Sure, but the large majority of the population lives in those handful of big cities. 1/3 of the population lives in the greater Tokyo area alone. Ignoring the people who live in American-style suburban sprawl means you're ignoring a small fraction of the population. This is basically the reverse of the US, where a small fraction lives in walkable city areas like Manhattan, and everyone else needs a car.

It is not "a small fraction of the population", pretty much any city other than Tokyo and Osaka suffer from ridiculous urban sprawl. Sure, Tokyo and Osaka are huge and together they hold half the population of the country, but then you have the other half...

It's hard to make small, rural places walkable. Walkability and bikeability imply density and a solid public transit network (which is costly).

It's fine if the places where 80% of people live are walkable and the rest maybe aren't as great.

I am talking about about cities of almost 300k people. Look for example at Aomori city, it has a small downtown of around 1~2 sqkm, and then a million houses scattered everywhere.

And in any case, I am from Spain, a country were even small villages a pretty walkable. There was an article here recently explaining it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38189840

> It's hard to make small, rural places walkable

I don't know about that. My experience (in the UK) is small, rural places are by default walkable 'cause they haven't changed that much in the last coupel of centuries, when you had to be walkable since cars and bikes didn't exist.

Yeah, many old villages in Romania and everywhere around the world are like that. Unfortunately newer ones tend to be designed for cars :-(

Here in the US those communities used to be walkable, but the small grocery store either closed, or has moved to a big box on the edge of town where you can't walk to it anymore. Most other stores have closed as all the locals just plan a monthly trip to the nearest large city (1 hour drive, each way) to use the WalMart and malls there - the prices are enough better in the large city that it is worth the fuel and making a full day of it once a month. If the town is close enough to a city the downtown stores now survive as a tourist attraction for the city, selling "art" - not the type of things you might go to town to buy for daily living.

There is a high likelihood that the old town square has been taken over by local government offices. If you work there great, but otherwise not the type of place you would visit often if at all.

In short they still have the walkabel guts from the 1800s, but there is nothing to walk to.

Rural Netherlands disagrees with you.

"Rural" Netherlands is still pretty dense, though. At least dense enough that the very idea of getting from one place to the next by bike is pretty sensible. You don't have that in the true rural U.S. Now suburbia could look like that (i.e. village-like mixed use communities linked by bike paths, not just vehicular traffic) and that would be a better comparison.

That's the dream!

I actually disagree to an extent. Many smaller towns I've visited in Japan actually are walkable: they have a single train station, and the town around the station can be mostly walked, and easily biked. If you need to go farther out, like to some warehouse or onsen not close to the town, this might be too much, but for most of the locals, they can do most of their trips without a car. But the key here is that the town, while not an urban metropolis with a subway system of course, is still somewhat dense compared to a North American suburb.

If we go back in time to North America in the late 1800s, for comparison, it's much the same. People didn't have cars, and while some people had horses, they were expensive and not everyone did. The towns had a railroad station and otherwise were very walkable. There were no parking lots forcing low density because there were no cars.

Edit: note that I don't mean to imply that all smaller towns or cities in Japan are like this. The boring towns that are copies of suburban America are places I simply wouldn't visit, because there's absolutely nothing interesting there for a visitor (just like suburban America); the towns I've visited are interesting, cute towns in the mountains that actually attract tourists for some reason (onsen, access to mountain trails, etc.).