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Tokyo is nice but the commute no shangri la. Trips longer than 10km are usually a hour because of so many train stops. Average commute to work is ~50min in a

Tokyo is nice but the commute no shangri la. Trips longer than 10km are usually a hour because of so many train stops. Average commute to work is ~50min in a crowded train standing up. Meanwhile on my social feed my Japanese friends will admire the large living spaces in the US. I think most people are just convinced it is always better somewhere else.

presentation 5y ago
That said at least it was feasible for me to live in a clean, $650/mo apartment of my own, in a great neighborhood, <15 minutes from Shinjuku/25 to Tokyo. The concept of an equivalent place in a place like NYC is laughable.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  I saw a video on YouTube showcasing $200-$250 rent rooms in the Tokyo area, some of them not that far out in terms of commute from the center. That is definitely something that doesn’t exist in the states, our housing codes would allow for it (small 2.5 tatami in area, they had no heat, shared toilets, no shower/bathing in the building).
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    A lot of things aren't available in North America because of the misguided belief that prohibiting low-quality market options leads those options being substituted one-for-one with higher quality options. This applies to micro-suites, prohibited by minimum floor size ordinances, low-wage work, prohibited by minimum wage mandates, etc. What actually happens is that more people are excluded from that market, e.g. people not being able to afford to live in SF, that - if microsuites were legal - would be able to. This comes down to not trusting individuals, particularly those in lower skill/income brackets, and their own choices.
rayiner 5y ago
> Meanwhile on my social feed my Japanese friends will admire the large living spaces in the US. I think most people are just convinced it is always better somewhere else. I think it’s about different people having different preferences. Most folks in Dallas (average commute under 30 minutes) aren’t wishing they were crammed into subway car in Tokyo. Likewise, people who like the urban lifestyle in Tokyo probably aren’t wishing they were stuck in freeway traffic in Dallas.
- ghaff 5y ago
  And the grass is always greener... I live out in the semi-country but within about an hour's drive of a major city. Yes, sometimes I think it would be nice if that drive were a walk or a short subway ride and that I could walk 10 minutes to a restaurant. But not enough to actually give up my space and quiet and move there. ADDED: And I don't actually go in very often because it is a longish drive but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
  - lillecarl 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - ghaff 5y ago
      You know absolutely nothing about my lifestyle. I'll refrain from what I would say to you in person as it is against the guidelines of this site. Everyone is not going to live in dense cities and those who argue that is the only solution have already lost their argument.
      - lillecarl 5y ago
        [flagged]
        ghaff 5y ago
        I haven’t regularly commuted for most of the last 15 years. And while I probably wouldn’t buy an EV today, that’s in part because my 10 year old vehicle only has about 70,000 miles on it so it’s nowhere near needing replaced—and doing so would be both a poor financial and environmental choice.
allset_ 5y ago
Many commuters in the US spend >30min (often 45+min) in their car in insane traffic. It's not like its all roses to drive to work.
chrischen 5y ago
Not everyone is standing on the train. The people who have the longest commutes usually also get on first, and thus have a seat. There are also express trains during rush hours... Do you have a source on the 50 minute average commute? 50 minutes on a non express train would be close to a last stop from the west side of Tokyo on one of the lines to the east side of Tokyo. Here's an example involving one transfer and the last stop on one of the lines: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wako,+Saitama,+Japan/Tokyo+Station,+1+Chome+Marunouchi,+Chiyoda+City,+Tokyo+100-0005,+Japan/@35.7363005,139.6475263,13.04z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x6018ebe8e0fe0c99:0xeaff9744d897efb8!2m2!1d139.6058063!2d35.7813326!1m5!1m1!1s0x60188bfbd89f700b:0x277c49ba34ed38!2m2!1d139.7671248!2d35.6812362!5i2 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wako,+Saitama,+Japan/Tokyo+S... Currently it is 53 minutes.
- 0x77x66 5y ago
  This source says 59 min (in japanese). https://www.athome.co.jp/contents/at-research/vol33/ https://www.athome.co.jp/contents/at-research/vol33/ one in english is here: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commute-time-japan/ https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu... This one is 45 min ... though that is all of Japan, not Tokyo specific. btw, I think Tokyo is great. But I think these articles set bad expectations sometimes and I have met a few foreigners that were totally disappointed/burnt out when moving to Tokyo.
  - chrischen 5y ago
    > 39.5 minutes each way Ok that makes more sense if it's the one-way commute. US average commute seems to be about 27 minutes one way, with public transit rates going much higher. I'd probably still take the train commute because it's self-driving and can potentially just sleep on the train (as many do).
- Seb-C 5y ago
  50 minutes feels pretty standard to me here. That said, my 45 minutes of train in Tokyo are far more comfortable than the 20~30 minutes I once had in France. The trains here are quiet, safe, does not stink, the air is conditioned in both winter and summer, the mobile network is always available and it's driven carefully. I can just spend my time carelessly on my phone reading stuff (and HN!) or watching videos.
thomasahle 5y ago
> Meanwhile on my social feed my Japanese friends will admire the large living spaces in the US. This seems to be comparing urban Japan with rural America. From my experience in San Francisco the living spaces certainly aren't big.
- ghaff 5y ago
  Define "rural." The Bay Area is obviously especially problematic with respect to housing. But get 30-45 minutes out of many major cities, even along a commuter rail/light rail of some sort, and people have houses in places that, for better or worse, are not rural.
- nemo44x 5y ago
