Yubari, Japan: a city learns how to die | Hacker News Reader

Yubari, Japan: a city learns how to die

theguardian.com

109 pointsoska53 comments

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Also I would recommend amazing post http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/spike-hokkaido-2/yubari-from...

He recently posted this as well:

http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/yubari-withering-...

(…darn, I just noticed the comment by taoquay).

Yeah. I also saw taoquay's link. Thanks anyway.

The extended/uncut version of The Guardian's article can be read here: http://spikejapan.wordpress.com/2014/08/16/yubari-withering-...

> Yubari has other lessons for the rust-belts of the west, too, although the lessons may be unlearnable. There’s no graffiti, no vandalism and scarcely any crime. Whole years can elapse without a single felony.

This is nothing specific to Yubari. The same can be said about most small cities in Japan.

>This is nothing specific to Yubari

It's not implying that it's specific to Yubari.

It's implying that it doesn't have the crime stats that are usual in decaying cities of the rust-belt.

Comparing decaying cities of the rust-belt with an average small city in Japan wouldn't be fair. Comparing them with a decaying city on the other hand makes sense.

Hey even during natural disasters in japan there is no looting going around. So why would you expect graffiti and crime to suddenly occur with reduced population and unemployment ? It's just not in the culture in japan. Plus, this kind of behavior usually comes from youngsters, and there are less and less of them in Yubari so it's EVEN less likely to occur in the first place.

Ah the "no looting in Japan" myth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Japan_earthquake_store_she...

http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2011/03/why-no...

FWIW the main reason there is less looting in Japan is because they have done a better job at eliminating poverty. Here's what happened before they had done so:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_Riots_of_1918

The pic on Wikipedia doesn't say much without context. You could have gone to the supermarket nearest to my apartment in the week after (I live in Tokyo) and it would have looked similar. People were definitely hoarding, but as far as I know they were paying for the stuff. Mostly, anyway.

Obviously, there is going to be some looting. But, consider a previous natural disaster of approximate magnitude* which took place a few years previously on a coastal city in the US. Compare the response by the US government, the Americans there, and more broadly American society. The Japanese have something figured out that Americans have forgotten, or more probably never had.

(*Not really, Tohoku was considerably worse than Katrina in magnitude and scope.)

> Ah the "no looting in Japan" myth.

Oh, come on. In the countryside farmers put vegetables in unattended booths for people to grab and put a coin in a hole for payment. Nobody's stealing. Where else in the world do you see that ?

Rural Wisconsin. I worked on a road crew during college and we'd rarely have guys buy stuff during breaks/downtime.

In Switzerland this is very common. From my point of view, the US is rather exceptional in terms of crime rate in a highly developed nation.

Well I'm not too surprised as Japan is often referred to as "The Switzerland of Asia", but I can tell you that in France people would steal without thinking twice in no time.

The thing is, if it's just a national thing, then it at least seems to be 'infectuous' to the foreign population - we have ~25% foreigners in Switzerland, many of them French. If most of them would steal, farmers would stop doing that very soon - but so far it seems to work just fine.

But hey, weighing your produce yourself at the supermarket is also a thing here, and it works fine as well. Sometimes I think it's just a part of society, no matter the cultural, ethnical or economical background people have - if you trust them to "do the right thing", most suddenly feel sort of honoured and obligated to behave the right way. If you put police everywhere and assume people to be criminal first, they will act accordingly (test their 'freedom' as soon as noone is looking). It probably doesn't work if it's just one farmer / supermarket doing it, but I think when it's a common part of society, it suddenly works.

I've seen it in rural Greece and Australia.

Rural Northern Greece is awesome, the people are awesome, but I haven't seen it there. Where were you, more specifically?

I haven't seen myself, but apparently still happening in Denmark.

Your first picture shows shelves that were bought clean, not looted. This is explained in the image caption on wikinews. http://en.m.wikinews.org/wiki/In_pictures:_Japan_earthquake_...

Immediately following the earthquake, transportation problems stranded many workers in Tokyo and cut off supply lines for stores. Those two issues combined with panic buying to result in the scene above shortly after the earthquake.

It sounds pretty cheap for Japan. I wonder what it would be like to work remotely while living there?

