The city is actually much more beautifully manicured than when I first saw it two decades ago. Grungy “shitamachi” areas have been modernized, many dowdy old “Showa” style apartment buildings have been replaced with modern construction, sculptures and decorations have been added everywhere.
Meanwhile, the glittering signs and soaring towers that we associate with urban Japan have only multiplied. If you’re impressed by big buildings, for example, it’s impossible to miss the vast, towering structures that the Mori Building Company is putting up all over the city. The biggest one, shown in the photo at the top of this post, is due to open this year. But it’s not just big towers getting built. Shopping centers, bars, clubs, and glittering zakkyo buildings (the ones with all the signs) continue to multiply. How could you live in Tokyo for a decade and miss all that?
In fact, Japan’s fervor for constant scrap-and-build construction is a major reason why rent there is so affordable, and why local politics haven’t halted dense development as they have in the West.
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Because Japanese people don’t use their houses as their nest eggs, as they do in much of the West, there is not nearly as much NIMBYism in Japan — people don’t fight tooth and nail to prevent any local development that they worry might reduce their property values, because their property values are going to zero anyway.
As a result, Japanese cities like Tokyo have managed to build enough housing to make housing costs fall, even as people continued to stream from the countryside into the city.
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In the bubble era [...] Japanese urban apartments were widely derided as “rabbit hutches”, but four decades later their floor space per person is similar to European standards and higher than in the UK.
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Tokyo itself is an international city now; in 2018, 1 out of 8 people turning 20 in the city proper wasn’t born in the country.
Yet another example is the role of women in the workforce. Wingfield-Hayes rightfully dings Japan for not having enough women in corporate management, but neglects to mention that the percentage increased from 11% to 15% during his time there — not a massive social transformation, but not a picture of stasis either.
And this was accompanied by a large-scale movement of women into the workforce, such that Japan’s female employment rate now exceeds America’s.
From the article:
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