An American in Tokyo

View from atop Atago Green Hills Forest Tower

Standing in awe of Tokyo is cliché. The city dazzles, sometimes quite literally with its bright signs, jumbo Jumbotrons, and sea of pulsing red lights stretching from here to the high-rise-filled horizon. But Tokyo is more than just hyperkinetic advertising and self-warming toilet seats. Here’s a shortlist of what makes Tokyo a magnificent city—and what it could do better—gleaned from my recent trip.

Peace and quiet

After a nearly 15 hour flight, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. Less predictably, I wasn’t awoken at some ungodly hour by city noise disrupting my jet lag-addled body. Instead, I opened my eyes at 7:30 AM to the sounds of birds chirping in the nearby temple grounds. In the background, the city whispered.

The Scramble, Shibuya, Tokyo

Even at its most frantic—say, the scramble across Hachiko Square in Shibuya—Tokyo didn’t blare its metropolisness. It wasn’t for lack of traffic. Cars and trucks flowed on smooth streets and on elevated highways, the Shinkansen whisked along polished rails, and metro trains glided from station to station. Having lived in Chicago and Boston where trains rattle like the lungs of a septuagenarian chain smoker, the quiet subway surprised me the most. The Japanese understand the value of a little peace and quiet.¹ For that, I thank them.

Cleanliness

Japan has a reputation for cleanliness that’s well-earned. From the little piles of leaves carefully swept off the Meji Shrine’s gravel paths to the sparkling bathrooms in JR train stations, Japan is a tidy place. Surprisingly, it didn’t feel oppressive. Discarded gum still stains the sidewalk, and yes, I did stumble on the occasional bathroom that smelled like a bus stop. Overall, the country was pleasantly hygienic.

Buddhist graves

Chalk it up to their religion. For well over a thousand years, one of the majority religions in Japan has been Shinto,² and Shinto gods don’t like filth. I had always figured the Japanese obsession with cleanliness was a way to deal with the filth of modern cities. Imagine my surprise when it dawned on me that the Japanese have been like this for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. Given that cultural legacy, Japan’s cleanliness would be difficult to replicate in other countries without religious awakenings or authoritarian rule.³

Orderliness

Part of what makes Japan—and especially Tokyo—so clean is the fact that Japanese people like to follow rules. My friend joked that the Japanese like standing in line so much that he was tempted to start a line waiting for nothing and see who queued up behind him. Lines abound in Japan, especially in Tokyo. It certainly helps make the metropolis less chaotic and more manageable. Such orderliness can be refreshing, but there are times when it goes overboard. Like the trash of a pop-up ice cream shop, which was neatly stacked inside the bin.

Neatly stacked garbage, Tokyo

There’s orderliness, and then there are obsessive compulsions.

Shinkansen

Obsessive definitely applies to their rail system, but there it’s a virtue. I’ve said it here before, but we here in the U.S. are fools for not investing in high-speed rail. It’s truly a transformative technology. Trains depart Tokyo Station bound for Osaka—the Japanese equivalent of New York to Washington—every ten minutes or so from 6 AM to 9:20 PM. It completes the 343 mile (552 km) journey in 2 hours 25 minutes, and average delays on the line are measured in seconds, not minutes. The only high-speed line in the U.S. takes nearly 3 ours to make the 224 mile (360 km) run between New York and Washington.

700 series Shinkansen

Comparing those routes may be more apt than you first suspect. If you overlay Japan’s main islands with the East Coast, you’ll see that it stretches from the Florida Panhandle to New York’s border with Canada. In that space, Japan has about 130 million people, the U.S. about 112 million.

The Japanese aren’t any more accepting than we are of noisy train tracks, either. Both the U.S and Japan have their share of NIMBYs, or “not in my backyard” protesters. As a result, regulations limit noise from the Shinkansen to 70 dB in residential areas. Faced with this challenge, designers have streamlined the trains and engineers have polished the rails. As a result, on my two Hikari-service trains, we zipped through cities at shocking speeds.

Inside the train cars, things are modern, clean, and spacious. The only downsides I noticed were seats without power outlets (newer cars have them in every seat, older ones don’t) and first class Green Cars that smell like ashtrays. In a few years, I’m sure both will be taken care of.

It’s little wonder that that Japanese are extending the Shinkansen as far as they can, from subtropical Kagoshima in the south to Sapporo in the snowy north. Existing lines are being upgraded or replaced, drastically so in some cases. By 2027, JR Central expects to have maglevs zipping between Tokyo and Nagoya in about 40 minutes, and by 2045 from Tokyo to Osaka in a little over an hour. That’s nearly one and a half hours shorter than it takes today.

