My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps

In 2009, Google Street View had only been gathering images in Austin for about a year, I think. I pulled up right behind the Street View car at a red light, and I waved out the window, hoping that would get captured. I sent an email to my friends with a link to the location and said, "check this out in a couple of months!"

When I checked later that year, there was no image of me, so I thought the camera had not been active, and I forgot all about it.

Then, while looking through old emails a couple of weeks ago, I found that one and clicked the link. I clicked to see images from 2009, and sure enough, there was my little white Honda. And when I moved around the map, I found an image where my hand was out the window, waving! It was like I was waving to myself from the past. Pretty neat!

I had to click this title!

For some months now I do basically the same, but without the clicking in Streetview. There are some channels on Youtube where someone walks through neighborhoods in Tokyo, I found I really enjoy these. The streets are so clean and the houses so beautiful. Indeed, once in a while a Japanese sports car pops up around a corner, just standing there on somebody's driveway.

I also enjoy the walk-throughs of neighborhoods in New York (edit: now that I think about it, this started with following ari@home, a streamer who makes electronic music on the fly while walking and having an open mic). I tried Dallas once, I guess, but it was all way too big and bulky (but it was down town I guess, so that's to be expected of a lot of cities on this planet).

Does anybody have ideas for other nice spots on this beautiful planet!? I think I know Tokyo by now. ;)

I lived in Tokyo for a year and my favorite hobby was taking the train somewhere about 10 miles from home then just wandering around, vaguely towards home. It's such a beautiful walkable city, and the safety means you don't need to worry about much at all. I usually walked at night and I would come across drunk people stumbling home, pets (and rodents!) roaming the streets, construction in the middle of the night, strange open late restaurants / bars, and all kinds of other things. Living in Japan has its downsides but that activity was a nice reminder of what a cool place it is. I continue going back every year just to explore new little places I've never gone. I recommend anyone who visits to find some time to just wander around. Pick a destination and walk there and see what you find.

If you've talked to ChatGPT enough this is instantly recognizable as AI writing. It's this kind of romantic hacker poetic ad copy thing. The short little punchy sentences. The sentence fragments. The repetition. This new age Instagram drama: flash talk for goddesses and sunsets.

I guess it works! But it's gross. lol.

Many years ago, I found an image via Goggle that I used as a desktop image: an old copper stamp mill in Calumet MI[1]. That image had a ghost image in it and I got a little obsessed.

After more research than I should have ever put into this question, I found a copy of the photo responsible for the ghost image[2].

Not being able to leave things at that... I had to try and find where the photo had been taken in Google Maps and street view. And I did[3]!

Wandering around maps and street view I found a number of houses in the original photo that are still there, like [4]. The intersection that is front and center on the photo [2] is the current intersection of Oak St & Spruce St. The duplex home at the bend in that intersection, where the woman is walking in front, is still there, though clearly it's seen better days.

Definitely spent too much time, even if virtually, in Calumet, MI.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...

[2] https://www.shorpy.com/node/11417

[3] http://goo.gl/maps/xYctZ

[4] http://goo.gl/maps/BSkFj

I appreciate this hobby.

I've visited San Francsico a few times but haven't been since 2007.

At one point, back in about 2013 or 2014, I got a little bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. It started innocently enough (reading an article about the Pulgas Water Temple), and I ended up spending many evenings in bed using Google Earth and Google Maps street view to trace the route of the aqueduct and look at the things around it. Where the pipes run under cities it's easy to see their "mark" on the land (since no permanent structures are permitted to be built above them). Following them up into the mountains was fun, too.

A few years later I got into looking at abandoned rail lines in the Midwest and spent evenings "flying" the routes of old railroads. They're similar to the aqueduct insofar as you can see the "scar" they've left on the (and in the oddly-shaped parcels of land left after they were sold-off).

I have also spent an incredible amount of time looking at slowly moving Street View footage, but it was through https://neal.fun/internet-roadtrip/ - a "game" where strangers collectively vote to move around Street View coverage at slightly faster than walking pace.

It was a great community, and good fun to see so much of North America that I would never visit. It's still going, but I don't visit as much (it used to be basically permanent second/third monitor content while I wrote my thesis). A cool opportunity for programming too: I made a bunch of mods for the game (https://greasyfork.org/en/users/1473129-jdranczewski) and a basic ambient viewer where you can just watch the Street View go by (https://jdranczewski.dev/irt/viewer.html).

Found myself recently down a rabbit hole watching a lot of climbing videos (free, trad, bouldering, etc).

