It baffles me that the country famous for high speed trains never bothered to build one between the city where 1/4 of its people live and the airport that handles most of its international flights (and used to handle all of them). Skyliner is pretty fast but it's not a Shinkansen, and Narita Express is basically just an ordinary train.

Of course, it's also baffling that they built the airport so far away in the first place, but that's another story.

> Of course, it's also baffling that they built the airport so far away in the first place, but that's another story.

The Kanto plain suffers from a dearth of available flat land, even more so enough available flat land to build a major international airport (this being worsened by Japan's weak eminent domain and history of resistance to relocation, half a century later there are still families living on the site and farming in the middle of the runways: http://www.japansubculture.com/the-phantoms-of-narita-airpor...)