Parks

Hamarikyu Gardens

Partially by historical accident, Japanese cities have a wealth of parks. Temples and shrines are typically open to the public and offer a few minutes respite from city life. Former imperial grounds are also available for a nap or a stroll. Parks and other open spaces are not concentrated in one place, either, but spread throughout. The skyscrapers that dominate the horizon are the only reminder that you’re in a big city.

Architecture

Japanese architecture oscillates between inviting warmth and cool distance. Traditional buildings are all wood and coziness. Unfortunately, unless you were the emperor, that usually meant little interior light and cramped living space. But their detail is marvelous, from the careful use of natural materials to the expert joinery.

In Kyoto

Modern buildings can be both warm and cool. From the outside, they often present an austere, technocentric face. I was frequently overwhelmed by the sheer amount of metal and grey stone, a stark contrast with the glassiness of Western skyscrapers. But the aesthetic of modern Japanese buildings can switch from cool to warm the moment you walk in the door. Grey may dominate the facade, but yellow wood is everywhere inside.

Kyoto Station

For the most part, I’m not wild about the last few decades of Japanese architecture, with one exception: Roppongi Hills.

Roppongi Hills

That place is amazing. It’s level after level of hidden treasures—patios opening onto sweeping views, open-air plazas sheltered by expansive glass awnings, a massive outdoor performance space, and dozens of escalators nestled among towering skyscrapers. I spent half my time there outdoors and nearly all of that uncertain of where the actual ground was. But I was certain of one thing—Roppongi Hills feels like the future. You know, the one where people live in a planet-wide city where building on top of building obscures the terrain—and seedy underworld—beneath.

Just the beginning

Japan has a way of getting into your head. Perhaps it’s the contradictions of order and chaos, old and new, energy and passivity. Or maybe it’s the fact that no matter how long I may spend in the country, no matter how much I study its history and norms, I would never be considered culturally Japanese. Whatever it is, I know that someday I’ll return.


  1. You can even get a taste of it here in the U.S. Ever stood next to a Lexus at idle? Unlike many cars, you don’t hear a rumble but a muffled clacking. That’s the sound of the engine’s cams slapping against the valves. You can’t even hear the exhaust. That’s quiet.
  2. Buddhism was added in about the 600s, partially owing to the fact that Shinto gods don’t like the dead (they’re dirty, apparently) while Buddha doesn’t mind them. The two work pretty well together, and most religious Japanese are both Shinto and Buddhist.
  3. Cough, Singapore, cough.
  4. That’s practically a whisper—at my old place in Cambridge, I recorded over 80 dB as midday traffic roared by my open window (which was over 50 feet from the street).
  5. Coming from the U.S., that’s a very foreign concept.

Why Houston has so many "new" jobs

Derek Thompson, writing at The Atlantic:

The recession in Texas was relatively mild, partly thanks to mistakes learned by the region’s real estate and energy industries, says Patrick Jankowski, an economist and vice president of research at the Greater Houston Partnership. Texas “won” the recession not only because of the jobs it’s created, but also because of the jobs it’s hoarded — particularly in energy.

I wonder if Houston would have fared differently if it didn’t have an extractive industry to rely on?

How Engineers Are Building a New Railroad Under New York City

Yours truly, reporting for Wired:

The biggest public transit infrastructure effort in the US is almost completely invisible — unless you’re 160 feet underground. The East Side Access project will connect the Long Island Railroad to New York’s Grand Central Terminal via a massive tunnel under the East River. Actually, that tunnel was the easy part; it was started in 1969. The hard part? “We are building a brand-new railroad here,” says Michael Horodniceanu, president of Metropolitan Transit Authority Capital Construction. When it’s finished in 2019, around 160,000 people will see shorter commutes. But before that, engineers must complete three tricky segments. Here’s how (and where) they’ll do it.

How Steve Jobs Hit What Walter Gropius Missed

Steve Mouzon:

Simply put, Steve knew the difference between body and spirit, and Gropius didn’t. Hardware is the body of a computer, while software (and more precisely, the user interface) is the spirit.

The National Automated Highway System That Almost Was

Matt Novak:

In 1991 Congress passed the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, which authorized $650 million to be spent over the course of the next six years on developing the technology that would be needed for driverless cars running on an automated highway. The vision was admittedly bold, seeing as how primitive all of the components needed for such a system were at that time. Even consumer GPS technology — which today we take for granted in our phones and vehicles — wasn’t a reality in the early 1990s.

