> It's a concept that's difficult to replicate elsewhere, but Lydon compares it to what made old Main Street America so special. Designing at a people-first scale pays off. "The smell of fried croquettes drifting onto the streets, small shops run by the building owners, easy public transit access, a feeling of safety and community for all ages… it's hard to overstate how well this all works."
Honestly, even though I love the idea of Japan and the idealized vision of Japan that's often presented in the media, I can't help thinking that a lot of this stuff can be found much closer to home in Europe. The BBC didn't need to go all the way to Tokyo - they could find this in pretty much any Spanish city.
Or come to downtown Vancouver. I live in a small apartment, but within four blocks I have a community centre with gym, a pharmacy, a post office, a grocery store, a small bakery, the best liquor store in the city, three banks, a hot pot restaurant, a physiotherapist/massage therapist office, a vet, a dispensary, multiple hairdressers, an optometrist, several restaurants, two places to get gelato, a public plaza with a weekly farmer's market, a walking/cycling route along the waterfront, a car wash, a sports bar with arcade machines, skeeball, and pinball, an enclosed pollinator meadow, a science museum/IMAX theatre, two separate public "subway" lines (though one is elevated and one is below-grade), and two private but inexpensive water taxi services.
I can leave my house at 6 AM and go get fresh bread or baked goods and go sit by the water, or I can leave the house at 7 AM to get groceries if I'm out of something and be back by 7:10.
American cities don't want this because having a huge empty house with a huge empty yard and having to drive 90 minutes to get to work or 30 minutes to get groceries is the American Dream and no one who's been sold this dream wants to believe that there are so many better and more efficient ways to live.
It's because living in downtown Vancouver is expensive. Your rent probably comes close to covering the mortgage on one of those huge empty houses in the suburbs. That fresh baked good is probably ~$4 while the equivalent at Walmart is $1. No doubt it's a great lifestyle for well off DINKs. A lot harder to make it work for a family of 5 on 50k a year.
While you are correct about Vancouver downtown, once you get o suburbs like Langley, Coquitlam, they are no different that what you are calling out American cities for.
If we limit this to downtowns, there are several cities in America that are similar (Boston, Seattle, SF, SanDiego, Austin, NYC to name a few).
One key difference that jumps out at me between various cities in Japan and Vancouver is that the COL seems significantly better in Japan. When I visited Vancouver I couldn't afford to stay in or even near the city, I had to find a place about 20 minutes away and even then it was pricey. Whereas in Japan I had no problem finding affordable stays in city centers in all of the major cities I visited, including Tokyo.
I will admit my ignorance here however and acknowledge there are likely myriad other variables at play here that I'm not considering.
TFA explains that Japan is unusual as being the only country in Asia with two cities in the top 10 most liveable cities in the World. That's why they wrote the article. If Spain had been the only country in Europe with two cities in the top 10, they might have done it in Spain.
And outside of a handful of New England towns, wherever that kind of city planning exists in the US, those parts of town are inhabited by half-dead zombies on meth whispering threats at you as you walk by. Not a pleasant experience. That's why sane people in the US usually move to suburbia as soon as they can afford a car.
> smell of fried croquettes drifting onto the streets, small shops run by the building owners, easy public transit access
The genius of the BBC is to gloss over that in a culture that isn't Japanese these things all easily become negatives.
Who wants the smell of other people's food, maybe from a cuisine you hate? Or new local businesses cannot start because they can't buy property limiting options for consumers? And public transit stops become noise and litter parties.
I had to laugh when they put a quote from a wheelchair user at the top of the article. Japan is many good things, but friendly to wheelchair users is not one of them.
As western tourists always seem to find out when they land with their gigantic suitcases, many Tokyo train stations require stairs to enter or exit.
on tokyo train and subway stations specifically: maybe in the past they weren't accessible, but at least since the olympics, they've become so. i believe they're closing in on 100% now.
If you read through the description, what they talk about is that the culture is built around the idea of the individual being part of something bigger, and that consideration and respect for that something bigger (other people), is core to your own identity.
That's not hard for a lot of cultures, but it's almost impossible for most cultures in the Western hemisphere, and to change it would require a cultural reset that would run against the grain of many things that make those cultures what they are.
If it were possible though - and there are times when certain subcultures had standards of etiquette different to those widely accepted today in the West - it wouldn't need 100% of people to "sign up", just enough to make it ostracising to not conform. And then the outliers would conform.
We do this already: it's OK (albeit illegal), to cycle through a red light where I live, because lots of people do it, but if you were to try and get served ahead of your turn in a pub, you might get into an argument, because nobody does that without expecting a problem.
