I was used to the rail system in London, which is extensive but also absurdly well documented. You always know what train you’re on and where you’re going. In Japan, you’re contending with the fact that everything’s in Japanese, and though signs flash briefly to English every 20 seconds or so, it’s never when you’re looking at them. Non-recorded announcements are never in English. Most recorded announcements are repeated a second time in English, though at times the English recording is clearly out of date and is saying something totally nonsensical, like please exit the train now even though it’s going 100mph. You’re also dealing with station names like Chojagahamashiosaihamanasukoenmae that are a little tough for Westerners to remember.

It also doesn’t help that Japan has secret pronunciation rules. We were having a hard time finding Morishita station, so we asked some nearby monorail personnel. “Is that the train to Morishita station?” “What station?” “Morishita.” “Never heard of that, let me ask someone.” Other girl’s never heard of it either. I pull out my phone and show them the station. “Oh! Mo-ri-sta Station! Yes, that’s the right train.” The “hi” is silent? Okay!

But the biggest difference is that in London, all the trains and underground and everything else are all one company. You get an oyster card and you’re done. In Japan you’re dealing with over a dozen different companies just for the trains alone, which are separate from each city’s subway system, and Tokyo has six different subway companies. Never mind that you’ll be underground on trains more often than you will be on the subway, which is often elevated.

Why this matters is that just because you’re in the train station in city X, that doesn’t mean you’re in the right train station in city X for your next train, since it’s run by a different company than the one you came in on. You’re in Nagoya Station, you need Kintetsu Nagoya or maybe Meitetsu Nagoya. Generally it’s in the same part of town more or less, but Google maps never figures any of this when it’s giving you 30 seconds to walk from train to train.

Tourists have the great advantage of being able to buy a Japan Rail Pass, which allows you sort-of unlimited travel on the largest train company’s network. I say sort of because it doesn’t work on their two fastest 200mph bullet trains, you’re limited to the 185mph trains which seems like splitting hairs but I think was just to keep us from feeling too ashamed of our shitty train system back home. This quirk was mostly a pain in the ass when scoping out itineraries and needing to remember which trains you can’t take.

Some cars on the train require reservations, some entire trains require reservations, and people seem to just know this. Japan was full of strange rules that weren’t explained anywhere. The US probably is too and we just can’t see it from the inside.

Most rail and subway travel is paid for by loading money on a Suica card, a stored-value card like the Oyster in England. Once you have this you can just swipe through turnstiles and it figures out how much to charge you. You can also use the Suica to pay at vending machines and convenience stores in the big cities. It’s a very slick system that works great if you’re not a tourist who also has a Japan Rail pass, which is just a piece of paper you show the station attendants and they wave you through a little side gate without scanning anything. This completely breaks the intricate Japanese system.

Normally, you swipe your Suica when you enter a station and again when you leave the next station, easy peasy, it charges you for that ride. But what if you took the subway (swipe) to the Japan Rail station, where you were waved through with your paper pass? (no swipe). Total chaos.

The first time this happened to us, we tried to get on a train but the turnstile wouldn’t let us through, so we went to the little ATM machine where you load money on your Suica cards. It told us our cards were broken because we’d entered a station but never left some time that morning, so we hit the “Help please” button, summoning a disembodied voice from the speaker that thankfully spoke English. After explaining our situation, the voice asked us to load our cards into the machine and hold up our rail passes for the camera that we didn’t know was there. Beep boop bip, cards spit back out, fully functional. Customer service in Japan is amazing.

This same kind of thing happened three or four more times on the trip, with varying degrees of difficulty in explaining the problem to station personnel with varying degrees of English skill.