Tokyo may have found the solution to soaring housing costs

It's the opposite of central planning. According to the article, there is a uniform set of rules. Follow the rules, build your condo building. In the US there is central planning on the local level, usually the city level. Planning commissions determine if your project meets the "character of the neighborhood" and neighbors bitch and complain that your project will "create more traffic" and the (central) planning commission denies your permit.

To add some more context: Japan defines a zoning "scaffold" at the national level, but it's extremely simple (8 pages with colorful diagrams) and highly permissive [1]. It defines a handful of zones cities can use across their neighborhood, allowing roughly "low, medium, high, or ultra high" density, and not much else. Your low-density neighborhoods still allow about as much density as much of Brooklyn, irregular plot sizes, homes that use 100% of the plot next to homes that 20% of the plot but are correspondingly much taller, and homes that double as a neighborhood restaurant. And the zoning is applied to large neighborhoods, not to individual plots of land.

There's also no minimum parking requirements, and cities often forego street-side parking: parking lots are privately built to meet demand.

In contrast, American zones can be hyper micro-managed: NYC defines hundreds of zones, and designates "zone" at the individual building level instead of neighborhood--the complexity spans 3500 pages[2]--not including a list of landmarked buildings and neighborhoods and their specific rules, which is a sizable list itself. Even if you adhere to the zoning laws for your plot of land, your new building proposal may still be rejected for not fitting in with "neighborhood character." (This concept doesn't exist in Japan: you can build a restaurant shaped like a boat next to an ancient temple for all anyone cares, or a corner store shaped like a tomato[3]).

Beyond that, NYC has an unfortunate habit of retroactively changing the zoning under parcels of land to become more restrictive, ensuring (1) old buildings are never torn down and upgraded for fear of being forced to rebuild it smaller, resulting in very old housing stock, and (2) it's a political rent-seeking game of rich land owners to fight for upzoning or rezoning of their individual plots, boosting their land value (see the controversy with NYU; nobody interested in just building middle class housing would ever go through this legal battle).

In comparison to highly restrictive and micro-managed US zoning laws, the national zoning scaffolds in Japan almost resemble a bill of rights more than a centrally planned system: city governments are allowed to plan densities to help with infrastructure planning, but they may not restrict what you can do with your plot of land, what buildings on that plot may look like, etc. anywhere near to the extent practiced in the US. They also don't, as far as I know, retroactively restrict your land rights like has happened in over 40% of Manhattan [4]. US zones are far more "centrally planned," just at the city/county level rather than national.

[1] http://www.mlit.go.jp/common/000234477.pdf [2] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/zoning/zoni... [3] https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQKl1g6... [4] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-p...