In Post-Tsunami Japan, A Push To Rebuild Coast in Concrete

Winifred Bird, reporting for Yale e360:

The roots of the coastal land-use debate go deep. People first began moving from higher elevations down toward Japan’s seashore, which offered rare expanses of flat land, at the beginning of the Edo period (1603-1868), Seino says. “Over a period of 400 years Japanese moved further and further into these dangerous areas, as modernization allowed for more public works projects,” she explains. “[Today], by law, the land management concept is to claim everything down to the high-tide line as human territory.”

It’s a stark contrast to the many hills that dot the costal plains, which stood out stood out on my recent trip as largely free of development.

What's stopping him?

Yale e360:

Roughly 70 percent of Americans say global warming should be a priority for President Obama and Congress and 61 percent support requiring fossil fuel companies to pay a carbon tax that would be used to help reduce the national debt, according to a new survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. 

My guess? Congress.

Most UK species in decline

Damian Carrington, reporting for The Guardian:

An unprecedented stocktake of UK wildlife has revealed that most species are struggling and that one in three have halved in number in the past half century. The unique report, based on scientific analysis of tens of millions of observations from volunteers, shows that from woodland to farmland and from freshwater streams to the sea, many animals, birds, insects, fish and plants are in trouble.

With large threats like climate change looming, it’s easy to forget about collapsing biodiversity. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it.

Vacation

It’s been nearly a year and a half since I’ve taken a break from near-daily blogging, and we all need some time off eventually. I’ll be spending a little over a week in Japan, where nearly 130 million people live along thin slivers of coastline. I’m very much looking forward to it. When I return, I’m sure I’ll be chock full of new perspectives on density.

European and Asian languages traced back to single mother tongue

Ian Sample, reporting for the Guardian:

“Everybody in Eurasia can trace their linguistic ancestry back to a group, or groups, of people living around 15,000 years ago, probably in southern Europe, as the ice sheets were retreating,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at Reading University.

Linguists have long debated the idea of an ancient Eurasiatic superfamily of languages. The idea is controversial because many words evolve too rapidly to preserve their ancestry. Most words have a 50% chance of being replaced by an unrelated term every 2,000-4,000 years. 

But some words last much longer.

Words that sound similar in at least four of the studied languages? “I”, “we”, “man”, “mother”, “to split”, “worm”, and “bark”.

The Hidden Geography of America's Surging Suicide Rate

Richard Florida, writing at the Atlantic Cities:

Wyoming tops the list with an increase of nearly 80 percent. North Dakota is second and Rhode Island third, both with increases of roughly 70 percent. Hawaii, Vermont, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Oregon, and South Dakota round out the top 10.

There’s a surprising link between overall suicide rates and population density. (Florida is discussing increases, which is related but different.)

Segregation Is Bad for Everyone

Emily Badger, reporting for the Atlantic Cities:

Segregated regions – by race as well as skills – have slower rates of income growth and property value appreciation. And this isn’t just true for minority families stuck in segregated pockets of inner-city poverty. It’s true for everyone, the suburbs and city alike. 

We all want to live in small towns, and it’s killing cities

Downtown Northfield, MN

A bunch of economists and a blogger are trying to dissect the riddle of why metropolitan population density has fallen in the United States. Robert Shiller (yes, that Robert Shiller) seems to have unknowingly kicked off the whole thing when he wrote an essay a few weeks ago in which he said housing prices have actually been pretty stable when you adjust for inflation.

Bill McBride took issue with that, essentially saying that because land is scarce in cities, the value of the land (and the homes on it) should go up. Noah Smith didn’t quite agree with McBride, arguing that changes in transportation cost—everything from automobiles to telepresence—will counter the effects of population density over time, which is why house prices should remain flat. Paul Krugman jumped in and sided with Smith, mostly, citing the issue of declining metro population density across the United States.

Then Felix Salmon, the blogger, entered the picture. He wrote a post a few days ago laying out his solution to the riddle of why metro population density is declining. Rich people, he says, are moving to the city in larger numbers, and because they can afford more space, urban population densities are either holding steady or falling. That’s been pushing less wealthy people out to the suburbs and beyond. I’m skeptical that’s the real reason.

