This is how you travel in Japan. Pay attention! Your gear travels separately, maybe arrives the next day, but through the crowded stations you have only what you're going to be using immediately. So pack accordingly.
The business of making the world Safe for Humans has gone uneconomically far in the last century and a half, and we are in the process of retreating from it. The response of advanced nations to the Germ Theory of Disease, for example, has been to sterilize the water supply. But only a tiny fraction of the water we use is for drinking; why chlorinate all of it? So you see the water supplies deteriorating, and ourselves drinking bottled water.
Another example: decent habitation. The building codes run hundreds of pages describing how a house must be built so that a human can live in it and not be squashed in an earthquake, or asphyxiated or burnt or whatever. But, guess what, your jet ski doesn't need all that. Anybody can buy 12 bedrooms full of junk, it's almost impossible not to, but who can afford a 12-bedroom house with proper ventilation and wheelchair accessibility for the U-Haul box that has your High School Yearbook and graduation tassel? So, once again, we are starting to double track: a modest house for our personal selves, and a blockhouse for all the out of season stuff.
As this applies to travel, the Japanese are inventing the way forward. The local convenience store and every hotel is a freight forwarding service. Your suitcases don't go by Shinkansen. You do.
