First, it's not clean, it's just different way of unclean and only during certain periods of the day. But during too many hours of the day in popular areas it's normal to see literal piles of trash on the street covered in rats, and in the morning with crows.
On the other hand, there's no littering, virtually no homelessness (nor their encampments, etc) and finally no cars on the street, which makes the city look a lot cleaner.
"Nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside" => completely agree, my pet peeve here is that one of the best towns geographically speaking of Japan is probably the ugliest town I've seen in my life in a 1st world country (Kawaguchiko, with the beautiful lake, lush forest and Fuji San nearby).
"never seen more miserable public parks" again have to agree, the median local park is taken out of a horror movie. Though there are* a bunch of very, very beautiful ones!
Apart from the worst parts of Roppongi on a Monday morning, I have never ever seen this.
I mean Tuesday: burnable waste, wed cardboard, Thurs clothes and Fri other, will tend to have trash in the designated areas, on each of those days.
Edit:spelling (Note:days and trash types differ a lot per area, but it's a good generalisation based off of my location).
Tip: when there's a typhoon, restaurants close and there's no trash on the street, the rats invade nearby shops looking desperately for food:
It's a matter of how contained/controlled/visible they are.
Last time I visited Tokyo in 2016 there was clearly an encampment at the Ueno park. And that wasn’t the first time I saw an encampment in Japan (visiting Tokyo in 2008 I saw a few in Tokyo and Osaka). However, Japanese homeless encampments are always very clean and well organized. It’s a completely different feel from the states (even if they definitely exist).
亀戸中央通り商店街 https://maps.app.goo.gl/9yY4Ncb5oM3hXqLY6
It's not particularly hideous by Tokyo (or world) standards, it's just exactly what was described earlier, a random mishmash of houses and shops in various states of repair.
I live in Barcelona and not even Gaudi’s architecture can distract you from the amount of dog feces and piss that are rampant in this city, plus a considerably lack of cleaning in recent years for some reason.
That's become extremely common in American cities too, in the past 2 years or so.
Here in Tokyo, I never see dog feces on the ground. Dogs are always on a leash, and their owners always clean up after them. I guess it's a cultural difference: dog owners outside Japan (and maybe Germany) think they're entitled to let their dogs run wild and crap wherever they want.
It reminds me a bit of a compressed version of older, less affluent northeastern towns, where buildings are a mish mash of styles and designs. It's an overused term, but it gives a sense of character or that it's a discrete place with it's own history. This building is a good example.
The random mishmash of houses and shops is exactly the type of place that makes walking viable negating the need for a car (and the expense and waste of space storing one).
I wish I could find neighbourhoods like those found in many Japanese and Korean cities; they're very small and hard to find even in Toronto and SF (and not really comparable anyway).
Just a planter box or two would be a massive improvement!
OTOH, while I heard that Paris is considered beautiful by some people, I didn't like it at all, and no longer visit there even if I happen to be going to other parts of France.
Similarly, I would never voluntarily spend a day in SF and several other famous US cities.
I guess the idea of "ugly" is quite subjective.
Many of the people I know in the U.S. live in attractive neighborhoods full of nice-looking houses and well-kept front yards. While some of that niceness is due to the owners’ own initiative, much is the result of zoning restrictions, homeowner association rules, and the like.
The only zoning restrictions on my house in Yokohama are limits on total floorspace and land coverage and fire and earthquake rules covering building design and materials. I can paint my house any color I want, pile whatever junk I want in my (tiny) yard, and hang whatever laundry I want from the balconies, and no one can or will say anything about it.
As a result of this tolerant, low-regulation regime, the neighborhood I live in is, like most neighborhoods here, an unattractive mish-mash of mismatched houses and apartments in many styles and states of upkeep. If that’s the price of (relative) freedom, I’m happy to pay it.
I'm not a huge fan of the look of the gravel parks, but every kid having a nearby park that they actually use beats a handful of parks that look nice, IMO. And it's not like Tokyo doesn't have big beautiful parks as well.
One other point that many of the Tokyo fans don’t acknowledge is how extraordinarily ugly the place is. Sure, it’s clean (more than you can say for New York) but clearly nobody in Tokyo cares about what their house looks like from the outside. And I’ve never seen more miserable public parks in a developed country.