  NYC apartments are nearly twice as large on average compared to Tokyo. In NYC bars and restaurants appear small to outsiders but go to Tokyo and wow, spaces are really small. That’s also a big part of its charm to be. But I couldn’t live like that day to day.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    what's interesting to note is that retail vibrancy seems to have a direct inverse relationship to square footage; it is much easier to get high utilization out of a smaller space and thus also easier to be profitable. I've lived in both NYC and Seattle. Older neighborhoods predominantly with retail like the 25-foot storefronts or small corner stores common in NYC and older parts of Seattle have lots of business thriving, many of them in low-margin industries. Newer Seattle developments have restaurant spaces sized to fit 100-200 people, which is pretty hard to fill outside of maybe a lunch or dinner rush, and those tend to cycle out restaurants and stores like no tomorrow.
- presentation 5y ago
  If you compare the average apartment in SF to the average apartment in Tokyo, you’ll realize that the SF ones are actually quite spacious. Just, nobody knows how to use their space efficiently in the USA like people do in Japan. That said the culture here, driven by the reality of living spaces, is to meet people outside of home, not invite people at home, allowing for more versatile design.
lillecarl 5y ago
I'm sitting on the subway train home, not entirely sober at 1:30 in Stockholm enjoying public transportation. I have 50 minutes to the city center (15m walking, 30m subway + 5m leeway). I just moved here from a smaller city and I adore it, public transportation brings people together. The spacious American homes you're talking about were plentiful where I used to live, but it just encourages people to stay at home zoning themselves off. I'm quite social so I guess that plays a role in my preferences.
JCharante 5y ago
How often do you have to travel 10km? With a high population density just traveling 1km means you're whizzing past the homes of a hundred thousand people.
bllguo 5y ago
But of course they like large living spaces, most people do. The issue is how costly suburbia is on a societal level. It promotes car usage, fosters social isolation, prevents building walkable and convenient neighborhoods, etc. The worst part is that after the cat's out of the bag, nobody is willing to give up their spacious homes. Better to heavily restrict or disallow the option in the first place.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > of course they like large living spaces, most people do [..] > nobody is willing to give up their spacious homes This is a view that is strident and sanctimonious, yet completely wrong. Suburbia did not come to exist because of a desire for big houses, which are just an incidental side effect, it's about home ownership. Specifically getting out from under the thumb of landlords. It was suburbia and the automobile -- not the New Deal -- that created the American middle class. Without the suburbs, you have to live in large urban tenements (or in rural areas) and there is no possibility of homeownership, as those landlords only sell to other landlords. Now along comes transportation technology which allows you to keep your job in the city but live where land is cheap enough to buy. Woohoo! Now you can be a homeowner thanks to automobiles, roads, and highways. The houses are larger than the urban tenements and flat just because the land is cheap. Going vertical is very expensive and makes financial sense only when land is expensive. So the size and shape of the house has nothing to do with why people rushed there. They rushed there because they want to get out from under the thumb of the urban landlord. Take a look at home ownership rates in the 20th C[1]: 1900: 46.5% <- Nothing much happens from 1900-1930 1910: 45.9% 1920: 45.6% 1930: 47.8% <- Great Depresssion + New deal: 1933-1941 sees decline 1940: 43.6% <- post-war suburbia boom: 1946-1966 1950: 55.0% 1960: 61.9% <- Increase slows as suburbs built out 1960 - 1980 1970: 62.9% 1980: 64.4% <- massively falling rates don't do much to 2000 1990: 64.2% 2000: 66.2% So to look at the post-war suburbia boom as some kind of indulgent preference for big houses is to completely miss what this is about. And note that a side effect of the growth of suburbia is the shrinking of rural areas, as people in rural areas don't need to relinquish home ownership and become renters if they move to cities. That used to be the case. Before suburbia, if you wanted to move to the city, you needed to rent from one of these landlords. But, you counter, we have condos! Well, there were no condos in 1940, and by 1990, less then 5% of housing units were condos[2]. There are very few condos in America, because again the owners of the big multi-unit properties prefer to rent them out rather than convert them to condos, and there just isn't that much infill land available in existing urban areas for developers to come in and add a significant amount of condo urban housing stock. So please stop judging people and wildly moralizing about long term social or economic trends. That's a terrible lens through which to understand economic history. - - - [1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/time-series/coh-owner/owner-tab.txt https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/ti... [2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-7775.pdf https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-7775.pdf
tasty_freeze 5y ago
Back in 1993 I spent six weeks in Japan, four of the in Kyoto where I was working on a contract. Because I was a foreigner they said I didn't have to work Saturday, giving me time to visit many castles and tourist spots. The other two weeks were spent traveling to Nagoya and Tokyo. Anyway, on one of those days a Japanese coworker chaperoned me. He told me when he was a kid he was astonished at how huge houses were in the US. How did he know? When he watched Tom and Jerry cartoons, the cat chased the mouse through so many rooms, far more than a Japanese house had.
greggman3 5y ago
It doesn't take much to be ~50 mins. I lived in Yayoi-cho. As a reference I could walk west from Shinjuku station and get to my apartment in 30 mins. I worked in Aoyama. The closest station was Nakano-shimbashi on the Marunouchi line but it was better for me to take the Oedo line from Nishi-Shinjuku 5-Chome station. Walking to that station was ~15 mins. With waiting for the next train it was another 15 mins to Aoyama, then another 10 mins walk from the platform to the Office. So 40 mins total. That's only 10 mins short of your average.

