Thanks for that insight gogooo ,that's a very Japanese trusting way to do this.

If we get into the specifics, I couldn't do self checkin, or online checkin. During the physical checkin I was helped, though it did seem to take rather a long time (10 minutes?), to get my boarding passes printed. I've no real idea what was the exact problem but they needed both my email and phone number before I could get them in my hands. I'm not certain I would have trusted waiting till the gate to get fully checked in.

Part of my "problem" on the b2b is that I was travelling hand baggage only and have an APEC card, so clearing immigration and customs took less time than walking from the (furthest away) gate.