>>1202228Not him, and I can only talk about my own, brief experience.
Coming from Switzerland, arguably the country with the second-best rail system in the world, I'm quite used to trains being on time.
Of course, we too get the odd 3 or 5 minute delay here, that's nothing special and from time to time there's the one train out that's 30 minutes late.
I've been in Japan for a total of 5 weeks only, so this is just an anecdote really.
While I found the trains there to me much less likely to be late than anywhere in Europe.
1. No delays on any of my long-distance shinkansen rides.
2. While going to the Fuji-Q highland, we had to take the Super Azusa, a limited express IIRC and that train actually arrived at the interchange station 20 minutes late. I was quite surprised by that, since there were no announcements in English.
3. While going north from Ueno towards Mito, we took the Hitachi, another express, and that one departed Ueno 20 minutes behind schedule. There was an earthquake about 5 hours earlier, and apparently that caused the disruption. Now I'm not blaming JR for natural disasters but I found them to not reacting very well. Instead of turning around the late inbound train in Ueno to prepare the trainset for an on-time departure there, it went all the way to Tokyo or Shinagawa. From Ueno onwards, the passengers coming in could have easily switched to any other train within Tokyo.
3. Our Yamanote line train once stood still in Nippori station for 10 minutes without any information in English. Now this could've been a planned stop but seeing Yamanote line trains usually run in 4 minute intervalls, it was quite strange.
