Japan (part III): the stuff that Twitter loves - babies, YIMBYism and religion

Enough of musing about holidays! It's time for Issues with a capital I. Let's take it away with the big 3 favourites of Twitter (by which I mean X and all its imitators): babies, YIMBYism and religion. 

I repeat that I don't pretend to understand Japan: all I intend to do below is to set out some relevant observations on these topics. I leave both the explanations and the lessons to be learned for more qualified people. 

(A) Babies

Japan is famous for many things and its low birthrate is undoubtedly one of them. But the lack of children is not especially noticeable to the visitor. There are plenty of visible babies, buggies, baby-changing facilities and so on. (The Japanese tend to refer to a large disabled loo / babychange as a "multi-purpose room", which put me in mind of "multi-faith prayer rooms".) I suppose one doesn't visit the kind of decaying backwater villages where the population decline is at its worst, and it's not as if baby-making is rife in the Europe either. In fact, on that score, Japan just looks like the sort of place that Brits normally go on holiday:

What sort of a place is Japan like to be a parent? Please put your prejudices to one side. I recall a conversation I once had with some friends about raising children in Singapore. Someone said that it must be a tough place to be a child (thinking of the hard work expected in school, no doubt) but someone else (who has family bringing up children in Singapore) rejoined, "No, it's a great place to be a child - you can swim every day!" (This is true: when I stayed in Singapore, the block I was in had a communal outdoor rooftop pool and it was perfectly possible to swim every day. That may sound somewhat plutocratic but I don't think it was, or at least no more so than a modern London development having a gym in the basement.)

My point in telling this story is that you need to consider the entirety of the experience when you are making comparisons of this kind. Maternity pay, education, childcare, climate, culture, proximity of grandparents - there's a lot to consider. 

One point on which Japan has a massive advantage is the famous burden on parents known as the "school run". In Japan, there's no need. You know that thing about how children go to school by themselves in Japan, even at young ages, across vast distances and all on public transport? It's true. You'll see the odd father proudly walking a daughter, but most children, young and old, go by themselves.

Not only that, but they entertain themselves. I saw plenty of children hanging around in malls after school, or playing in the park by themselves. The actual burden of parenting - the helicoptering that is normal in the West - is much less in evidence.

Note also that house prices are low in Japan (see further below.) That means that two of the biggest and most salient costs of being a parent - time and accommodation - are much lower in Japan. 

There are therefore definitely some important ways in which Japan is a great place to have children. Now, no doubt you can point to prejudices against working mothers or bad childcare facilities or inadequate maternity pay laws or whatever - as I say, one needs to look at the entirety of the experience. But Japan - like Singapore (also safe, clean, good climate, good schools) - has some big, big advantages - yet the children do not come. 

More broadly, there's no sensible set of metrics on which the likes of Japan and Italy are less tempting places to have children than, say, Chad, and yet:

Of course, I don't think the solution is to be more like Chad. What is perhaps more unusual is that I now have some faith in the ability of Japan to solve the problem. 

Japan works and I am pretty sure that the Japanese will want it to continue to work. As I mentioned in my first post, one already sees noticeable levels of immigration in Tokyo: this is not a country that refuses to change. Moreover, Japan has already twice completely reinvented itself after suffering humiliation and I see no reason to think that it cannot do so again.

Just to remind you, the first such reinvention was the Meiji Restoration. This was mind-blowing. "At one point, he reflects on the significance of this voyage, and the reader cannot help but agree with the general sentiment: “It was not until the sixth year of Kaei (1853) that a steamship was seen for the first time; it was only in the second year of Ansei (1855) that we began to study navigation from the Dutch in Nagasaki; by 1860, the science was sufficiently understood to enable us to sail a ship across the Pacific. This means that about seven years after the first sight of a steamship, after only about five years of practice, the Japanese people made a trans-Pacific crossing without help from foreign experts. I think we can without undue pride boast before the world of this courage and skill.”" (Source: this anonymous review of the Autobiography of Yukichi Fukuzawa.) This voyage wasn't a showy one-off, either: in 1905, Japan defeated a major European power (Russia) in a proper war, including at sea. From Shogunate to modern world power in a lifetime! 

The second reinvention was after World War II: a destroyed militaristic power rebuilt itself to a pacific modern leading-technology industrial superpower. Again, no mean feat.

