Gee, fuck all these other cities that are all obviously shitholes? I guess?
I’m gonna laugh my way into the new year with downvotes because I dared to think my city is also pleasant to live in and say so.
Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
61–70 of 448 posts
Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wish all cities everywhere was more like them! (and Tokyo)
Lived in Paris for years but wanted to go to my native Normandy 90 minutes away by car often, with friends (so train is uneconomical, and whatever): I love car free cities just as much as I love cars, but I feel they always miss the massive parking space at the periphery. Those have to be free one day, and truly understood and desired, so we can sort of mix the intra city metro/bike, the intra regional car, and maybe…
I think that there much better approaches to your problem than to just wack a great big car park on the outskirts.
For instance if you don’t have a car, the money save from not having a large piece of machinery sitting around most of the time would probably more than make up for a few train tickets. Another option is car share fleets which allow you to split costs and avoid a cost of owning a car.
Even with electric cars, cities should still be designed for people rather than cars. Electric cars are still a massive burden on the environment so we shouldn’t be aiming for most people to have their own.
Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Living in Tokyo is amazing, but working for a Japanese company as a dev is probably not a great career move if you're relatively young. Software Engineering in Japan is many years behind the rest of the world, the pay is relatively low, and it isn't considered as desirable of a career as it is in other countries. It would be much better if you could find an international or remote company that allows you to live in J…
I thought about getting a remote role for an SV company while living in Tokyo but the timezone difference is way off.
I've thought about trying to get a remote role for a company in AU/NZ and living in Japan that way, then you're "only" off by 1-4 hours. Better be good at waking up early though.
Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wish all cities everywhere was more like them! (and Tokyo)
Lived in Paris for years but wanted to go to my native Normandy 90 minutes away by car often, with friends (so train is uneconomical, and whatever): I love car free cities just as much as I love cars, but I feel they always miss the massive parking space at the periphery. Those have to be free one day, and truly understood and desired, so we can sort of mix the intra city metro/bike, the intra regional car, and maybe…
Making cars electric doesn't solve any of the problems with cars though. Cars, no matter the technology, are the problem. I'd much rather get rid of more or less all cars, permanently, period.
Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
#65> Tokyo comes joint fourth, but its population is larger than the combined populations of the others (Adelaide, Auckland, Osaka and Wellington).
Having lived in Adelaide and visited Toyko, Osaka and a bunch of other Japanese cities, I can take a crack at the difference:
Adelaide is a great lifestyle city, if you don't actually want to live in a city, love car enabled lifestyles and the outdoors. Tokyo would be great if you just love city life and have an insatiable desire to discover city culture, and you want to spend most of your time as a pedestrian. You just can't run out of things to discover in Tokyo or Japan in general, and everything is easy to get to in Japan from Tokyo.
In Adelaide, you need a car to get out of the burbs, it's very car centric, and because you'll eventually run out of stuff to do in the city since it's quite small, you'll need the car to drive out to new places. Public transport is spotty, or non-existent. Trains aren't too bad, if you move here, move near a train.
I would recommend Adelaide if you're pretty content with a median lifestyle, and just want to focus on hobbies, sports and don't mind going to the same handful of cafes every year. I think you'd get more mileage out of Tokyo if you want to dive headfirst into city life and city culture.
The other difference is that with a low population, hobby groups in Adelaide are small, and what you love may not even be in Adelaide, getting supplies for things can be difficult. Lots of new things don't make it there due to that issue as well. It can feel a bit dead-end in that way. In Tokyo, if you like it, there's a group for you somewhere, and what you want is probably sold nearby.
Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like this is a chicken and egg problem. In many western cities - and I won't name names - the downtown area is not pleasant due to anti-social behaviour. So even when they do make it walkable, I don't want to walk there, I'd rather drive to a suburban mall and reduce my chances of an altercation. Until that's fixed it's a non-starter.
Is this a problem that America has generally? I.e there are areas where most people are scared to walk through in every city? I know many parts of the world have problems like this, but Europe doesn’t have many places like that.
Yes, it's a known problem. Lax law enforcement, most social services are also "downtown."
While the commenter said they wont name the cities, it can be Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, etc.
It makes it unpleasant, and if you do have to live in the middle of downtown or such, not only are you paying more - you have to for safety. Safety of a living place, safety of controlled entry, safety of a garage for your car, etc.
In General it's all depressing, you'd imagine downtown cores would be the "best" of a city, but in the USA they generally are not.
Now whether or not it's true insecurity, fear or such can be up to person/gender but criminal statistics do not lie. You can pull up a map and see where the majority of crime is reported of happening - and there you go.
Then you can look at the threshold and severity. But nowadays we live in an era of political correctness or wokeness, so saying or making direct observations of that data can become very faulty quickly, especially once you bring up age, gender and race of the perpetrators.
So eh.
Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I grew up in Stockholm and it too sadly is very, very car centric compared to Tokyo. Amsterdam, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Paris and others are much better... I wish all cities everywhere was more like them! (and Tokyo)
Note that Amsterdam made a conscious flip on this, as did other Dutch cities. Take your 4 lane street, turn one lane in a tram lane, one lane into grass + trees, reduce the width on the other two lanes and add a bike lane with a heightened divider. Bam you've got a street for a more livable city center.
It also took them the better part of several decades.
Most cities that have tried doing this globally have only done so very recently, and it shows, but that's okay, because it took time and patience to methodically go through more or less every Dutch road and change it.
Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
#68I thought about getting a job there as a dev. However certain things like culture, low pay, the language, and making new friends has held me back. I really loved the city when I visited a couple years back. Does anyone live in Japan as a dev and not really know how to speak japanese? How has the experience been?
Don't need to speak to be a dev. Pay is low, rakuten imports devs regularly. Japanese prefer South East Asia/West Europeans vs Americans (North, Central & South.)
Learning the language isn't hard either, I passed JLPT N4 within 3 months of just showing up in Tokyo.
Max pay would be 40-60K/yr until you get PR &/OR N1/N2. Then it may balloon up a bit but not so much. You should be able to score a free apartment though.
Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is honestly the thing that bothers me most about cities the US. Having grown up in Europe, I find many (I'm sure there are exceptions) US cities to be plain ugly and unlivable. The reason is obvious to me. It's that they are designed around cars. It makes such a huge difference.
I think New York is fine.
New York is quite loud, which is not good for your hearing and causes a whole bunch of health problems. https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/31/new-yor...
I would also say that navigating the piles of garbage on the sidewalk is not fun, either.
Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in
#70Having lived in Tokyo for years, the elephant in the room is "cars". The whole city is full of pleasant mixed use neighborhoods that are more or less car-free, and centered around public transport hubs that have everything you need around them. People, including unaccompanied children, can and do safely walk and ride bikes everywhere at all hours of the day, including when grocery shopping etc. The world can learn a…
I also live there and one interesting bit that, in retrospective is OBVIOUS, is that there are also no cars parked on the streets! Like, if you look at pictures or walk down the street it feels so pleasant for some reason but difficult to put your finger at it, until you realize there's no huge cars piling on the sides.
I prefer European Architecture for downtown buildings, but the no cars bit generally overpowers this preference in making Tokyo at a similar level of beauty for me, and the bits where there are particularly beautiful buildings in Tokyo or Japan well that's just perfect.
(also warning like parent, there is some street parking, but it's just minuscule)