Every now and then I watch one of these Japanese "video walk" channels on YouTube and find myself despairing at how wildly better their land use is than in the US.

Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one. And yet, so much of Tokyo seems like it's built at the scale of a small-town main street: Between the major roads with their skyscrapers sit networks of pedestrian-friendly streets with little shops and restaurants, often crossed by even smaller yokocho which themselves have bars and flats. Quiet side streets intermix residential buildings and even single-family homes, and yet somehow these little districts are all linked up together into the world's largest metropolis.

> Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one.

It has little to do with "island nation", most nations use mixed zoning, it's certainly the standard in europe (and recent developments are gravitating towards more mixed zoning e.g. Amsterdam's eastern docklands). It could have to do with being an old nation, but even then that's not actually true, the US existed for a while before cars happened.

In the US, we invented zoning, mostly to exclude black people from white neighborhoods. And now we use it to prop up property values and continue to keep poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods.

Now I'm speculating, but I wonder if Japan, being mostly Japanese people, didn't have such a large group to exclude from certain neighborhoods? So they didn't entrench the institution of local control and exclusionary zoning?

Japan traditionally had a caste system where certain people were restricted to certain neighbourhoods. There was a lot of official effort to break that up after the war, but you can still tell which neighbourhoods are which.

google burakumin

The public schools I taught at in Japan kept (private) lists of which kids came from burakumin families.

It's my understanding that Japan's housing regulations are mostly driven by a long history of all their buildings falling over in an earthquake every couple of decades.

This was one of the biggest things that struck me when I visited Japan. Their cities are just so much friendlier/better than 99% of American cities.

Thank you for posting that.

I've lived in Japan for 30 years, and I've never seen the topic so clearly explained.

Edit: BTW, in case you were wondering about the special zoning classification, "bathhouses with private rooms" are in a very different business than bathhouses without private rooms.

I live in Edinburgh in Scotland. Best feature is tenement flats with shops or bars below. Old town is especially mixed use and it's brilliant because of it.

One of the more personally infuriating aspects of Brexit for me is that I can't just drop in to Aberdeen or elsewhere in Scotland and move there for longer. :(