I was looking at Google maps to locate some of the more obscure climbs outside the Yosemite valley proper. Little did I realise that Tommy Caldwell, Alex Honnold, Lynn Hill and others had done a project with Google to take a Street View camera up El Capitan (The Nose route but also parts of the Dawn Wall). Seriously the best in-person view to get an idea of what it's like pitch by pitch up the wall.

I've done this in Google Earth VR, and it's very fun. You can get down to basically street view, but everything is very blocky and blurry..

Or you can stay at "Godzilla scale" and walk around the city with buildings the (relative) size of appliances or furniture.. NYC is kind of fun that way.

If you are somewhere that you've been in real life, it's uncanny how familiar it still seems even at low res..

For somewhere you haven't been, or are planning on going, it can give you a sense of scale/scope/direction that is quite nice.

This is a hobby of mine, too. It's one of the most fantastic things available on the internet. The ability to travel anywhere in the world and - as the author of the blog also said - the ability to travel back in time as well!

I did some road trips in 2009 and made pictures with a compact camera. I was able to determine the almost exact locations I shot these pictures thanks to street view, so I could see route that we took back then. One picture was shot in the dark but had a distinctive logo sign on the side of the road. Given the timestamp on the photo and the extremely blurry restaurant and motel logos on the sign, I had a good idea of where to look, but it turned out this sign was only up in a single year and it was quite hard to navigate to!

Unfortunately, I don't think you can "lock" the street view date? Nor does the map view on go back in time? I guess you can use Google Earth to view satellite images. There is a whole neighborhood in Seoul that's been completely leveled on the satellite pictures, yet you can still use street view from 2018 to travel around.

I have done this for places I visited a lot in my early childhood but since have never returned to. It's a bit eerie to see the memories come back to life. Often I remember just enough of the place to be able to find my way between what were the main attractions to me at that age. Somehow, despite forgetting all the details of the path, something in the back of my head compels me to follow the right road even in confusing intersections. I find it fascinating.

I do this sometimes too but the ux has always been lacking. Arrow key directions sometimes don't work if the system thinks the forward image is e.g. not actually forward. You try and resort to clicking, you might miss the click target and end up 600 yards down the road instead of to the next frame. Or you merely zoom in and don't move at all.

It has always been like this ever since they released streetview. I'm surprised they haven't improved it, but then again, maybe I am not surprised. Probably actually a good thing google hasn't felt compelled to touch it recently.

In unrelated news, I got a notice that they are killing google earth pro in January, so get your downloads in now before they stop sharing the packages.

Interesting read. Some context that might be fun to know after reading the article is that in order to purchase a car in Tokyo you first need to have a space to park it. So you build your home with a parking space and you park it there, hence why it’s almost always parked back home.

Another thing is that the houses are only built to last for a couple of decades due to the risk of earthquakes. The lot is more or less what you pay for, while the house standing on the land depreciate very quickly. So most house buyers purchase the land and work with architects to build their own home.

Such a timely post for me personally. I spent quite a bit of time yesterday with my daughter "walking" around the areas in The Netherlands I grew up in. I moved to Canada a long time ago, so my kids grew up here. It was a nice moment of nostalgia (for me) and noticing differences between The Netherlands and Canada for my daughter. We mostly talked about differences in urban planning and design, and how that's obviously better in The Netherlands ;-)

I use an app called Wander to do this in my Oculus Quest. With some lo-fi music it really helps with anxiety.

It really is fun just picking some random spot on the map, some random neighborhood no tourist would ever think to visit, and poking around.

I actually had a hobby of posting "virtual vacation pictures" for a while. Not any attempt at a business or going viral or anything, just literally cool things I found and took pictures of. No one cared but I thought it was cool.

Here is one of buses in Nairobi https://pixelfed.social/p/krapp/809174497538634738

And "cat island" Tajiroshima https://pixelfed.social/p/krapp/780990927466607564

Once when I pressed the random button I wound up at the LHC at CERN (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmBOew7U9rc). That was a trip!

I just wish it could actually export 3D videos in 16:9 format.

I do the same except with really bad countries as a reminder to myself of how much worse things could be.

I spent a lot of time wandering around the border zones between countries on Street View. It's fascinating, the lengths we go to to keep the "other humans" out of "our country", and yet... Often even the most militarized borders are illusions, with huge swathes of wilderness making border walls or fences impossible.

