Japan is an urbanist, YIMBY paradise – and a bureaucratic nightmare

Some short takes following my holiday to Japan.

Me and the last remaining hairs on my head just hanging out in Tokyo.

Apologies for the unusual service for the last few weeks – I’ve been on holiday to the same place that every other childless millennial visits and makes their entire personality for a while: Japan.

It was a pretty epic, two-and-a-bit-week trip, and I’ll desperately try not to bore you senseless with what-I-did-on-my-holidays content,¹ but I can’t let it go entirely, as Japan is a fascinating place if you’re interested in the sort of topics I tend to write about in my newsletter. It’s simultaneously both an urbanist, YIMBY paradise – and a bureaucratic nightmare.

So I thought it would be fun to share some of my observations from my first visit to the country. To be clear, I’m definitely not claiming to be an expert in Japan, and this is very much not journalism – it’s just my observations as I’ve done the usual tourist things of visiting shrines, monorails and the Nintendo Museum. But I hope you’ll enjoy it, as below the paywall I’m offering short takes on:

• Japan’s strange retro-futurist approach to technology.

• How the national transit card works as a de-facto digital ID.

• The benefits of living in a high-trust society.

• The unexpected way that Japanese audiences behave at events.

• And (most exciting of all) a bus that turns into a train!

And if that last one isn’t an unbeatable sell to persuade you to take out a paid subscription, I don’t know what is. So let’s get started!