[livius]

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.

[Vigilanteman]

It is a country which is roughly the size of Montana with 40% of the U.S. population, heavilly skewed to the urban side. And, yes, the elderly don't travel much but the young probably travel more than their U.S. counterparts.

The international travel density is not all that dissimilar when one considers there are exactly THREE airports designed for a large volume on international travel; one in the Kansai (Osaka-Kobe) area and two in the Tokyo area, Narita and Haneda. Haneda is also a major domestic hub with two of the three terminals devoted to domestic flights.

The biggest difference, I think, is cultural as Japan has neither many visitors nor local population that feels "special" nor "entitled."