Google Street View used to be a time capsule for Germany until a few years ago: they started gathering data around 2007-2008, then there was huge public backlash (something about invasion of privacy - sure, they only photograph from public streets, but the cameras are placed much higher than an average person walking or driving, so could "look" over fences that would otherwise be too high etc.), so the government decided that anyone living in a building could request their whole building to be blurred in StreetView (with an exception for storefronts IIRC). So Google kinda just lost interest (or decided to wait for the negative sentiment to die down), and for the few larger cities that were already captured, you could always take a look at how a street used to look back in 2008.

PlaneSpotting in Google Maps had been my favorite for many years. Somehow, I lost that interest now.

https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/aircraft-in-flight-in-...

I watch a lot of videos of people just exploring Tokyo and other cities on foot. Good stuff.

My dad has been doing this for years. If I tell him I'm going somewhere he will "go" there too on StreetView then ask me about stuff he saw when I get back. He says sometimes he forgets whether he's actually been to places or just been to them on StreetView.

I haven't thought about looking around random places before, it is indeed quite fun. The one thing that strikes me as different about Tokyo is the overhead wires. I guess there's a reason they put everything overhead. In London almost everything is underground these days.

I do consider myself lucky to be close enough to London that I can basically do this but in real life. You can spend days just randomly wandering around, it's quite fascinating. You can do it to some extent in Glasgow and Manchester too, but there's no other place like London. I intend to move far away from urban centres in the not-too-distant future, maybe I'll continue to scratch the itch remotely at that point.

The treadmills at my gym have a big display with YouTube. Each time I run for ~1 hour and watch one of those Walking Tour videos.

It's much easier to run with something to distract you from the pain of running. Time really flies by.

Tokyo is a great pick for this kind of thing. It's big, so I usually pick a specific neighborhood (Hiroo, Shibuya...).

When I do this with places I've lived in before, especially in other states or countries, the nostalgia is so strong that it hurts!

It's pretty crazy how we are able to expose ourselves to memories and experiences (normally inaccessible) in so much stronger ways than previous generations.

Not Tokyo, but I put up a UK site a couple of years back with old maps going back to Victorian times. Search for "Knowle Winchester" and you'll see (in satellite view) a modern housing estate. But on the 1937-61 maps you can see it was built on the remains of a huge old mental hospital: Knowle Hospital. And on the 1888-1913 maps and you can see it was originally called County Lunatic Asylum! Both geography and language change substantially over time. I like chasing up old train lines with it. Geeky fun. https://solentmaps.uk

I've spent hours doing this in Google Earth VR. The city is just so damn walkable and liveable on the street level, which comes through even in a headset. And it seems to go on in all directions forever. Amazing urbanism.

Related, but has anyone else noticed that Maps has gotten really slow in the past several months? I don't think its just my internet connection. Not sure if Google is throttling it or its getting slammed by AI

Buy a plane ticket and go. I once walked 10 miles in Tokyo and never got bored.

I call this a Street viewcation https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Street+View

I remember doing something similar back on my graveyard job days, it was fun to see gas station supermarkets on random countries, still have a small place on my heart for the ones on Iceland

I love wondering around streets I know from my own past. Since my father died I love to 'walk past' his house on Google maps, changing the date to a time when he was still live, and look in to the lights on there and know that at that moment, he's alive and in the house, happy and probably reading a paper or a book. Forever. Somehow it feels even more poignant than my own photos of him.

I like trying to find spots I once visited, like little cafes or things like that. Harder than you would think given how sprawling Japanese cities are.

I also enjoy trying to find where photos are taken from. Especially fun are photos from a tall building, and trying to get the exact building and recreating the angle of the shot. That often takes lining up railways, roads and other buildings in order to first find the right tall building.

Reminds me a bit of this story, where a street view style photographer picked up a friendly dog so he now appears on just about every location https://www.rover.com/blog/friendly-dog-follows-google-photo...

Berlin used to be stuck in 2006 because of Germanys hardcore privacy regulations AFAIK and I used to love going through now gentrified neighborhoods and see an ocean of casinos, kebabs and photocopy places where bars and clubs i frequent now are... Then it got updated overnight a couple years ago and you couldn't go back anymore! I was very sad i didn't take enough captures

My personal vehicle would have appeared to have never moved either. Google tends to stick to daylight hours for street view, so, for those of us working overnight shifts...

I think it's probably a more common thing than you realize, but I get the whole "exploration is interesting" and agree with the jist of the article. There is a lot of cool finds to be found.

When you kayak along Norway coast, you have to use google street view constantly, because communities do not advertise their services seawards and you cannot see from bottom of the fjord what is happening up there.

