I was wondered that. Like from movies or documentaries, etc. Very nice, clear, order, minimalistic. Then I was looking to buy a house and I found a site with "almost" abandoned house for sale.

My God. Everything , everywhre, no design ( haha ), no exceptions. People were actually living there.

Had a cultural shock.

I do live in Japan and good god, I have never seen such messy people anywhere else in the world. The offices of all my Japanese colleagues are piles upon piles of documents and boxes without any kind of order.

But the cities themselves are like that. There is zero urban planning, just buildings thrown around in impossible non-Euclidean patterns.

They're a book from the early 1990s called "Tokyo Style" that is packed with photos of real living conditions from back then. Chaos of every variety. Plus some Super Famicom and PC-Engines laying around. A very cool book, most recently reprinted in 2024 with Japanese/English captions.

and the cables, the cables hanging from everywhere!

( btw, has anyone noticed in anime there are always frames of street cabling? Like those cylindrical transformes and thick cables. Almost cyberpunk! )

The transformers are a result of a the lower voltage (also used in America), for efficiency and to keep the required voltage the transformer needs to be nearer to the house.

We also have transformers in Europe, but they are hidden. Which incidentally makes them more reliable, as they are not exposed to the elements.

Here's the full book "Tokyo: a certain style" by Kyoichi Tsuzuki (same author), https://archive.org/details/tokyo-a-certain-style

I believe that's essentially the first English edition.