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Comment by reustle | Hacker News Reader

I've just wrapped up a 6+ year stint in Tokyo. It is my favorite city in the world, hands down. Maybe similarly to Paris, Tokyo is a great place to _visit_, especially for a few weeks or months, but a difficult place to live long term.

My hope is that, with all the gentrification pain that this recent tourism push [0] is bringing, we will see a much larger and more stable international community settle in Tokyo. Currently, long term Japan life is best enjoyed by introverts (generally).

[0] https://www.nippon.com/en/ncommon/contents/japan-data/222973...

* 6mm~ to 32mm visitor increase in the past 10 years. Gov target is 60mm by 2030.

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> Currently, long term Japan life is best enjoyed by introverts (generally).

And long may it continue.

I too love Tokyo, but I don’t want to see a larger international community move there. Those big cities with lots of expats and immigrants all end up looking like London or Toronto or New York.

I absolutely agree, but the tourism train is barreling forward at this point. I think an emotionally invested foreign community is the only way to smooth out future gentrification tension.

Rupert Wingfield-Hayes said it well in his "goodbye after 10 years" (sort of) writeup. [0]

> Will Japan gradually fade into irrelevance, or re-invent itself? My head tells me that to prosper anew Japan must embrace change. But my heart aches at the thought of it losing the things that make it so special.

[0] Japan was the future but it's stuck in the past https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-63830490

Can you expand more on why you think it's a place best enjoyed by introverts?

I've only ever visited for a short trip so I'm curious to hear your take.

It is very difficult to get into Japanese society. They are really friendly and helpful, but finding a common "wave length" is very difficult. Introverts have it much easier to live with that. Also, since there are a lot of introverts in Japan, the infrastructure for an introvert lifestyle exists.

it probably depends if you can speak fluent Japanese or not tbh

Even if you can speak fluent Japanese, it's just a different culture where fast friends, especially as adults, isn't as prevalent. You'll have the exceptions who might seek out friends from different cultures, but most people are just trying to get by and content with the social circle they already have.

My guess? Hard to make friends.

It might be the circles that I move in, but it seems like Japan fell out of favour as a tourist destination?

I know lots of people who went in the early 2000s, and I also visited myself a handful of times. It doesn’t seem to be quite so on the radar nowadays, which is strange considering how interesting it is.

I think this is an interesting piece of semi-related anecdata from 2021 [0]

> The Japanese cities of Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto have earned the first, second and third spots respectively on Condé Nast Traveler’s 2021 list of the best major cities in the world.

> The cities were selected in a poll of over 800,000 Condé Nast readers as part of the publication’s prestigious, long-running Reader’s Choice Awards, and won particular acclaim for their world-class cuisine, inspiring cultural attractions and seamless blending of tradition and modernity.

[0] https://theincentivist.com/japanese-cities-conde-nast-best-m...

Hm, might just be your circles? Anecdotally, lots of people I know have been to Japan in the past decade.

I do notice less people talking about going in the past couple years (but that's due to COVID restrictions, etc)

I wonder if that is less about Tokyo/Japan falling out of favor versus other Asian cities falling into favor?

Since the early 2000s, many Chinese cities, as well as other Asian cities like Seoul, rapidly developed in both scale and modernity. Tokyo sort of remained the same.

Could you elaborate on "long term Japan life is best enjoyed by introverts"?

I have a slew of thoughts I still haven't completely fleshed out in a publicly sharable form yet, and are from the perspective of a western-raised person, but the summary would probably look something like:

- Most of your socially active friends will most likely leave within 2-3 years of arriving

- If you were raised in the west, family and culturally similar communities are likely quite far away (both in flight hours and timezone changes)

- It is notoriously hard to break into Japanese social circles, regardless of language competency. Acquaintances are easy, but I'm talking about deeper connections.

What kind of social circles are you talking about?

And why would you want to 'break into' them if they are so exclusionary?

AFAIK Japan is a high-trust, high-context society. It is difficult to break into social groups or make new acquaintances, while the infrastructure necessary for living a "solitary" existence (supported by service-providing strangers) is extant and quite sophisticated.

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