In de olden times I tried to listen to cars for example. When they seem to slow down, there is invisible Co-op or Narvesen up there.

The update section is somehow moving. Not sure why. Maybe because it captures the spirit of "もののあわれ" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_no_aware

Yep. This be my poor man vacation. Also, I kinda wanna go to Japan but don't care for their far right PM that doesn't really want us foreigners there. So I shall oblige.

There is a specific Google Street picture in Rio De Janeiro, (in order to find it I need to go to a specific spot and then change the date to the time when I was living there), where I can see a friend who passed. His face has been blurred as usual, but to anyone who knew him, it's obvious it's him.

I do this often. Every time I hear about a city or place in a video, book, or any other media, I immediately pause it and google map the location and if they have a street view I “walk” the streets. Probably a waste of time, but it helps me contextualize the place and people living there.

Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps is fun. However, it pales in comparison to walking around Tokyo.

me too.

i recently used street view to look at the places i lived in with my parents growing up.

we only ever lived in apartments, and i remember as a kid i was sometimes embarrassed (looking back it pains me i felt this way, because i was getting bullied at school over it) by our car for example which was a old mazda my dad purchased for like 2000 bucks. it was missing hub caps, rusting on the side doors.

but it was the car that my dad would drive to drop me off at school before commuting for almost an hour and 15 minutes to his job one way.

it was the car i learned how to drive. i remember the steering felt so good, i still miss the steering feel even tho now i've driven some really nice cars.

anyway.. i saw our old car and i actually cried. took screenshots of it, and put it in my iCloud.

I use google maps at least 15 minutes a day. At least. Mostly looking at places I know, drove through and intrigued me, etc. I can tell when the satellite picture changes. I once saw a plane that was captured in the views (it got edited out soon after).

I just love Google Maps.

In my street, about 100m away from my house, there's a seam, where the street view images transition from 2026 to 2014. I like to pretend I'm Marty in the Delorean and the transition point is where I hit 88 mph :)

I love doing this for food in particular. Seeing how and what other countries eat is just really fun for me. Even though I won't be able to visit most of these places it quite often leads me to new local restaurants or new things to cook.

The car spotted is just one example. Here's another well preserved over the time: https://maps.app.goo.gl/64iSqCS7d2DLWpt86

I started a YouTube channel doing this, dropping randomly all over the global map and seeing what imagery appears is endlessly entertaining!!

There are so many images that Google maps has collected around the world it's insane

@ mapdrops on youtube

This is what a lot of people learning Japanese do for reading practice. Reading signage and exploring an area virtually through street view is great for in-context learning.

I've always recommended to people traveling to Tokyo to just walk around. Hit your spots, but walk when and where you can. You'll almost always stumble into some pocket of peace there.

Sometimes I'll do something similar and go back to old streets I used to live on, or the street I current live on but look at it in the past. Google Maps is a cool time capsule

I wonder how we can get cities to build on a human scale. that is my dream for LA; that would involve massive zoning changes here and breaking up quite a bit of concrete...

Totally get this. I've spent embarrassing amounts of time "exploring" Berlin neighborhoods before actual trips. Such a great way to pre-visualize.

With Oculus VR headset on, you can walk through the streets.

A hobby of mine is finding "walking guides" to various places in used book stores and trying to replicate them in Google Maps.

Is there a smoother UX for Street View? Some way to avoid the shuffle > load > shuffle > load as you ambulate down the street?

reminds me of this scene from the movie 'Smoke' where Auggie shares his photo scrapbook of the same corner, day after day, and his friend being confused by the repetition, but Auggie explaining his view of things... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGV_h36uZ5E

Been doing this for decades, not weird at all

“I walk the streets of Japan Till I get lost ‘Cause it doesn’t remind me of anything” - Audioslave (“Doesn’t Remind Me”)

Google Street View is one of the most incredible engineering work produced by humans, it's just incredible.

Hong Kong, kowloon side is a lot more interesting imho, take a look ander start wondering around!

I do this as well, and I hope Google never takes away the ability to look back in time.

Haha, that’s actually a really cool hobby and the 350Z story makes it even more interesting

You wouldn't download (a picture of) a car.

definitely not just you. I would walk along Kamo River in Kyoto sometimes at night, and it makes me peaceful.

you can make an open records request for other peoples video calls in jail including with their old ladies lol

Because Japanese hate second hand houses?

Tokyo wandering on YouTube. A drug.

AIDR

I love doing this, in every city, even without Google Maps!

Me too! :)

Yup, one more of us.

Gaijin moment