The cracks are already there though in Japan where this is starting to fall apart and has fueled a substantial rise in anti-immigration sentiment there. Particularly at specific groups that are not assimilating (but affecting basically every immigrant).
I feel like half your post is dancing around not saying this.
What qualifies as good manners varies from situation to situation, but the concept of acting with good manners is hardly complicated (conform to the expected behavior of the situation).
Enforcment is a matter of encoding the rules and then applying a carrot and/or stick -- same as any other rule.
And with countries with lots of newcomers it can take decades (well, generations) to take on the host countries manners rather than sticking to home country manners that may not mesh with host country’s manners/customs.
I think they are saying that it's difficult to "maintain manners" for hundreds of thousands to millions of diverse "I, the individual" 's. It's great that you don't struggle with that yourself, but your manners can be made entirely irrelevant by 1 person in a public place who has anti-social behaviors (doesn't share the same set of "required" values for that society).
The actual question is if you could move to another country with a very different system of "manners" (read: culture) and throw out your learned behavior and adopt theirs.
My experience living in an incredibly multi-cultural immigrant dense area, is overwhelmingly "No". People like their "home" cultures (generally they believe its the best), and they tend to carry some degree of resentment for their new society for not recognizing that. It creates endless friction at the edges (whereas core values tend to be pretty similar globally).
Japan doesn't really deal with this at all, and what immigrant ingress they have is usually fueled by people trying to live a Japanese like life.
> Japan doesn't really deal with this at all, and what immigrant ingress they have is usually fueled by people trying to live a Japanese like life.
This is very true, and is at the heart of the antipathy of Japanese society to foreign immigrants, and the recent resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment (Sanseito, etc.)
In particular, Japan let in a lot of Southeast Asian immigrants over the last decade. Those folks are overwhelmingly working class, and don't have the time, energy or resources to "become Japanese". So they resort to behaviors that are the norm where they come from, but not in Japan, and it creates significant cultural resentment.
I don't intend this to be a criticism of those folks. The average HN commenter is probably fairly well-off, and has never been an immigrant anywhere, ever, but carries around a weeby vision of Japan that doesn't even remotely connect with the reality of being a foreigner.
Cities and any polity or group of people cannot be created by some abstract rules or enforced. You need it to be composed of individuals who are disposed to act harmoniously with each other and have a culture (which is basically a bunch of jigging to aid harmonious interactions, you cannot create top down the manners you don't want people to violate). Everyone acting in their own self-interest ends up creating a harmonious organization because all of their self-interest corresponds such that their self interest is reflected in the good of the whole.
Just as a feedback system, if there is something wrong in a city or organization if the person who encounters it sees it as contrary to their own self interest and is capable of dealing with it themselves they will.
If this internal principle does not exist you rely on top down surveillance and enforcement which is basically delusional if it works will only be through violent enforcement against the people. Again in terms of a feedback system, if the polity is constructed out of a bunch of individuals who have a self-interest that corresponds with the good of the whole, there is no need to propagate that information to some manager. The persons directly involved with it are capable of dealing with it mindful of it's impact on the good of the whole because it's good for them. If you do not have that you would need a system of management, evaluation, and enforcement which basically demands the disruption in question is something easy to communicate and form policies around. Anything that cannot be just cannot be dealt with and the system falls under it's own weight. That's why technocracy is a delusion that is always doomed to fail, if the individual units in a system are unable to deal with aberrations on their own it requires the whole mass of bureaucracy to evaluate, construct policies, enforce etc. That is only capable of handling anything which is understandable to that kind of system, which is a small fraction of actual disruptions.
I appreciate the efforts of people trying to emulate the positives of Japanese cities mimicking the externals of it and enforcing it on other people is the opposite of any actual organic system and itself prohibits the more dynamic system that is required for an actually stable polity. If someone sees a wallet on the street they have to see it as their own self-interest not to steal it. If people do not see themselves as having a shared self-interest with those around them there is no enforcement or rules or policies that can make that polity stable or harmonious.
Honestly, even though I love the idea of Japan and the idealized vision of Japan that's often presented in the media, I can't help thinking that a lot of this stuff can be found much closer to home in Europe. The BBC didn't need to go all the way to Tokyo - they could find this in pretty much any Spanish city.
I can leave my house at 6 AM and go get fresh bread or baked goods and go sit by the water, or I can leave the house at 7 AM to get groceries if I'm out of something and be back by 7:10.
American cities don't want this because having a huge empty house with a huge empty yard and having to drive 90 minutes to get to work or 30 minutes to get groceries is the American Dream and no one who's been sold this dream wants to believe that there are so many better and more efficient ways to live.
