211–220 of 237 posts
I dont know how accurate this report is, but i do wish western europe was as well organised and clean as japan. Many, if not all, west european capitals are a mess with poor living conditions with no signs of improvement.
Purely as a visitor, Zürich definitely felt cleaner and better organized than other cities in western Europe.
I think measuring per person is pretty misleading. A single person living in a 25m^2 appartment would be quite cramped. A family with two young kids living in 100m^2 is pretty spacious. So if you look at living space per person, then societies with smaller household sizes will appear to have more living space per person. so if you measure that, you also have to compare how many people are in households as well.
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That's why I said virtually; in Tokyo you know where you saw one at some point as a curiosity. In many European cities just walking around aimlessly you have high chances of seeing some homeless people. In SF I had to literally jump over homeless' people stuff to walk down multiple streets in my last visit.
I wasn't looking for encampments in Japan but found them anyways. Ueno train station and the park behind it is obviously a high traffic destination. And in Osaka, we were just walking around randomly. Homelessness is common and visible enough that to say it virtually doesn't exist is not really accurate.
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It's not about perspective. Both average to 25m2 per person, but they are vastly, unambiguously different. In a 100m2 home: 3x15m2 bedrooms, 25m2 living room, 10m2 kitchen and you still got 20m2 left. It's no comparison to a single 25m2 apartment where all these functions have to fit.
In that sense, I guess a 100cm2 apartment is "pretty spacious" compared to a 25cm2 one. My point was that a family of four living in a 100m2 apartment is going to feel cramped.
But it really depends on expectations. When people who live in the city visit us, they say "woah, that's a big apartment". When people who live on the countryside visit us, they say "how can you live in this tiny space".
My comment really was about how talking about "area per person" is not a good metric, because how spacious an apartment feels does not scale linearly with household size.
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Then why doesn't everyone just live in Tokyo? You just got your answer.
Everyone does just live in Tokyo. It's the most populous city in the world, the nicest place to live, and anyone with any sense moves here.
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> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience I have friend living in Tokyo paying Regarding size, I was far more comfortable living in a ~550sqft 1LDK in Japan than I ever was in 800sqft-1000sqft apartments in North America - everything is geared to living in tighter quarters (from furniture to fridge to food packaging) making it much more convenient than trying to fit a full size couch into a sma…
I lived in 250sqft with a shared bathroom in NYC for 2 years and loved it. Loved in 800 sqft in suburban America for 4 months and couldn’t handle it. In a big city with affordable Third Spaces you can simply live outside of your apartment.
In the suburbs you’ll have to get that buzz in your house somehow
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Can you post examples of this ugliness? I’ve never been to Japan and am curious. I had never heard of this.
Pick a random spot in any suburb of Tokyo in Google Maps Street View and start exploring. Here's one: 亀戸中央通り商店街 https://maps.app.goo.gl/9yY4Ncb5oM3hXqLY6 It's not particularly hideous by Tokyo (or world) standards, it's just exactly what was described earlier, a random mishmash of houses and shops in various states of repair.
OTOH, while I heard that Paris is considered beautiful by some people, I didn't like it at all, and no longer visit there even if I happen to be going to other parts of France.
Similarly, I would never voluntarily spend a day in SF and several other famous US cities.
I guess the idea of "ugly" is quite subjective.
I think measuring per person is pretty misleading. A single person living in a 25m^2 appartment would be quite cramped. A family with two young kids living in 100m^2 is pretty spacious. So if you look at living space per person, then societies with smaller household sizes will appear to have more living space per person. so if you measure that, you also have to compare how many people are in households as well.
> A single person living in a 25m^2 appartment would be quite cramped. > A family with two young kids living in 100m^2 is pretty spacious. I would argue very much the opposite! - 1 person in 25m² (270 ft²) is comfortable enough in a city, and if your hobbies are small - 4 people in 100m² (1076 ft²) can definitely be cramped
The 270 ft² space might have 100 ft² usable area, but the 1076 ft² could have 700 ft² usable.
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> The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience I have friend living in Tokyo paying Regarding size, I was far more comfortable living in a ~550sqft 1LDK in Japan than I ever was in 800sqft-1000sqft apartments in North America - everything is geared to living in tighter quarters (from furniture to fridge to food packaging) making it much more convenient than trying to fit a full size couch into a sma…
I never mentioned anything about prices though :) 550sqft (52sqm) for a single person is unheard of here. Look at the article I shared, unfortunately it cuts off at 30sqm, meaning ALL the houses of 30sqm or more make up 22% of the total. Assuming a normal distribution that peaks around 20sqm/person, you should've lived in the top 1-2% of Tokyo. I feel like Paris' 20 Arrondissements is too small, comparable to Zone 1…
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Yes, the numbers are a bit skewed by the fact that more people live alone in Tokyo than Paris or NYC, but it's definitely true that you get more square meters per $ in Tokyo. Also, it is true that people on Tokyo on average earn less than NYC, London and Paris, but they also spend a smaller percentage of their total income on housing, so housing is cheaper in PPP terms too. I'll dig out the exact numbers tomorrow if…
Do you know numbers about how much housing is sponsored by the companies in Japan? Maybe that's what is making the difference since it's not counted neither as salary, nor as the price of the house? I know some large companies sponsor partially or totally the housing of thousands of their employees, again skewing prices greatly. For example if Tanaka's salary is $500 lower because the company is partially paying for…
I don't think it's extremely common to live in actual employer provided housing.