Japan's trains are great. Why is booking one so hard?

Japanese trains are renowned for their engineering excellence, but booking tickets online presents a frustrating user experience due to confusing interfaces, fragmented systems across six regional railway companies, and unnecessary complexity like requiring both a basic fare ticket and a separate express train ticket. The author attributes these design issues partly to cultural preferences for familiarity and caution, but primarily to Conway's Law—how a company's internal organizational structure shapes its software, causing the system to prioritize railway company operations over user needs.