If we limit this to downtowns, there are several cities in America that are similar (Boston, Seattle, SF, SanDiego, Austin, NYC to name a few).
I will admit my ignorance here however and acknowledge there are likely myriad other variables at play here that I'm not considering.
But yeah, this description matches the city I live in here in France.
The genius of the BBC is to gloss over that in a culture that isn't Japanese these things all easily become negatives.
Who wants the smell of other people's food, maybe from a cuisine you hate? Or new local businesses cannot start because they can't buy property limiting options for consumers? And public transit stops become noise and litter parties.
Get to the bottom of why that is and you'll probably have a good understanding where the problems to address are.
As western tourists always seem to find out when they land with their gigantic suitcases, many Tokyo train stations require stairs to enter or exit.
If you read through the description, what they talk about is that the culture is built around the idea of the individual being part of something bigger, and that consideration and respect for that something bigger (other people), is core to your own identity.
That's not hard for a lot of cultures, but it's almost impossible for most cultures in the Western hemisphere, and to change it would require a cultural reset that would run against the grain of many things that make those cultures what they are.
If it were possible though - and there are times when certain subcultures had standards of etiquette different to those widely accepted today in the West - it wouldn't need 100% of people to "sign up", just enough to make it ostracising to not conform. And then the outliers would conform.
We do this already: it's OK (albeit illegal), to cycle through a red light where I live, because lots of people do it, but if you were to try and get served ahead of your turn in a pub, you might get into an argument, because nobody does that without expecting a problem.
I feel like half your post is dancing around not saying this.
Enforcment is a matter of encoding the rules and then applying a carrot and/or stick -- same as any other rule.
My experience living in an incredibly multi-cultural immigrant dense area, is overwhelmingly "No". People like their "home" cultures (generally they believe its the best), and they tend to carry some degree of resentment for their new society for not recognizing that. It creates endless friction at the edges (whereas core values tend to be pretty similar globally).
Japan doesn't really deal with this at all, and what immigrant ingress they have is usually fueled by people trying to live a Japanese like life.
This is very true, and is at the heart of the antipathy of Japanese society to foreign immigrants, and the recent resurgence of anti-immigrant sentiment (Sanseito, etc.)
In particular, Japan let in a lot of Southeast Asian immigrants over the last decade. Those folks are overwhelmingly working class, and don't have the time, energy or resources to "become Japanese". So they resort to behaviors that are the norm where they come from, but not in Japan, and it creates significant cultural resentment.
I don't intend this to be a criticism of those folks. The average HN commenter is probably fairly well-off, and has never been an immigrant anywhere, ever, but carries around a weeby vision of Japan that doesn't even remotely connect with the reality of being a foreigner.
Take with a mountain of salt.
Cities and any polity or group of people cannot be created by some abstract rules or enforced. You need it to be composed of individuals who are disposed to act harmoniously with each other and have a culture (which is basically a bunch of jigging to aid harmonious interactions, you cannot create top down the manners you don't want people to violate). Everyone acting in their own self-interest ends up creating a harmonious organization because all of their self-interest corresponds such that their self interest is reflected in the good of the whole.
Just as a feedback system, if there is something wrong in a city or organization if the person who encounters it sees it as contrary to their own self interest and is capable of dealing with it themselves they will.
If this internal principle does not exist you rely on top down surveillance and enforcement which is basically delusional if it works will only be through violent enforcement against the people. Again in terms of a feedback system, if the polity is constructed out of a bunch of individuals who have a self-interest that corresponds with the good of the whole, there is no need to propagate that information to some manager. The persons directly involved with it are capable of dealing with it mindful of it's impact on the good of the whole because it's good for them. If you do not have that you would need a system of management, evaluation, and enforcement which basically demands the disruption in question is something easy to communicate and form policies around. Anything that cannot be just cannot be dealt with and the system falls under it's own weight. That's why technocracy is a delusion that is always doomed to fail, if the individual units in a system are unable to deal with aberrations on their own it requires the whole mass of bureaucracy to evaluate, construct policies, enforce etc. That is only capable of handling anything which is understandable to that kind of system, which is a small fraction of actual disruptions.
I appreciate the efforts of people trying to emulate the positives of Japanese cities mimicking the externals of it and enforcing it on other people is the opposite of any actual organic system and itself prohibits the more dynamic system that is required for an actually stable polity. If someone sees a wallet on the street they have to see it as their own self-interest not to steal it. If people do not see themselves as having a shared self-interest with those around them there is no enforcement or rules or policies that can make that polity stable or harmonious.
Seems like the hardly arrest the innocent, even if they didn’t do it
https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/11/04/inquiry-needed-japans-fl...