I don't think I even saw a single piece of litter on a train. The respect with which people treat public property was genuinely eye-opening.
I wish there were some kind of transferable lesson that we could apply here where dingy and defaced public infrastructure is just accepted as "the way things are in a big city," when it's demonstrably not inevitable.
You become blind to it when you live there but when you suddenly realise places _dont_ have to be tagged when they shutter for the night. (If they even shutter at all)
When you go hiking in the countryside, it is common to see people carrying a small plastic bag to pickup any garbage along the trails. Again, compared to other hiking destinations, the trails here are freakishly clean all the time.
General stores, restaurant, and public transport work really well however.
I will not touch on societal issues or politics, as everyone has their own view on these matters.
On iOS the integration with Apple wallet means you can top it up and provision it without even needing to install the app.
Still incredible that I can now have a Suica ready to go before I even arrive in Tokyo, all using the Wallet app
Never heard about a shortage. Possibly the person did not know where to buy them.
There are Fare adjustment machines in the stations for the cases you mentioned. You don't have to handle cash or talk to attendants.
Station names can definitely be confusing though, even for natives.
When I was a tourist here several years ago, I had no trouble at all. I just used Google Maps. It tells you exactly where to go, which platform to stand on, when the train will arrive, which car to sit in for most efficient transfer, etc.
>First, you have to pay your tickets in cash every time (the "IC cards" are not sold anywhere due to a chip shortage)
No one uses cash, except some tourists. The chip shortage thing is a very, very recent problem. All the locals don't have this problem; they have IC cards they've had for years, or they use their phone. According to some other comments here, they do sell special IC cards for tourists at the airports now.
>and the machines do not accept foreign credit cards.
There's a good reason for this. 1) fees, and 2) credit cards are incredibly slow. Japan developed the Felica chips used in IC cards specifically because they needed to be extremely fast to handle the incredible foot traffic going through the fare gates. Using credit cards (even if the processors lifted all the fees) would slow everything down and cause a massive backup.
>you have to go to a ticket counter and pay whatever you owe (again, in cash only)
Well yeah, that's what you get for using old-fashioned paper tickets.
>Lastly, the similarity in station names, such as Nippori Station and Nishi-Nippori Station,
You think it's confusing to have "X Station", and "West X Station"? The US has the exact same thing: in the DC metro system, there's Falls Church East and Falls Church West stations, for instance, or Farragut West vs. Farragut North in downtown DC.
You were relating it as if it's normal. It's not.
It's like going as a tourist to NYC in 2012, getting hit by Hurricane Sandy, and then complaining that NYC is plagued by hurricanes and flooding and a terrible city to visit as a result. (Sandy was an event that NYC hadn't experienced in, I don't even know, generations?)
Buying paper tickets for local trains/subways simply hasn't been normal in Japan for quite a long time. And according to other posters here, you could have bought an IC card at the airport anyway, but for some reason you didn't do that or ask about it. When I came here as a tourist, buying an IC card was the second thing I did after I got off the plane and got out of immigration/customs, right after visiting an ATM and getting some cash. It's one of the most basic things about visiting Japan, and should have been one of the first things mentioned on any website that you'd find when googling about traveling in Japan.
It's not even much different than the US: if you want to visit DC or NYC, you have to have a stored-value fare card (or phone app these days), and unlike Japan, those cards are only good on those cities' metro systems, whereas Japan's IC cards can generally be used everywhere in the country (with some weird exceptions, but Suica and Pasmo generally work almost everywhere). And unlike the city-specific cards in the US, you can return the IC cards when you leave Japan and get your whole deposit (plus remaining stored value) back.
>Another problem which I forgot to mention is that sometimes the colors in Google Maps didn't match those in the metro.
I've never noticed that. The colors for the Tokyo Metro lines are all correct in my daily experience; I'm not so sure about the other lines, but Tokyo Metro makes more use of color-coding for different lines AFAICT.
I ignored the names and worked purely off the station numbers, knowing that my hotel was on the chiyoda line, and google maps.
iPhone and Apple Watch work OOTB since iPhone 8/X and Series 4.