Also, it's weird, but I love the Japanese melons even though I do not like cantaloupe--they always taste rotten to me.

Funny, I had the same thought about working remotely. But I wonder what the internet is like, and I don't think I could stand the cold all year. It'd be an interesting place for a holiday solitary retreat, a small house to go live in during the summer months and think. Explore the wilderness, write, program. It's a curious idea actually.

Hokkaido looks rather beautiful in winter http://www.michaelkenna.net/gallery.php?id=22

What's the visa situation for foreigners working remotely in Japan? I was under the impression that Japanese visa regulations were pretty strict and also rigorously enforced.

How would they ever find out?

Police can stop you for a visa check.

I mean they have no way to know you're working remotely instead of being a tourist.

You still need a visa if you want to stay more than 3 months.

I wouldn't underestimate the police there. I'm not sure how to go about it legally, but I would definitely go through proper channels if I were to try this.

Yep but it's extremely cold in the winter. I'd take rural Southern Japan or maybe rural Taiwan, as other very safe, cheap and well serviced areas.

Perhaps could it be that you have never had properly ripe, healthy cantaloupe? In US supermarkets at least most fruits are unripe, or rotten, or unripe and rotten at the same time.

For anyone unaware the most helpful signal for picking properly ripe melons is smell. Unripe melons will usually have no smell at all, while overly ripe ones will have hints of a rotten fruit odor mixed in, even while still being completely firm in feel. The outside of an uncut melon should smell sweet and fragrant through and through, and just one sniff should be enough to tell which fruits should be passed over without a second thought.

For already chopped melon a lot of times it's a gamble, and odds are bad. In the US at least most fruit salad preparers are barely payed, and likely not even given the basic authority to be selective about what fruit they chop up in the first place. Basically no one cares how properly ripe or palatable the fruit is, and so sadly-often it simply tastes like oh so much disgusting garbage.

Unfortunately melons are some of the worst-affected victims in the race-to-the-bottom world of modern mass-production fruit, along with apples, pears, tomatoes and olives. Like with humans when no one cares to begin with crime is much much more common.

It's quite possible. I've really only eaten it at buffets and such, where it's often mixed into other fruit. Until I discovered the Japanese melon, I thought I hated them all.

I know that the Japanese put considerably more effort into quality than what I've seen from other markets. I haven't completely ruled out the idea that there's something unique to the Japanese cultivar, though. But every cantaloupe I've ever tasted had a rotten flavor that prevented me from enjoying it. I don't know if others don't mind that flavor or what, but it has prevented me from enjoying any melons available from US markets.

I keep hearing that good ones exist, but I have yet to actually eat one.

Everytime I read stories about dramatically shrinking cities I wonder if there's an opportunity to create a startup hub. The cities aren't always where the customers are, so probably the only kind of startup that would work would be tech related.

If a dying city invested in great internet connectivity in one neighbourhood, offered extremely reasonable cost of living expenses (mostly cheap rent), maybe even a tax break in the first 2-3 years of your business, would you consider relocating to help keep your startup expenses down?

I don't think it would work. If you're selecting a city to start a startup, as opposed to starting one wherever you already are, then ideally you're going to want a low cost of living, a high density of talent, investors, and early adopters. This option would only offer the low cost of living. If your business doesn't need to be physically near your customers, investors, or talent, then you can literally setup anywhere in the world and you'd probably be better off choosing somewhere more pleasant with an even lower cost of living.

Am I alone in thinking that if Japan as a society really wants people to start having more kids, it would start encouraging a normal 40-50 hour work week?

Glad to see a Spike Japan post make it to the Guardian. It's a really good blog and I wish it'd get published as a book or something.

It was an OK article, but honestly this is nothing new in Japan or anywhere else. This is not unheard to have villages dying in Europe with all youngsters leaving for the cities and better job prospects while the population ages and ultimately disappears. The matter in Japan is exarcerbated by low natality rates but the phenomenon is really, nothing new.

>This is not unheard to have villages dying in Europe

This is not a village, it's a city with a population of 120k falling down to 10k.

A population of 120k would put it as a top-5 city in any medium-sized European country. And it is completely unimaginable that such a city would die this way (unless it were destroyed in a war).

