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> One thing I have been wondering about from the outside is if part of what keeps Japanese lifestyle's relatively cheap is that the population is so homogenous (& seemingly law-abiding) that there doesn't appear to be the same emphasis on living in a "good area" as in other countries for personal security reasons.

As a foreigner living in Japan, I can confirm this is true. Much of japanese society benefits from this homogeneity. Hard to quantify a lot of these benefits and even harder to compare Japan to somehwere as big and varied as the US, but there is certainly grease in the wheels of society as long as you are the average case in japan.

That said extremely homogeneous society is a double edged sword. Personal computing never took off in Japan as much as it did in the US, and the youth here are extremely disadvantaged because of it -- they're proficient with smart phones (roughly around 2010/2011 they gained mass adoption/cleared the popularity/acceptance hurdle) but it absolutely does not feel like there is enough proficiency being built in japan for success in the increasingly digital present and future.

[EDIT] - the proficiency I mean in the last bit is "real" computing -- i.e. using computers to create content, programs, and other useful things, rather than simply consuming it. I'm likely blinded by my own biases, but I see the ability to use photoshop/gimp, after effects, IDEs, terminals as abilities that award more leverage than being really good at using tiktok (which can indeed make engaging content) or drawing apps on iphone/etc.

This is an interesting dynamic I noticed when living in China, too.

There are no "good" or "bad" areas, only "rich" and "poor". If you're a student/minimum-wage worker who can only afford to live in certain areas, you're not forced to deal with the crime/drugs/general shitheads you usually encounter in the "bad" areas in the West.

>I wonder if this acts as a somewhat hidden subsidy to life whereas for people in many Western countries it is normal to think "there is no way I am living in area X/Y/Z" due to security concerns for them or their families, in Japan you basically don't need to take that into consideration at all. Everywhere is pretty safe (relatively speaking).

Hidden subsidy? It's not a subsidy. Americans self impose an additional burden on themselves. They want their homes to be expensive because they don't want undesirable people to live near them.

Nice linguistic trick of trying to just mix "homogenous populations" and "good areas/bad areas" as if they're interchangeable /s

There's definitely huge variation in quality of areas in Tokyo (more or less parks, more or less access to services etc). Less so now, but many areas had a good amount of crime too! Loads of people don't want to live in areas cuz of the "bad vibes". People get stuff stolen here too! And there's a "good school"/"bad school" thing for certain areas.

But there's a baseline that is still something you can survive with. So yeah maybe you have a shitty environment but it's not "the entire bottom has fallen out" like chunks of the US. The schools have (some) money, and (relatively) clean water comes out of the pipes. And if you make very little money there is some semi-public housing that can fit a family of four.

And poorer families are given cash, not food stamps with 1000 exceptions to them.

All this sociological exoticism (mainly from Americans) is really missing the forest for the trees. A lot of it is the result of giving people some means to survive, even in difficult times. The US would change a lot if it could adopt that attitude.

In canada, most places are not 'bad' areas, but just lower income or higher income. The competitiveness to live a richer area to get better schools is not much of a thing, almost a foreign concept.

> The competitiveness to live a richer area to get better schools is not much of a thing, almost a foreign concept.

I assume Canada doesn't primarily use local property taxes to pay for schools. This whole better schools thing is in higher income areas is a self imposed problem in the US.

Would that really solve it? If the funds for schools are raised from local property tax, then wealthier areas will still have the best funded schools will they not?

My sentence was confusing. The point was that school funding shouldn't come from local property taxes. This method in the US simply makes the divide between rich and poor even greater. And my badly made point was that this problem in the US is self imposed b/c of how schools are paid for.

> The competitiveness to live a richer area to get better schools is not much of a thing, almost a foreign concept

Are you sure about that? A lot of real-estate listings I see here boast about having good schools.

Americans really take the cake when it comes to creating exclusive "close the door behind you" communities which advantage the already relatively wealthy kids to hog the next generation of opportunity.

Just think Silicon Valley.

But I was asking about Canada.

I'm curious what you mean by "homogeneous". I've just had a quick Google and apparently the Gini coefficient in Japan is ~0.3 compared to ~0.48 in the US, which is one definition of "homogeneous". Another search turned up some suggestion that said coefficient correlates well with the percentage of people who have been victims of theft/assault or who feel unsafe walking home alone.

They likely mean culturally homogeneous rather than financially.

> One thing I have been wondering about from the outside is if part of what keeps Japanese lifestyle's relatively cheap is that the population is so homogenous (& seemingly law-abiding) that there doesn't appear to be the same emphasis on living in a "good area" as in other countries for personal security reasons.

I's recommend you try doing some back of the envelope logic/math here. I think you'll find the personal security effect negligible (unless you're comparing with south africa).

Even to someome like me who leans towards "race realism" (e.g. racism) this sounds like nonsense and dogwhistling.

I have to say I didn't see the the comment in this light, and now I'm wondering if I'm under attuned or if you (and others who posted similarly) are over-attuned.

There's a very real truth to japan's generally law abiding culture and it's the double edged sword of homogeneity. "good area"s didn't signify anything about race/culture difference to me (I wasn't even thinking of foreigners/non) in the negative, but more about how the basic "shared programming" of japanese culture is generally tilted away from crime/disobedience/singular action and towards law abidance/obedience/group action. If you take a look at how certain systems are set up (online security, in person security, how paperwork is done, etc), it can only exist in a country with very tight cohesion which comes from very tightly held shared values (or at least the appearance of that), whether that's a good or bad thing.

I didn't see that the commenter was implying that the heterogeneous portion was responsible for all the crime, but just that the dominant culture was on average more lawful than another might be, and that since that culture was so concentrated crime in general was lower than you might find in other places -- reducing the need to worry for everyone who lived there.

That said, Japan definitely has that kind of insidious/hard-to-demarcate racism/classism/etc. Japan as I've experienced it is just really good at 'other'-ing groups of people in some way or another and you could see it as a product of the culture, their historically generally xenophobic nature (also culture, I guess), or some other things.

> there doesn't appear to be the same emphasis on living in a "good area" as in other countries for personal security reasons

This is common mostry in the anglosphere. In many other countries there is no such difference.

There's definitely 怪しい areas in Japan.

> This is all speculation and I don't live in Japan, don't speak Japanese, and have never even been to Japan.

So what did you base this speculation on?

Crime rates are generally low so the difference between the areas is less a factor than for other countries, but there are soil and geographic positioning factors that weight a lot more.

For instance low elevation areas are usually weak to tsunami, river areas can also flood, and former swamp and artificial terrain can liquify under seisms. There are hazard maps detailing the risks, and avoiding riskier areas will usually cost a bunch.

Buildings also get more expensive depending on their level of resistance against earthquakes.

Sizeable seisms are not that rare (way more than “once in a lifetime” kind of event), so you might still be spending a decent amount of money to try to have a better chance at surviving them.