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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

> Shopping centers, bars, clubs, and glittering zakkyo buildings (the ones with all the signs) continue to multiply. How could you live in Tokyo for a decade and miss all that?

Emphasis on Tokyo, which was basically the only place in Japan that's still growing, until it too started shrinking during COVID.

Go to any second-tier city, or even much of suburban Tokyo, and you'll see urban collapse in action: emptied-out "shutter-gai" shopping arcades, closed restaurants and hotels. Then drive out into the countryside, and you'll see completely depopulated hamlets and virtually all businesses not catering directly to agriculture have already collapsed.

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Kind of related, but the slightly odd thing about a lot of Japanese commentary is that people forget the suburbs exist.

And these suburbs are very car centric.

The major difference is that the suburbanites will not visit the major city by car, and most young people do not become stuck in the suburbs and instead leave for Tokyo or any of the other big cities.

“Very car centric” is incredibly relative. Compared to Tokyo, yes. Compared to anywhere in America except NYC, not even close. In suburban and even rural areas, there’s still a centralisation and comprehensiveness of public transit that makes it possible to get by without a car. Look at all the apartment buildings with no parking or like four spots and 30 homes.

> Emphasis on Tokyo, which was basically the only place in Japan that's still growing, until it too started shrinking during COVID.

A few days ago I commented the opposite of this: most of Japan's major cities ("Osaka, Yokohama, Nagoya, Sapporo, Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Sendai, and more"), per Wikipedia, have been growing. The inaka is shrinking, but that's part of the same migration away from rural areas that's happening across the developed world. Are you basing your claim that everywhere in the country - besides and now including Tokyo - on data that contradicts Wikipedia, or is it just intuition?

In Japan the inaka is shrinking, but the cities are shrinking too. In 2021 every single prefecture except Okinawa saw net population loss: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01310/

Here are the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research's latest projections: https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-shicyoson/e/shicyoson18/t-page.asp

Virtually all municipalities in Japan, large or small, are already shrinking or will go into negative growth by 2025-2030. These 2018 projections predate COVID though, which has sped up the decline.

And yes, there are a few exceptions, but they're mostly things like ski area Niseko, which boomed on foreign tourism investment, and a few towns in Fukushima that grew because people were evacuated from the reactor zone.

> Go to any second-tier city, or even much of suburban Tokyo, and you'll see urban collapse in action

And this is different from the old Rust Belt cities in the US, how?

Cites are growing. Anything outside of that is collapsing. There's no bloody in-between.

fix: all businesses not catering directly to agriculture or AEON have already collapsed.

AEON is the culture in suburbs

Can you expand AEON (I assume it's an acronym)?

It's apparently a retail business in Japan. https://www.welcome-aeon.com

It's a shopping mall conglomerate. They specialize in massive multi-level shopping malls.

And they’re fucking everywhere and inescapable, even in big cities.

And just like suburban malls, rather boring and filled with your usual milieu of chain stores (Uniqlo among them).

Because they serve a purpose and have high utility.

“Shutter-gai” shopping arcades are a special kind of depressing because you know that just 20 minutes away by train business is booming in the hip new downtown shopping malls.

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