Most of the previous decade’s growth in the U.S. happened in the exurbs, those far flung outposts on the fringes of metro areas. There, populations rose by about 5 percent, much higher than the zero to 2 percent elsewhere throughout metro areas, including low-density but closer-in suburbs. People forgoing suburbs for the exurbs—that’s a nuance of the statistic that makes me question Salmon. If people are being driven out of the city because of high rents, then the suburbs should be growing swiftly, too. But they’re not—at least not as much as the exurbs.

Rather than reacting to what the rich are doing in the city, I think it’s more the result of how most of the rest of us would like to live. The exurbs are closer, by many measures, to the small town American ideal than the city or even the suburbs. Exurbs have single-family homes, big lots, wide streets, and a nearby countryside. The city doesn’t have that, and many suburbs don’t anymore, either—as cities swell, they’re becoming indistinguishable from the city. The exurbs are the new suburbs.

Krugman tries to drive home his point, saying, “the average American lives in a quite densely populated neighborhood, with more than 5000 people per square mile.” As such, he says, “real” America isn’t a small town, but rather something like metropolitan Baltimore. By pure statistics, he’s right. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the U.S. is a country trending toward Baltimore. A statistical snapshot can’t outweigh decades of cultural legacy. Most Americans may live like Baltimoreans, but do they want to?

Our cultural tendencies suggest we don’t. As long as the American ideal is to live in a small town—which to many people¹ means big yards, small downtowns, and concomitant low population densities—then that’s where we’re heading as a nation. If cities are to succeed, maybe they need to look to small towns for inspiration. Not the low densities—it wouldn’t be much of a city, then—but the more abstract qualities that draw people to them.


  1. Not necessarily me, though that’s a post for another time.

Photo by Northfielder.

Related posts:

Town, section, range, and the transportation psychology of a nation

How population density affected the 2012 presidential election

How far should you live from work?

China's bizarre architecture

Lily Kuo, writing for Quartz:

Bizarre buildings have increasingly been piercing China’s skylines, earning the country a reputation for being “a playground for bad design.” Unattractive Chinese buildings have become so commonplace that a Chinese architectural firm, Archcy, has started surveying residents on what they believe are the country’s 10 ugliest buildings (article in Chinese). One architect last year said choosing just 10 was “very hard” but a million he could do.

Lost in the Geometry of California’s Farms

Verlyn Klinkenborg, writing about California’s Central Valley for the New York Times:

It’s easy to let yourself be overwhelmed by the agricultural geometry of the valley, all those rows seeming to rush past as you drive. But to understand its true immensity and capacity for transformation, you have to drop down off the interstate and onto the valley floor.

There is something stunning in the way the soil has been engineered into precision. Every human imperfection linked with the word “farming” has been erased. The rows are machined. The earth is molded. The angles are more rigid, and more accurate, than the platted but unbuilt streets out where easy credit dried up during the housing crisis. This is no longer soil. It is infrastructure, like the vast concrete sluice of the California Aqueduct, like the convoluted arrays of piping that spring up everywhere at the corners of fields.

The Human Dimension of Thetford Forest

Thetford Forest

NASA Earth Observatory:

Thetford Forest, at least as it appears today, would not exist were it not for human intervention. The forest was created after World War I to prop up sagging timber supplies. Authorities planted stands of lowland pine in uniform rows in place of thorny evergreen shrubs (gorse) that grew naturally amid the sandy, heath-covered landscape. Today the forest is a popular recreational area, and the pine stands are periodically harvested for timber. Meanwhile, the ecosystem that Thetford Forest replaced—lowland heath—is now one of the rarest and most endangered ecosystems in Europe.

The Life Story of The Oldest Tree on Earth

Peter Crane, being interviewed by Roger Cohn for Yale e360:

When we think about flowering plants, there are about 350,000 living species. And in an evolutionary sense, they’re equivalent to that one species of ginkgo. They’re all more closely related to each other than they are to anything else. But the ginkgo is solitary and unique, not very obviously related to any living plant. 

Ginkgoes are fonts of great trivia. One of my favorites: In the autumn, ginkgoes will shed their leaves in rapid fashion, in some cases going from golden yellow to completely bare in less than a day. 

Egypt’s Birthrate Rises as Population Control Policies Vanish

Kareem Fahim, reporting for the New York Times:

After two decades of steady declines and modest increases, the birthrate in 2012 reached about 32 for every 1,000 people — surpassing a level last seen in 1991, shortly before the government of the longtime president, Hosni Mubarak, expanded family planning programs and publicity campaigns to curtail population growth that he blamed for crippling Egypt’s development. Last year, there were 2.6 million births, bringing the population to about 84 million, according to preliminary government figures.