presentation 5y ago

That said at least it was feasible for me to live in a clean, $650/mo apartment of my own, in a great neighborhood, <15 minutes from Shinjuku/25 to Tokyo. The concept of an equivalent place in a place like NYC is laughable.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago
I saw a video on YouTube showcasing $200-$250 rent rooms in the Tokyo area, some of them not that far out in terms of commute from the center. That is definitely something that doesn’t exist in the states, our housing codes would allow for it (small 2.5 tatami in area, they had no heat, shared toilets, no shower/bathing in the building).
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  A lot of things aren't available in North America because of the misguided belief that prohibiting low-quality market options leads those options being substituted one-for-one with higher quality options. This applies to micro-suites, prohibited by minimum floor size ordinances, low-wage work, prohibited by minimum wage mandates, etc. What actually happens is that more people are excluded from that market, e.g. people not being able to afford to live in SF, that - if microsuites were legal - would be able to. This comes down to not trusting individuals, particularly those in lower skill/income brackets, and their own choices.

rayiner 5y ago

> Meanwhile on my social feed my Japanese friends will admire the large living spaces in the US. I think most people are just convinced it is always better somewhere else. I think it’s about different people having different preferences. Most folks in Dallas (average commute under 30 minutes) aren’t wishing they were crammed into subway car in Tokyo. Likewise, people who like the urban lifestyle in Tokyo probably aren’t wishing they were stuck in freeway traffic in Dallas.

ghaff 5y ago
And the grass is always greener... I live out in the semi-country but within about an hour's drive of a major city. Yes, sometimes I think it would be nice if that drive were a walk or a short subway ride and that I could walk 10 minutes to a restaurant. But not enough to actually give up my space and quiet and move there. ADDED: And I don't actually go in very often because it is a longish drive but that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make.
- lillecarl 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - ghaff 5y ago
    You know absolutely nothing about my lifestyle. I'll refrain from what I would say to you in person as it is against the guidelines of this site. Everyone is not going to live in dense cities and those who argue that is the only solution have already lost their argument.
    - lillecarl 5y ago
      [flagged]
      - ghaff 5y ago
        I haven’t regularly commuted for most of the last 15 years. And while I probably wouldn’t buy an EV today, that’s in part because my 10 year old vehicle only has about 70,000 miles on it so it’s nowhere near needing replaced—and doing so would be both a poor financial and environmental choice.

