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Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

economist.com

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Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#231

Post by dymk »

mrkentutbabi wrote: post #133
88840-8855 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing. It's a super great place when you are a tourist. I lived there and I saw the bad sides, too. To keep this amazing tidyness, order, extremely high quality of service, people go to their limits - with low pay and low perspectives. We have these "bad" jobs also here, people in those jobs are half-assing them, are rude or just quit. In Japan, at least from my experience, it's the conservative conformity…

Most of the things you mentioned here is why I like Japan more han the Western world. To be fair, Japan isn’t perfect. But a lot of things make sense for us. Are you a westerner? It seems that your way of thinking is just different than ours. We value things differently. For example, have you ever stopped to consider that maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role? The western world has a lot of problems t…

> consider that maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role?

This obviously can’t be true for all Japanese women, so what’s your solution to that? At least in Western countries there is progress being put towards letting women chose if they’d rather be a housewife or an independent person. In Japan there is no such option.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#232

Post by downrightmike »

karterk wrote: post #163
greggman3 wrote: post #141

I love Tokyo but I know lots of Japanese people that love suburban America. They love the space. I quick search suggests the average size house in Tokyo is 66sq meters where as in LA it's 167sq meters or nearly 2.5x larger. And that's just LA. My guess is plenty of other suburbia cities the average is even larger. I lived in Tokyo for 15 years. My last place was 54sq meters. I like there are more options in sizes tha…

Does Japan have a concept of suburbs? Are houses larger on the outskirts of Tokyo?

In the rural towns, houses can be bigger if they are older, but modern design in Japan builds small houses right next to each other and it is easier to build a small tight suburb because of the way infrastructure and land ownership works. So like you'll see a small cluster of a dozen houses all right next to each other in the middle of farm fields.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#233

Post by simdsimp »

brigandish wrote: post #102
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do snack bars in any Japanese town/city allow foreigners? I mean, I get it, these aren’t places foreigners should be going, but their forbidden nature always raises eyebrows.

> I mean, I get it, these aren’t places foreigners should be going, but their forbidden nature always raises eyebrows. Snack bars aren't anything forbidden or erotic, they're bars where women are employed to speak to the customers and entertain them (again, not in an erotic way), that's it. I live in a suburb with lots of them around, it's not some kind of red light district filled with brothels, they're just bars I…

No post body was provided.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#234

Post by Kavelach »

tsunamifury wrote: post #224
VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.

It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother. If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric, it’s not like the cars built the cities for us. And we keep getting worse. Small towns I drive through now are full of angry people who seem to want to be left alone. It’s incredibly sad. We are a selfish and community-less people that enjoy the frontier and adventure more than qu…

I don't think that is true. If you look at how larger residential areas looked in the States historically, you'll these placese were very livable, since there weee no cars. The main issue in the US is that at some point the jobs of city and regional planners were hijacked by car industry lobbyists. The current state of affairs is what followed.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#235

Post by tsunamifury »

pakitan wrote: post #228
tsunamifury wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother. If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric, it’s not like the cars built the cities for us. And we keep getting worse. Small towns I drive through now are full of angry people who seem to want to be left alone. It’s incredibly sad. We are a selfish and community-less people that enjoy the frontier and adventure more than qu…

> It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother. As a general rule, people don't like each other. In places where people live close to one another it's not because they like it but out of some kind of combination between inertia and necessity.

When I go to France or England or India (city centers and countryside) people may not Love each-other but they seem to generally be ok with being together and cooperating a bit more. In America it’s a whole new level. Except for a few idyllic small towns and suburbs that are actually economically and racially exclusionary that seem to have a faux-community.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#236

Post by Wiseacre »

wrycoder wrote: post #197
dr_dshiv wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> especially once you bring up age, gender and race of the perpetrators Is there sufficient social support for the families of young black males? If not, it may make sense economically to provide it, if it would make American cities functional again.

“social support” is what caused the problem in the first place.

If I'm not mistaken they never received any kind of reparations, so they've been a permanent underclass since slavery.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#237

Post by opportune »

ripe wrote: post #157
danielrpa wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does the US need to have traditional cities? I grew up in a high density city overseas and I can see the appeal of both types of city. I personally prefer low density, car centric cities (obviously we need to finish solving the emissions problem from cars, but that's separate).

