Throughout my life I’ve never had to regularly travel to school or work for more than about 30 minutes from A to B. I felt that that used to be a lot at times and I still do but thats nothing compared to the Japanese. Commuting to work for over an hour is fairly standard here it seems. They tend to use each journey as personal time for reading, studying or more commonly just sleeping. One of my Japanese friends travels two hours to work everyday so that takes up four hours in a day on top of the average 10-12 hour working day so very little time for anything else from his day.

However, that pales into insignificance compared to what I read a few months ago about one man who travels for three hours one-way everyday. Why anyone would want to do this, I don’t know but given the cost of rail travel in Japan it is more practical than the more expensive British Rail prices.