No, I think you get the wrong impression here. This is not a city that has grown to 120k over 1000 years and which disappeared in a blink, this is a village that was overgrown because of the coal mine activity in the past 100 years, and just like in all modern countries which made the switch from coal to something else, the economic activity went somewhere else and people with it.

So no, it's actually very similar to cities in northen France, West Germany and South Belgium which lived from coal as well and quickly dropped in population as well. And the same thing is happening in Detroit as the auto industry dissappeared as well. It's all the same thing at work.

The coal industry in Germany mostly happened in hughe cities of the Ruhr metropolitan area, and these are far from dying. There might be small villages in eastern Germany turning into ghost towns, but this is a mostly unheard phenomenon. There is no german Detroit. Probably because there are much fewer places to move to instead.

I don't think this is a coal mining town, but Sonneberg is used as an example in [1] of a town which seems to be having similar problems:

Heiko Voigt, the deputy mayor here, can point out dozens of vacant homes that he doubts will ever be sold. The reality is that the German population is shrinking and towns like this one are working hard to hide the emptiness. Mr. Voigt has already supervised the demolition of 60 houses and 12 apartment blocs, strategically injecting grassy patches into once-dense complexes.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/world/europe/germany-fight...

It's shrinking, but not anywhere near Yubari. Here is the population statistic: [1]. Similar things will happen, but it's not there right now.

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonneberg#mediaviewer/Datei:Po...

>A population of 120k would put it as a top-5 city in any medium-sized European country.

Europe only has a couple of medium-sized countries—Germany and France. 150k people wouldn't make for a top 5 city in either. 120k people is a town, not a city.

Clarification: Examples of large countries (both in terms of land mass and influence) would be Russia, China, Japan, Australia, the US, Brazil, etc

Those are the largest countries in Europe..? That's probably not what jaksemas meant.

Europe only has a couple of medium-sized countries—Germany and France

Not sure what you are using as a definition of "medium sized", but if France and Germany are included you may want to consider the following (with roughly the same size): Spain, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Russia, United Kingdom, Sweden, Norway, Finland (Turkey of course is large too, but the European part is quite small - unlike Russia, where European part is large)

Finland, Sweden and Norway have fewer people and smaller economies than some cities.

I'm not sure what your point is? If you are talking population AND area you missed a number of countries too.

Incidentally the population of the Tokyo agglomeration (39 million) isn't far off Spain (46 million) or Ukraine (45 million) and is greater than Poland (38 million) as well as much greater than Australia (22 million). All that proves is that there are some cities with very large populations.

And it is completely unimaginable that such a city would die this way (unless it were destroyed in a war).

That simply isn't true. There are a number of similar sized European cities shrinking - although not quite at the same dramatic rate. For example, Miskolc (in Hungary) has shrunk from 186K to 168K since 2000, and there are a number of other cities with similar problems[1].

Another example which is more directly comparable is the former oil shale mining town of Kohtla-Järve in Estonia. In 1980 it had a population of 90,000 while today it is 37,000[2].

[1] http://www.citymetric.com/chart-eastern-europes-incredible-s...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohtla-J%C3%A4rve

In Europe there are some ex-minery towns that went from 100K+ to a few thousands. I know a couple personally. However, they are very different in that services and safety would be abysmal. Yubari sounds like a place I'd love to move to if it wasn't so extremely cold in the winter. Hokkaido is quite extreme and by looking at its location in the map this town might be even colder than Asahikawa, which is serious stuff. Siberia-like extreme cold.

Looks like Japan's solution is to let in more immigrants or they come up with a robot at extremely low cost and low energy consumption.

Japan would rather have robots than immigrants but ultimately, like immigration boom that happened in the west due to lack of indigenous population supply, foreign workers has to come.

I do not want to make any pro or contra immigration statement, but I think your premise is wrong. We should all get used to shrinking. We had Growth for the last centuries, if not millennia, now it looks like that has come to an end, and that is not necessary a bad thing. Japan is in this regard already living in the future, a future that will come of Europe and North America soon, and to the rest of the world a little later.

There is only 20 people there under 15, must be lonely for those kids.

Uh, from the article:

>>barely one in 20 of the population under the age of 15

>>[the population] more than halved again, to below 10,000

So 10K/20 == 500.

I'm sorry I must of misread.

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