The rest of the airport was so nice (Tokyo Haneda) with reasonably priced shops, restaurants, exhibits and the like that I never even got around to checking in the longue.
They have this weird notion over there that customers are to be served and enticed, not herded like cattle.
In all fairness, Japan is a smaller country, a lot of its population is elderly and doesn’t fly much and in any case I think unvaccinated Japanese are not permitted to enter the US. Thus they probably don’t have the international travel density that we have.
Atlanta is a pretty good airport, JFK is horrible, O’Hare is worse, so yes, there are differences between international airports. A lot of these are essentially taxpayer funded, so we should make more demands on them.