To be fair, Japan has specific digital service offerings in a lot of niches that outdo most of internationally aligned competitors with their eyes closed.
It's just many things piling up. transit.yahoo.co.jp for long and short distance public transport, maps.yahoo.co.jp instead of US map services, tabelog.com for restaurant reviews, navitime for car navigation etc. Note that the desired functionality is often available only in Japanese. If the sites have international/English versions, often you get a lite version at best and a dummy version without much content in the worst case. You can observe that for example already when you research the Narita Express rail service; the JR pages in English always have less detail and info than the JP ones. A good thing about Japan's online services is that a lot of them are not "apps" they're web sites and the apps just containers for the web sites, on Android more often than not anyway, as Japan is iPhone country. So you get the same services from your desktop as on your smartphones, and many service websites still have proper, fully featured mobile web versions, as opposed to many Western online services making their mobile web versions increasingly unusable, pushing apps, like .e.g. reddit. Also JP web is much more pleasant than Anglo web in my opinion; they have stuck with a combination of "tables tables everywhere", hypertext links, and dead-simple HTML markup plus colorful icons/ads/banners in plain image formats from the late 2000s which is very easy to read, e.g. https://www.jreast.co.jp/ltd_exp/guide/#price_area2 Easy to read, easy to use.
