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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, but "Tokyo... one of the most human, inspiring place on earth". Living in Tokyo is not fun. There are way too many people. You barely have space to walk, and the trains are overcrowded. It's very noisy, and if you want to go out of the city you need to take a 2 hours ride to start seeing actual green stuff.

To my mind, inspiration comes from flexibility, i.e. when you can choose to change environment as you please. A mid-size city is ideal for that, since you can have times in the city and off the city, that change your perspective. If you live in Tokyo, you just cannot do that, and you are stuck in a world that is very different from everywhere else, and out of touch with a lot of what most people consider "reality".

Disclaimer: I live in Japan.

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Tokyo is very much not my cup of tea, but for people who enjoy city life because it is city life and not because of non-city things they can find in the city, Tokyo can be a very nice place to be. Is it crazily overcrowded? Yes. Is it overly expensive? Yes. Is it possible to experience alienation from humanity to a level almost incomprehensible anywhere else in the world while simultaneously having no elbow room? Yes.

You can also live in a shoebox apartment in a walkable neighborhood with forty-seven little restaurants at which the owner will remember your face after your third visit, well-maintained parks and orderly, efficient public services, connected via the world's hands-down-best mass transit system to a) a commercial center which has just about anything anyone could possibly want to buy (and that is not always a compliment) and b) a stupidly convenient rail network which will whisk you to anywhere on Honshu, including the parts of Japan that I rather enjoy, in less time than it takes many Americans to get to work in the morning.

If New York has any appeal to you, Tokyo will probably be your kind of town. If it doesn't, Tokyo will probably not be.

The a) and b) do not only apply to Tokyo. The top 10 cities in Japan can offer the same degree of convenience, less the "alienation from humanity to a level almost incomprehensible anywhere else in the world", which I find a very good description of the situation, by the way.

Concerning the "well maintained parks", several parts of Tokyo feel/look dirtier than many other places in the country, except maybe the southern part of Osaka.

If you live in a commuter suburb of Tokyo and ride the train at rush hour, yes you will not be happy. But why commute? I live 8 minutes' walk from Shibuya station and during the day perhaps 1 or two people walk by every few minutes. At night even fewer. Cars drive so slowly on my side-street that you cannot hear them at all.

As for taking two hours to "actual green stuff" man are you ever exaggerating. Even without LEAVING the city I know of 3 different nature preserves that range from 20 to 30 minutes away DOOR TO DOOR. If you hop on a train for 30 minutes, you hit Tamagawa, a breathtaking open expanse of river and low brush. Want forest? How about Takao-san, a breathtaking natural space with tons of hiking trails and a mountain you can climb easily in an afternoon. 44 minutes west of Shinjuku.

If you hate crowds, just avoid them. "Living in Tokyo is not fun" says more about your unhappiness with the rhythm of life you have created for yourself than it says about the city.

Well, the point is, to get to a green space, you need to get in a crowd in the first place. You cannot avoid them that easily. It's like you get double-punishment before the reward.

Tokyo is simply a city that is OVER-capacity, not by a factor of 1 or 2, but 10 or maybe more. If the train is 10 minutes late for any reason, any station would be filled with people on the platforms you can cross through it anymore. That says a lot. I feel New York is way more livable, from what I can compare.

Its funny you mention the train being late, and crowds. When I lived in NYC, traveling on the train during non-peak times was so stressful I avoided it like the plague. Always late. Noisy as hell. Smells like a cesspool. During rush-hour the train might stop in the middle of a tunnel, and the lights go out, the whole time it is not even air conditioned. I visited NYC 2 months ago after a few years away, and the floating filth in the tracks was still there of course. My Japanese travel companion who had never been in NYC before took only two train rides (at non-peak hours) to declare a strong negative impression of the NYC subway.

Maybe you live in another NYC where there are no trains? Or you just drive everywhere, but you don't mind that it takes an hour stuck in traffic to get out of Manhattan on a friday evening. In Tokyo it takes about the same amount of time to travel any distance whether it is 9am or 3pm, since the trains actually work.

I beg to differ. I live in Tokyo. I think it feels great and fun. It's New York, but nice. There are open spaces to the north/south/east/west, within 30 min (depending on which side you live).

Well I have lived in different parts of Japan and I find Tokyo the least inspiring place to be in this country. There's no great landmarks (except if you consider a 600m concrete/steel tower a valuable landmark...), no cool historical places, and this is not a place where I can relax, ever. Even when you reach home you have to live in the smallest apartment ever because it's what's available and affordable there. I agree Tokyo has some interesting aspects (how some quarters differ from one another), but there are too many drawbacks for me to qualify this as "inspiring". I guess it depends on your personality in the end, and what you can relate too. I need to be in a place when I can breathe, and Tokyo feels suffocating in many ways.

Tokyo is a big place. Living in Ebisu is worlds apart from living in Itabashi for example, but you'll need a bank balance to match.

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