At precisely 7.30am every weekday, just as they are cramming in a last mouthful of toast and gulp of coffee, Japanese commuters are treated to one of the great Tokyo institutions: the daily rail report.

A uniformed lady — herself an employee of the rail company — appears in the corner of the television screen against a large map of the greater Tokyo metropolitan rail network. “Today's problems on the railways.” she announces gravely. There is a short pause.

“There are no problems with the railways,” She bows demurely.

This daily slot, like the railways themselves, runs flawlessly. It is only on days when truly violent phenomena — typhoons or earthquakes — or when human frailty in the sad extreme of suicides occur, that there is any variation on the formula. And even then it is almost never JR East's fault.

The trouble is, Japan has been spoilt rotten by all this, which is why the spectre of lateness, cancelled trains and — horror — unpredictability of services is so profoundly unsettling to the men and women of Tokyo.

A spokesperson at JR East describes the corner it has painted itself into. “It's not like the United Kingdom, where five or ten minutes' delays are considered normal,” she said. “Japanese see it as a delay if the train is 15 seconds late.”

The company and the sister companies that run the famous bullet trains have done an extraordinary job in meeting the demands of such fastidious commuters: average annual lateness on the lines regularly comes in at less than half a minute and in some cases is under 10sec.

On the Yamanote Line — the giant loop that encircles central Tokyo — a train arrives every 2min 30sec on the anti-clockwise route and 2min 20sec on the clockwise route. If they are out by any more than 10sec, there is an apology — sincere, abject and (because of the high audio quality of the loudspeakers) universally audible.

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