allset_ 5y ago

Many commuters in the US spend >30min (often 45+min) in their car in insane traffic. It's not like its all roses to drive to work.

chrischen 5y ago

Not everyone is standing on the train. The people who have the longest commutes usually also get on first, and thus have a seat. There are also express trains during rush hours... Do you have a source on the 50 minute average commute? 50 minutes on a non express train would be close to a last stop from the west side of Tokyo on one of the lines to the east side of Tokyo. Here's an example involving one transfer and the last stop on one of the lines: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wako,+Saitama,+Japan/Tokyo+Station,+1+Chome+Marunouchi,+Chiyoda+City,+Tokyo+100-0005,+Japan/@35.7363005,139.6475263,13.04z/data=!4m14!4m13!1m5!1m1!1s0x6018ebe8e0fe0c99:0xeaff9744d897efb8!2m2!1d139.6058063!2d35.7813326!1m5!1m1!1s0x60188bfbd89f700b:0x277c49ba34ed38!2m2!1d139.7671248!2d35.6812362!5i2 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Wako,+Saitama,+Japan/Tokyo+S... Currently it is 53 minutes.

0x77x66 5y ago
This source says 59 min (in japanese). https://www.athome.co.jp/contents/at-research/vol33/ https://www.athome.co.jp/contents/at-research/vol33/ one in english is here: https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commute-time-japan/ https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/average-work-commu... This one is 45 min ... though that is all of Japan, not Tokyo specific. btw, I think Tokyo is great. But I think these articles set bad expectations sometimes and I have met a few foreigners that were totally disappointed/burnt out when moving to Tokyo.
- chrischen 5y ago
  > 39.5 minutes each way Ok that makes more sense if it's the one-way commute. US average commute seems to be about 27 minutes one way, with public transit rates going much higher. I'd probably still take the train commute because it's self-driving and can potentially just sleep on the train (as many do).
Seb-C 5y ago
50 minutes feels pretty standard to me here. That said, my 45 minutes of train in Tokyo are far more comfortable than the 20~30 minutes I once had in France. The trains here are quiet, safe, does not stink, the air is conditioned in both winter and summer, the mobile network is always available and it's driven carefully. I can just spend my time carelessly on my phone reading stuff (and HN!) or watching videos.

thomasahle 5y ago

> Meanwhile on my social feed my Japanese friends will admire the large living spaces in the US. This seems to be comparing urban Japan with rural America. From my experience in San Francisco the living spaces certainly aren't big.

ghaff 5y ago
Define "rural." The Bay Area is obviously especially problematic with respect to housing. But get 30-45 minutes out of many major cities, even along a commuter rail/light rail of some sort, and people have houses in places that, for better or worse, are not rural.
nemo44x 5y ago
NYC apartments are nearly twice as large on average compared to Tokyo. In NYC bars and restaurants appear small to outsiders but go to Tokyo and wow, spaces are really small. That’s also a big part of its charm to be. But I couldn’t live like that day to day.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  what's interesting to note is that retail vibrancy seems to have a direct inverse relationship to square footage; it is much easier to get high utilization out of a smaller space and thus also easier to be profitable. I've lived in both NYC and Seattle. Older neighborhoods predominantly with retail like the 25-foot storefronts or small corner stores common in NYC and older parts of Seattle have lots of business thriving, many of them in low-margin industries. Newer Seattle developments have restaurant spaces sized to fit 100-200 people, which is pretty hard to fill outside of maybe a lunch or dinner rush, and those tend to cycle out restaurants and stores like no tomorrow.
presentation 5y ago
If you compare the average apartment in SF to the average apartment in Tokyo, you’ll realize that the SF ones are actually quite spacious. Just, nobody knows how to use their space efficiently in the USA like people do in Japan. That said the culture here, driven by the reality of living spaces, is to meet people outside of home, not invite people at home, allowing for more versatile design.

lillecarl 5y ago

I'm sitting on the subway train home, not entirely sober at 1:30 in Stockholm enjoying public transportation. I have 50 minutes to the city center (15m walking, 30m subway + 5m leeway). I just moved here from a smaller city and I adore it, public transportation brings people together. The spacious American homes you're talking about were plentiful where I used to live, but it just encourages people to stay at home zoning themselves off. I'm quite social so I guess that plays a role in my preferences.