Forget about the emissions issue, I just hate driving and having to depend on its supporting infrastructure (repair shops, gas stations, insurance...) for my day-to-day needs. I live in a US suburb. Can't even get a sandwich or buy milk or see someone without strapping myself into my fucking car. This is no way to live. If I could, I'd give up ever having to drive again in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, here we have few…

I moved to SF specifically to avoid having a car. Everything about owning a car pisses me off. Insurance and registration are a racket. Parking is either expensive or miserable. Traffic and seeing how other people behave makes me hate my fellow man. Every time I try to merge onto a crowded highway I realize I’m risking my life.

I’m angry that urban design for decades, almost a century, was planned around these machines. Obviously in rural areas they are incredibly freeing and useful. But having traveled the world I’ve come to realize and hate how peculiarly dependent we are on them in the US. We are heavy outliers among developed countries in how much we rely on cars and eschew public transit. They’re dangerous, expensive, and an annoying. In most cities in the developed world it’s normal to be able to get to a convenience store in a 5-10 minute walk.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#238

Post by poisonarena »

ipiz0618 wrote: post #195
mrkentutbabi wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the things you mentioned here is why I like Japan more han the Western world. To be fair, Japan isn’t perfect. But a lot of things make sense for us. Are you a westerner? It seems that your way of thinking is just different than ours. We value things differently. For example, have you ever stopped to consider that maybe Japanese woman prefer to be in traditional role? The western world has a lot of problems t…

I wanted to comment, but deleted them since you've described my thoughts seeing the parent comment. All I'm going to say is I'm not a "Westerner" so I don't view things in the western perspective.

ehhh if you are spending time commenting on hacker news you are a westerner

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#239

Post by ben-schaaf »

tsunamifury wrote: post #224
VeninVidiaVicii wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Concur totally after living in Sevilla (Spain). US cities - with the exception of New York - are just cookie-cutter strip malls. There’s a fundamental lack of coherence that’s hard to explain.

It’s pretty easy to understand when you realize Americans don’t like eachother. If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric, it’s not like the cars built the cities for us. And we keep getting worse. Small towns I drive through now are full of angry people who seem to want to be left alone. It’s incredibly sad. We are a selfish and community-less people that enjoy the frontier and adventure more than qu…

> If we liked living together we wouldn’t be so car centric

It's entirely the other way around, car centric planning results in less community. It's much easier to be angry at the other 2t metal boxes than at your fellow human being.

American cities used to be just like European cities: designed for walking, mixed use developments, small shops, public transportation everywhere. It's only after the delusion of the car being the future was popularized - in large part due to very successful advertising by the automotive industry - that policy was written to heavily subsidise car-centric development to the point of making everything else illegal. There's even real, convicted conspiracies of the automotive industry purposefully buying public transportation just to kill it.

Re: Tokyo: A big city that is also pleasant to live in

#240

Post by orn688 »

hiptobecubic wrote: post #192
orn688 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no "cannot", it's a conscious choice - if you have more space than necessary that absolutely does not require that you expand to fill all of it. And in particular this has caused issues because American cities tend towards sprawl, filling up area with low-density housing that requires significantly more infrastructure per capita, and implementing zoning laws to prevent higher-density development even as the p…

They sprawl because people want space. If you're from Paris or Tokyo or London you really just don't know what it's like to have a quiet, detached house with a nice garden, maybe a pool where your kids can play randomly without needing to plan a trip to the community center, space for a garden, knowing everyone within 200m of your house by name... It's a completely different way of life that is not possible without l…

As some other commenters have noted, in cities like Amsterdam and Tokyo there are enough nice safe public spaces that even young children are free to play outside on their own and there's much less planning required to go places since you don't need a car.

That being said, I'm sure there are plenty of North Americans who love having a ton of space for gardening etc. But I would guess they're actually in the minority and that most people choose to live in sprawling suburban developments because they're the only affordable option to guarantee access to good schools and a safe neighborhood.

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