Comment by rgmerk
3 years ago
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 country.
I’ve been living in Tokyo and Yokohama since 1983 and am as much of a Tokyo fan as they get, and I readily acknowledge how ugly Japanese cities are in general. But after buying a house here twenty-three years ago, and comparing my experience with those of houseowners I know in the U.S., I have started to see some beauty in that ugliness.
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.
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 street, which makes the city look a lot cleaner.
"Nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside" => completely agree, my pet peeve here is that one of the best towns geographically speaking of Japan is probably the ugliest town I've seen in my life in a 1st world country (Kawaguchiko, with the beautiful lake, lush forest and Fuji San nearby).
"never seen more miserable public parks" again have to agree, the median local park is taken out of a horror movie. Though there are* a bunch of very, very beautiful ones!
> 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 always very clean and well organized. It’s a completely different feel from the states (even if they definitely exist).
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.
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> 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.
Apart from the worst parts of Roppongi on a Monday morning, I have never ever seen this.
Trash days 5~8am, normal days in any place with many restaurants 11pm~8am basically (Shibuya, Ebisu, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro, etc).
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Ugliness is subjective. Tokyo is varied but to me that's generally nicer and more interesting than uniformity. I don't think there's any part of Tokyo that looks as bad as the Barbican or the Brunswick, and to me the endless rows of identical beach-hut-style houses in San Francisco were far grimmer than Tokyo. YMMV I guess.
I'm not a huge fan of the look of the gravel parks, but every kid having a nearby park that they actually use beats a handful of parks that look nice, IMO. And it's not like Tokyo doesn't have big beautiful parks as well.
You folks ought to spend some time in Taiwan. I'm in Tokyo now, was in TW for a couple of years prior. Tokyo is extremely beautiful in comparison. (I'm Taiwanese Canadian)
Not just Tokyo, but the whole of Japan. I live in Aomori, I have traveled quite a bit around the country, and I haven't seen yet a single city that wasn't extremely ugly. I have asked many Japanese people, and they just don't care.
I live in and love Japan, and after many years have also gotten used to the general ugliness and just enjoy the beautiful parts when I can, but turning off the Japanese filter I’ve developed, good god this is so true.
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.
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> how extraordinarily ugly the place is
First impression as well, but it's an aquired taste.