Japan impressions

Thoughts on zoning, hardware, and toilets

I recently visited Japan with Shota and Kerry, two of my best friends. I spent 9 days exploring Tokyo, Kyoto, and Nara.

To prepare, I read Japan and the Shackles of the Past by R. Taggart Murphy, perused blegs like this, and got through those head-scratching intro levels of Duolingo Japanese that teach you how to say “Jeremy is a lawyer” but not “Where is the bathroom?”

I knew little about Japan. Vague concepts like the Meiji Restoration and Abenomics floated around my head, but I couldn’t talk about them meaningfully. I could not have picked out Kyoto on a map. I did not appreciate the unique complexity of the US-Japan relationship, despite knowing WWII history as well as your average dad.

Yet I went into this trip with that same high expectation and wonder that many Americans harbor for Japan — this strange, humble reverence that Americans don’t reserve for any other country.¹ China may be far more powerful and technologically advanced, and Korea may be carrying the torch of East Asian business success into the 21st century, yet it’s Japan - as world war enemy, vassal state, economic rival, and cultural mecca - that continues to capture the American imagination.

I jotted down most of these wandering thoughts in a yellow Rollbahn notebook with a purple Pilot Uniball while sitting in bullet trains & metro cars. That I can still read my handwriting is a testament to how smoothly those trains run!

Disclaimer: Japan has 126 million people. It’s not a monolith. Meanwhile, my Japanese knowledge stems from visits to three cities over a few days, plus a lot of reading. I’m observant, but I’m not an authority.

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My first impression of Japan: this place has high standards.

• Japan is spotless. In Philly, my dog tries to eat discarded chicken bones and pizza crust every few feet. In Tokyo, the streets are so clean that I would happily eat said bones and crust right from the pavement.

• Japan functions. Elevator doors close immediately when you press the button.² The famously on-time trains are indeed on-time.³

• Japan has stellar food: 7/11s and their ilk sell real, high-quality food. Carton milk tastes better. You have the world’s greatest seafood cuisine at your fingertips.

  

• Japanese workers are good at their jobs: in general, service quality is top-tier. Some anecdotes:

  • At the Uniqlo Ginza store, I set down my fanny pack and water bottle outside my dressing room curtain. When I opened the curtain again, a worker had neatly organized my stuff into a basket.

  • A 7/11 attendant cut the plastic tag off my umbrella at checkout so I didn’t have to yank it off myself.

  • When Kerry didn’t have enough money loaded on her Apple Watch to cover her exit fare, a subway employee sprinted down from the office, cash box in hand, to help her pay in cash.

  • Attendants at even mid-level department stores wrap your goods with a comical fastidiousness that would make Love Actually’s Mr. Bean proud.

In the US, rich enclaves enjoy standards like these. In Japan, the average person can expect them, too.

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My second impression: Japan is like a well-designed video game.

Good open-world video games do two things:

1. React to the player

2. Reward exploration

Valve, designer of Half-Life, Portal, and Team Fortress, sums it up well when it says “… if the world ignores the player, the player won’t care about the world.”

By these standards, Japan wins Game of the Year. Tokyo and Kyoto reward curiosity. There is always something worthy of a closer look just around the corner. Tokyo in particular is a fractal: you find yourself wandering into ever skinnier and quieter streets, a spiral towards the smallest detail.

What makes Japan different? Zoning drives a lot of it. In Tokyo, it’s common to pass a block with single-family homes, multi-family buildings, small businesses, and massive corporate offices all in the same space. There is never the sense of liminal dread you feel walking through an American housing development. Combine this with quiet, well-kept streets that prioritize humans over cars, and you have a recipe for fruitful wandering.

Why can’t we enjoy this in the US? Japanese zoning differs from American zoning in two key ways (read more here):

1. It is federal rather than local, with only 12 zone types rather than hundreds.

2. It is inclusive rather than exclusive

   1. In the US, you zone for a single family house or a multi-family unit or a department store or a school, etc

   2. In Japan, if you zone for a school, you must also zone for residential. If you zone for neighborhood stores, you must also zone for schools & residential. On goes the pyramid.

Second, Japan’s attention to detail lives up to its reputation. Partly because of zoning, the Japanese excel at maximizing the aesthetic appeal of minimal space. Maybe this is the heritage of Japan’s long history of garden design, which seeks to mimic the large in the tiny (think bonsai!). Yet even in dense, concrete Tokyo neighborhoods, beauty permeates. Even the manhole covers felt like easter eggs.

Tack onto this endless vending machines with green-tea-as-power-ups and a train system that provides the closest thing to IRL fast travel, and it’s no wonder that some of the world’s most famous gaming companies were born from this archipelago.

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I’ve often heard the refrain “things just make sense in Japan.”

Here’s a list of things that just made sense to me (many are toilet-related):

1. Vending machines that sell non-sugary teas

2. Zoning laws mentioned above

3. Restaurants with three bathrooms: woman, man/woman, man (with just two urinals). Solving for the equilibrium:

   1. Cuts down waiting time for everybody

   2. I had to think about the game theory of pooping here. Assuming you’re slightly embarrassed to walk out of a smelly bathroom only to hand it over to the other sex, this suggests that women will use the dedicated woman’s room for number 2, and men will either try to be quick in the shared room or skip it altogether (either way, a gain for society).

