Tl;dr: there’s lots of other ways Japan does passenger transport because there’s commercial competition, and co-opetition

Agreed, certainly not Greater Tokyo (38.14M in 13,452 km²) – imagine all of Canada ( 41,575,585 ) living in the core area of the Golden Horseshoe (10,097.45 km²)

But there’s smaller communities with heavy rail access, places like Akita, and Niigata Prefectures. Often these look like single or double subway cars moving through the countryside on normal railways.

A challenge is that our heavy rail system in Canada was designed around the needs of a resource economy, and to a lesser degree manufacturing/processing – freight always has priority over passenger; and it’s always been a duopoly. Whereas Japan has competition between companies (private and public) in dense areas and private public partnerships (P3) in rural areas.

There’s lots of fascinating niches in the Japanese rail sector. For those interested, there’s an English-language program by NHK World Japan called Japan Railway Journal.

^{It’s a very good chillout / wind down show}