91–100 of 237 posts
I spent a month in Tokyo in 29 Square meters it was painfully small, and expensive. It was the best I could find. These numbers are deeply suspicious.
One-month is ultra-short by Japanese standards. The rental inventory is distinct from regular apartments. This is effectively a hotel.
Maybe it's only cheap due to the barriers to immigration? I've only been to Japan once, but I noticed how they're very formal compared to the various EU countries. I keep meeting people who move to Appalachia and not register that the things that made it attractive (low crime etc) won't stay that way if people keep talking to me like I'm literally retarded. (Every time someone tells me "I work in technology or whatev…
Permanent Residency is helpful towards procuring a mortgage, but you don't need a visa to buy property in Japan. Non-resident cash buyers had no problem pushing up the real estate market in Vancouver, Canada.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An hour commute to work is most definitely not acceptable to most, especially post-pandemic. Median commute in the US is about 26 minutes and many people are now used to working from home some or all of the time. Hour-long commutes are outliers for a relatively small percentage of people in a small number of cities.
Possibly. But close to an hour commute (or more) is probably the reality most places if you work downtown in a city and don’t live within the city limits. Even within NYC getting to the financial district from Brooklyn or Staten Island is probably hitting close to that. Average commutes in the US are brought down by urbanites who live close to the office and suburbanites who live a modest drive away from an office pa…
Sure, if you cherry pick the worst possible commutes in the worst commuting cities you're going to find pockets of ~1hr commuters, but the broader claim simply isn't true and is perpetuated by people who are themselves trying to justify their overly long commutes. The large majority of people value their time too much to put up with commutes over about 40 minutes.
Paris, London and New York - the key points of comparison - aren’t exactly known for their spacious housing. One other point that many of the Tokyo fans don’t acknowledge is how extraordinarily ugly the place is. Sure, it’s clean (more than you can say for New York) but clearly nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside. And I’ve never seen more miserable public parks in a developed coun…
Many of the people I know in the U.S. live in attractive neighborhoods full of nice-looking houses and well-kept front yards. While some of that niceness is due to the owners’ own initiative, much is the result of zoning restrictions, homeowner association rules, and the like.
The only zoning restrictions on my house in Yokohama are limits on total floorspace and land coverage and fire and earthquake rules covering building design and materials. I can paint my house any color I want, pile whatever junk I want in my (tiny) yard, and hang whatever laundry I want from the balconies, and no one can or will say anything about it.
As a result of this tolerant, low-regulation regime, the neighborhood I live in is, like most neighborhoods here, an unattractive mish-mash of mismatched houses and apartments in many styles and states of upkeep. If that’s the price of (relative) freedom, I’m happy to pay it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that housing an hour out of NYC seems to be more expensive than the housing the article talks about.
I don't know - an hour out of Penn Station takes you as far as places like Wyandanch on Long Island with the LIRR, or Stamford, CT with the MNR.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one thing for sure, but I attribute it most to the lack of dumpsters. I am not sure why they were banned, the trash cans supposedly because of terrorism, but the larger containers/dumpsters would make the city so much cleaner and better. Tip: when there's a typhoon, restaurants close and there's no trash on the street, the rats invade nearby shops looking desperately for food: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B…
To be fair to Tokyo I doubt there's a major city in the world that doesn't have rats unless rats can't live in a super hot desert or frozen tundra. It's a matter of how contained/controlled/visible they are.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be fair to Tokyo I doubt there's a major city in the world that doesn't have rats unless rats can't live in a super hot desert or frozen tundra. It's a matter of how contained/controlled/visible they are.
Calgary and Edmonton.
The housing space metrics seem very far off from my experience, looking at numbers it seems "Tokyo" means "Tokyo Metropolis", which includes the countryside, mountains, etc. So it's not really comparing the city. If we look at the numbers for Tokyo 23 wards[1] (what would traditionally be called "the city"), we can see they are virtually half than those from Paris or London: 16.5-19.7sqm/person is the range that fall…
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 small western apartment, or trying to save by bulk buying ingredients when you don't have the space to store it.
So I think the title of the article is half right (rent is cheaper than you'd think), missing some key info (wages are also cheaper than you'd think), half of it is roughly incorrect (housing is not any more spacious than you'd think), and the article itself doesn't back it up well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to agree and disagree :) First, it's not clean, it's just different way of unclean and only during certain periods of the day. But during too many hours of the day in popular areas it's normal to see literal piles of trash on the street covered in rats, and in the morning with crows. On the other hand, there's no littering, virtually no homelessness (nor their encampments, etc) and finally no cars on the stree…
> On the other hand, there's no littering, virtually no homelessness (nor their encampments, etc) and finally no cars on the street, which makes the city look a lot cleaner. Last time I visited Tokyo in 2016 there was clearly an encampment at the Ueno park. And that wasn’t the first time I saw an encampment in Japan (visiting Tokyo in 2008 I saw a few in Tokyo and Osaka). However, Japanese homeless encampments are al…