   3. But even if a man desperately needs to use the shared room for number 2, he won’t have to wait long, because women are only using the shared room for number 1, and other men are either foregoing it or going very quickly, per (b).

   4. God, it’s genius

4. Bidets on every single toilet

5. “Privacy mode” on the more upscale bidets, which plays a little ditty so that others can’t hear you

6. Toilets that feature a faucet on top of the tank. Water is flowing into the tank post-flush anyway - why not use it to wash your hands first?

7. Using umbrellas on sunny days

8. Being pleasant to others, being good at your job, etc.

   

   The final boss of public toilets

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In American cities, noises, smells, and tiny dangers all force you to enter a state of light fight-or-flight, your brain automatically filtering out the small problems (loud cars, broken sidewalks, trash) to focus on larger potential issues (the human poop you need to step around, the train you cannot miss). This inures us to an accumulation of unpleasantries. But when moments of beauty strike - the virtuosic old violinist playing to a bustling crowd, with only a young woman standing there in appreciation - they capture us, define our day.

Conversely, in Japan I found my baseline levels of cortisol to be much, much lower. Walking through Kyoto at 8 AM was like hiking through a forest. But rare instances of incongruity, as minute as out-of-tune announcement beepers in the subway, annoyed me. Something I never would have noticed in Philly or New York made it impossible to think in Kyoto.

There’s a question here similar to “would you rather fight a horse-sized duck or 100 duck-sized horses”: would you rather live in a chaotic world with flashes of beauty, or a beautiful world with flashes of chaos?

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On train to Nara

Tourists from British Isles

Make me miss silence

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I’ve often thought of Japan as high-tech society par excellence, but this isn’t quite true in 2023. Japan is one of the best hardware societies in history. Cars, trains, mechanical pencils, gaming systems, medical devices — all areas where Japanese craftsmanship remains legendary.

Yet Japan has missed the boat on many of the tech innovations we take for granted during the last twenty years. Of the >4,500 companies that have gone through Y Combinator, two are based in Japan. Japanese web design is sometimes so Web 1.0 that it feels nostalgic.⁴ The global smartphone market is dominated by Korea, California, and China. Consider the ‘80s American hand-wringing over the imminent hegemony of Japanese industry, and you have to ask, what happened?

The best answers to this question lie in this excellent article by Patrick McKenzie, an American engineer who worked for years in Japan and eventually started his own company. It’s long, but well worth the read for anybody trying to understand the radical differences between Tokyo and Silicon Valley.

The upshot is that Japan often feels like techno-utopia if somebody were asked to describe such a utopia in 1988. During my time in Japan, I noticed this 90s retro-futurism a few times. White-collared salarymen hunched over PCs released the same day as The Matrix. Public pay phones, spotless and prominent, greeted you at every subway exit. Stores in Shinjuku proudly sold MP3 players with clickable buttons.

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Open questions about Japan:

1. Startups: What’s the future of Japan’s startup ecosystem? Can “move fast and break things” coexist with salaryman culture? Are Japanese startups forced to choose between serving Japan vs. serving the rest of the world?

2. Geopolitics: At what point will Japan claim independence from the US as a vassal state, and stake its claim as an ally on equal footing? Would a hot war in Asia speed this up or slow it down?

3. Domestic politics: What would it take for the Japanese far-right to take power in Japan? It’s alarming that the basic political structures that led to the horrors of the ‘30s — decentralized power among historically powerful family dynasties, serving under an untouchable Emperor — have not changed. Sure, there’s the postwar Constitution, foisted upon Japan by MacArthur, but the restrictions it enforces are openly derided by politicians on the right. An armed, ultranationalist Japan is not problem #1 in the world today, but it could happen.

4. Women: Japan continues to undervalue women’s potential in the economy. As long as salaryman culture survives, so will the expectations of the salaryman’s wife (quit when pregnant, raise children, keep the home, never see your husband). This is a raw deal for most intelligent, ambitious women, and many are opting out. Maybe a one-two punch of 1) startups 2) run by women is exactly the shock the Japanese economy needs.

1. Except maybe Germany for its engineering and France/Italy for their food. But reverence in these cases is tied to a specific cultural export, not to the society as a whole, as it is with Japan.

2. Was going to make a joke along the lines of “Why does this seem illegal in the US??”, but it actually is illegal in the US.

3. Not only are the trains on time, they’re also frequent. I was amazed to learn that Shinkansen trains leave busy stations every few minutes, and that tickets did not limit you to a specific physical train. Yes, the Shinkansen is strictly better than Amtrak. It is not illegal to have better trains in the US, by the way.

4. This might be a bit unfair. There’s a rhyme and reason to Japan’s cluttered web design. I still find it ironic that a culture famed for its minimalist aesthetic produces some of the most headache-inducing websites I’ve ever seen.