I visited Japan rather recently, and one of the things which struck me about their rail network (aside from how clean and high-specification all of their trains are) was how staffed everything was.
Most metro-style commuter lines in the cities had conductors onboard - in fact during my two weeks there, in which I must've travelled on around 70 trains across various different regions, I only encountered one "conductorless" train which was a little EMU which pootled along the rural coast in Hiroshima Prefecture.
On one rural line in Yamagata Prefecture, the two-car train I was travelling on appeared to have three conductors onboard. I'm unsure of the reason for this - perhaps training purposes - although it certainly wasn't uncommon for trains to have two, three, even four, members of staff onboard at once.
On the Tokaido Shinkansen, it seemed as though they had employed staff solely to hand out wet towels to passengers. I'm sure they have other duties (?) but from the perspective of a seated passenger, that was all they appeared to do - and then you had the catering staff and every so often a different member of staff would walk through with a bin bag.
Many of the stations in the smaller towns and villages I visited also had manned ticket offices until quite late in the evening - certainly very different from the "peak-hours only ticket offices" at most smaller stations we have over here.
