Before coming here, the largest city I’d lived in was Ann Arbor, Michigan. I’ve been to some of the world's biggest cities, and but never thought I’d want to LIVE there. Give me the woods, the open spaces, the quiet rustles of leaves, the tinkling of a brook over mossy stones. The happiest place I’ve ever lived was 10,000 acres of wildness with only 200 or so other people.
So it comes as a surprise to find that I am living in a city of 800,000 people and it is quite nice. It is all about the sense of scale, and understanding the effects of scale to make life more bearable (or not.)
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| A typical street in the 'hood. |
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| Garden in front of fancy apartment building in our neighborhood. |
Housing is a good example. The area where we live seems fairly upscale. There are many single-family homes, but lots of apartments, too, with small shops mixed in. The houses are not usually smaller than American homes, but much closer together. The yards are either non-existent, or compact. Some yards are well maintained, more like living sculptures than gardens, but there are a fair share of run down ones as well.
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| Walking to school |
What is the advantage to living this close together? Compact neighborhoods mean that children can walk to school. No one lives too far away. So, you don't need school buses, and all the kids go to school, and get out, at the same time. They can walk to all their friends’ houses and can set up their own playdates! They can always walk to school and use the playground there. Preschools are in the neighborhoods, and I see the preschool teacher walking around in the morning collecting the kids at their homes, and dropping them off in the afternoon. That is practically a mind blowing concept to an American.
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| Extra pruned tree |
If you have a tiny yard, there is no grass to mow, and no need to own a mover (good thing since there are no garages to store one!). If you like to garden, it is possible, but it can’t become too overwhelming or take up too much of your time, since it is of necessity, small. There are very few trees in the neighborhoods (no raking in fall, either!). Those that are there are trimmed and pruned within an inch of their lives.
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| City bus |
A compact city also means that it is possible to have a decent, efficient, inexpensive public transportation system. The bus line is plush, comfortable and relatively easy to use, even if you don’t know the language. I can get anywhere in the city, from the dunes on the coast to the mountains in an hour or so on the bus (I can probably get back, too). There are two light rail lines. Hamamatsu sits on the Tokido main line, and it has many long distance trains stopping each day.
The cars are generally small, but then, they are built to fit on the tiny roads (they must use less fuel and cause less wear and tear on the streets, too.) Most people have cars, and the moms at school are appalled that I don’t have one, and have offered to take me shopping. Given that we’ve reduced our credit card bills by two thirds since we have arrived- I’m better off without a car and without shopping!
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| Japanese candy- purchased for research purposes, only! |
Even the food comes in smaller quantities. The candy bags are re-closable on a size that might make one portion in the US. Most food stores sell things in small quantities: 3 carrots, 4 apples, a few ounces of chicken. It certainly makes me have to think more efficiently about how I buy food, but we’ve found it makes for far less waste, too.
These are positive scale effects I’ve noticed, but there are negatives, too. The most obvious to me is the suppression of nature.
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| Wave motif in gate. |
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| Five people trying to work/entertain themselves. |
It is also very hard to be alone here. But this might just be my impression because I live in a 500 sq ft apartment with 4 other people!
One last positive note I’ve observed is that living in close quarters has made society more courteous than our society in the US. People think about the other person more and make an effort to be polite and limit their actions if they would cause others inconvenience. In the US, we’ve gotten into this habit of thinking everyone has the right to voice their opinion, loudly, but we don’t actually bother listening to each other anymore. Think about that next time you listen to talk radio and hear some loudmouth spouting off their opinion as if it were fact. Rudeness has become standard, and civility looked down on as weak in the US. Walk across a college campus, or go into Starbucks and you’ll see everyone plugged in, but no one actually communicating. Here, people look at you and listen and expect the same courtesy when it is their turn to talk. You see groups of people walking across campus talking to one another, not texting. Everyone has a cell phone, but they don’t seem to use them as much as people do in the states. I just read a statistic that the average Japanese Facebook user has less than 50 friends. They seem to be doing a much better job of having real friendships than we do. (I’m not dissing Facebook, that would make me a hypocrite, but I worry about how it seems to be inhibiting the building of new friendships for some people).
I think about scale a lot as an ecologist, trying to sort out what relationships are scale dependant and which independent. It has been eye opening to see how scale affects the way I live. How a simple change (closer housing) effects transportation, education, the natural world, energy use, and personal relationships. I’m starting to see the pattern, but there is much more to learn.
