Japan 1: transport

I visited Japan for the first time in August 2007. Flying from Newcastle (NCL) via Schipol (AMS) to Narita (NRT), and back, the long flights over Asia were painful and long-as-a-lifetime. However, KLM was good, and avoided adding extra pain.
Taking the Narita express was the least problematic means of travelling the fifty or so miles from the airport into central Tokyo. Returning to Narita at the end of the holiday it was a mistake to take the stopping train, for although the ticket was cheaper, the train was crowded for much of the journey, which was also substantially longer.
Japan has many railway companies, some of which belong to the Japan Rail Group. Trains belonging to different companies may run on the same lines, or on different lines; may stop at the same stations, or at different stations; may start and terminate at the same place or different places. Inevitably there are different running frequencies, different travel times and different fare structures. Working out how best to travel by train from, for instance, Tokyo to Nikko, is as complicated as working out how best to travel by train from Durham to Newcastle is easy. Within Tokyo, the subway system has a tendency to shadow the suburban railway system. Not forgetting the limited-stop, deep-underground suburban railway system. Whether Japanese people are so used to these multi-layered options that they negotiate them without effort, or like unsuspecting visitors from overseas they quail at the thought, I have no idea. Their ability to read modern Japanese script, which, true to form, uses four different character sets (kanji, hiragana, katakana and roman), delivers a profound advantage when buying a rail ticket from machine, for although the machine offers instructions in English, the same courtesy is not extended to the names of stations, which are written in kanji.