JCharante 5y ago

How often do you have to travel 10km? With a high population density just traveling 1km means you're whizzing past the homes of a hundred thousand people.

bllguo 5y ago

But of course they like large living spaces, most people do. The issue is how costly suburbia is on a societal level. It promotes car usage, fosters social isolation, prevents building walkable and convenient neighborhoods, etc. The worst part is that after the cat's out of the bag, nobody is willing to give up their spacious homes. Better to heavily restrict or disallow the option in the first place.

rsj_hn 5y ago
> of course they like large living spaces, most people do [..] > nobody is willing to give up their spacious homes This is a view that is strident and sanctimonious, yet completely wrong. Suburbia did not come to exist because of a desire for big houses, which are just an incidental side effect, it's about home ownership. Specifically getting out from under the thumb of landlords. It was suburbia and the automobile -- not the New Deal -- that created the American middle class. Without the suburbs, you have to live in large urban tenements (or in rural areas) and there is no possibility of homeownership, as those landlords only sell to other landlords. Now along comes transportation technology which allows you to keep your job in the city but live where land is cheap enough to buy. Woohoo! Now you can be a homeowner thanks to automobiles, roads, and highways. The houses are larger than the urban tenements and flat just because the land is cheap. Going vertical is very expensive and makes financial sense only when land is expensive. So the size and shape of the house has nothing to do with why people rushed there. They rushed there because they want to get out from under the thumb of the urban landlord. Take a look at home ownership rates in the 20th C[1]: 1900: 46.5% <- Nothing much happens from 1900-1930 1910: 45.9% 1920: 45.6% 1930: 47.8% <- Great Depresssion + New deal: 1933-1941 sees decline 1940: 43.6% <- post-war suburbia boom: 1946-1966 1950: 55.0% 1960: 61.9% <- Increase slows as suburbs built out 1960 - 1980 1970: 62.9% 1980: 64.4% <- massively falling rates don't do much to 2000 1990: 64.2% 2000: 66.2% So to look at the post-war suburbia boom as some kind of indulgent preference for big houses is to completely miss what this is about. And note that a side effect of the growth of suburbia is the shrinking of rural areas, as people in rural areas don't need to relinquish home ownership and become renters if they move to cities. That used to be the case. Before suburbia, if you wanted to move to the city, you needed to rent from one of these landlords. But, you counter, we have condos! Well, there were no condos in 1940, and by 1990, less then 5% of housing units were condos[2]. There are very few condos in America, because again the owners of the big multi-unit properties prefer to rent them out rather than convert them to condos, and there just isn't that much infill land available in existing urban areas for developers to come in and add a significant amount of condo urban housing stock. So please stop judging people and wildly moralizing about long term social or economic trends. That's a terrible lens through which to understand economic history. - - - [1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/time-series/coh-owner/owner-tab.txt https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/ti... [2] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-7775.pdf https://www.huduser.gov/portal/Publications/pdf/HUD-7775.pdf

tasty_freeze 5y ago

Back in 1993 I spent six weeks in Japan, four of the in Kyoto where I was working on a contract. Because I was a foreigner they said I didn't have to work Saturday, giving me time to visit many castles and tourist spots. The other two weeks were spent traveling to Nagoya and Tokyo. Anyway, on one of those days a Japanese coworker chaperoned me. He told me when he was a kid he was astonished at how huge houses were in the US. How did he know? When he watched Tom and Jerry cartoons, the cat chased the mouse through so many rooms, far more than a Japanese house had.

greggman3 5y ago

It doesn't take much to be ~50 mins. I lived in Yayoi-cho. As a reference I could walk west from Shinjuku station and get to my apartment in 30 mins. I worked in Aoyama. The closest station was Nakano-shimbashi on the Marunouchi line but it was better for me to take the Oedo line from Nishi-Shinjuku 5-Chome station. Walking to that station was ~15 mins. With waiting for the next train it was another 15 mins to Aoyama, then another 10 mins walk from the platform to the Office. So 40 mins total. That's only 10 mins short of your average.