It's interesting how freeways and extensive public transit are able to coexist peacefully in the metropolises across Japan, especially Tokyo which I visited in mid-January. I wonder why we can't do that here in the US.
It's a very homogenous society; if something stands to benefit the majority, my understanding is that most Japanese people will support it.
As I've learned in my transport courses at university, society doesn't benefit from transport networks that don't have some degree of redundancy (to absorb "shock"). Japan's major cities have incredibly redundancy; as far as I know, Tokyo offers all forms of transportation. If one mode gets overloaded, there's capacity elsewhere to absorb it. This redundancy is beneficial to everyone, even if someone only uses bikes and subways to get to work.
This is all wonderful, although they are apparently suffering from incredible levels of debt (^^^^) building such infrastructure.
I gotta ask, does any Japanese city have anywhere near as many freeway lane-miles per capita as any U.S. city that isn't New York? It's a loaded question because, despite my admitted lack of thorough quantitative research on the subject, I highly doubt it.
(Also, I'm jealous that you took multiple courses in transport. I didn't even have one that was fully dedicated to the subject.)
I did see this comment. Pardon the slow reply. "Transport courses" = two, for the record

(an Urban Planning course, and a Transport Planning course).
It's really hard to say. I don't know how many lane-miles of freeway there are in my city, nevermind some Japanese city.
But, based on what I know about Japan, they do have a surprising number of expressways. It's just that, by and large, they aren't 10 lanes in each direction. There are exceptions, like the Osaka CBD Ring Road that has four to five lanes in each direction, because it's a one-way sort of orbital road around the center of Osaka, but most freeways are fairly narrow, with 4 to 6 lanes max.
Japan doesn't view road travel, at least within built-up areas, as the most important transport method. For example, in Osaka (the city below -- note how many freeways there are), private vehicles account for a mere 18% of the modal share. The vast majority either walk, ride bikes, or use public transport, or some combination thereof.
I would guess that the average Japanese city isn't far off some American cities in terms of the overall number of freeways constructed, but they differ not just in financing methods (lots of tolls in Japan), but also how wide they are. As cities grew, the focus was not on adding more lanes or improving bottlenecks, but primarily on growing the public transport network and constructing urban areas that encouraged alternative transport methods. We did not do this in the US, so we instead focus on weird metrics like "freeway lane miles per capita". It's not that it's a silly metric, but it's just not important in places like Japan where, by and large, freeways just aren't the main transport mode.