The technology for making babies is well-understood. It's not like learning how to be an industrialised society in a generation: it's just doing more of what you're already doing and all your ancestors did. So I'm hopeful that the Japanese will get there. It might take another humiliation by a foreign power (I vaguely recall that there is a revanchist up-and-coming power in the region), but it is do-able.

(B) YIMBYism

I've said plenty about YIMBYism in the past and I am on record as saying that "I'm pretty receptive to the idea that it would be a good thing if Britain were to build more stuff." (I must have been in a generous mood then, as I went on to say that "given the uphill struggle that YIMBY-Boosters face, I think we can overlook a certain amount of hyperbole in the way they put their case, both as to how bad the UK's situation is and how much better it could get".) Tokyo is sometimes presented as the closest thing to Actually-Existing YIMBYism and it seems sensible pass on my observations in that context. What is the urban infrastructure of Japan really like?

First, Japan definitely has low property prices. There simply aren't equivalents in the UK to what you will see here, for example. Or look at Sothebys International Realty for top-end real estate comparisons: you can find a 3 bedroom house just a short walk from the Meiji Temple/Harajuku for US$1.5m (I'm not sure what the direct comparison is, but a house just off the King's Road feels about right) and plenty of convenient looking 1 and 2 bed flats at very reasonable prices (US$620k for this, for example), but Sotheby's doesn't even bother listing London properties at such low prices (nothing below US$2m at the time of writing, and that's for a 1 bed in Mayfair). Whether Japan's YIMBY policies are responsible for this (what were the policies in the 1990s?) is a matter for others. Let us at least say that there may be an association.

Second, Toyko is seriously massive. 

Here's a like-for-like comparison. I mentioned the Ghibli Museum in my previous post. That's a little under 20km due west of the Imperial Palace:

Hampton Court Palace, another big tourist attraction, is a similar distance from our own dear King's London residence: they can both be walked in about 4 hrs 20 minutes.

Here are the local maps of our starting points, in each case with the royal residence in the southwest corner:

Roughly comparable density, I'd say (please note that I have not got the scale quite right).

Now let's look at the street maps around the station at the other end of your journey:

Again, I don't think the scale is exactly the same in each case, but you get the idea. By the time you have reached Hampton Court, you are at the edge of London, looking at vast expanses of greenery and comfortably wide suburban roads with extensive gardens. But travel the same distance in Tokyo and you are still in a world of small roads and dense housing - and still it goes one. The scale of these two satellite photos is roughly the same:

What you can see is that Tokyo has dense, inner city housing levels - the vernacular equivalent of the dense terraces in residential parts of inner London - located at distances from the centre at which any self-respecting Western city would have given up on urbanism and resorted to leafy suburbs. 

Tokyo is highly unusual: the population of Singapore is much less than that of London; Hong Kong is also a bit smaller than London; London and New York are much of a muchness, while Seoul and (depending on how you count it) Paris are a little larger; but Tokyo is plausibly more than 4.5 times the size of London (by population). It is mind-blowingly large.

One consequence of this is that the Tokyo underground is busy all the time. I was on holiday (so I wasn't travelling at rush hour) yet it was standing room only at all times. That is not like London.

Third, following on from the previous point, a quick word about transport. 

YIMBYs tend to be pro-public transport (see the typical picture below). But, as I mentioned in my first post, Tokyo has great public transport and great roads. If you look at the travel times from royal palace to Ghibli Museum/Hampton Court I set out above, you'll see that Tokyo's public transport times and car journey times are materially less than London's, and the difference is more significant for the car journey than for public transport. 

While the side roads of Tokyo are small and pavement-less (see photos below), the main roads are big and wide. I stayed in a quiet hotel in Tokyo, but it was facing an 8-lane highway with an elevated multi-lane road above: there simply aren't equivalent roads in London. 

Fourth, Japanese residential streets look very different from what we are used to. When British YIMBYs show us artist's (or AI's) impressions of the glorious future under YIMBYism, it looks rather like Chelsea with futuristic trams. Here's a fairly typical example I saw not long ago (source).

By way of a corrective, here are some photos of typical street scenes in actual Japan. Notice random architectural juxtapositions, a lot of frankly undistinguished utilitarian design, little or no pavements for pedestrians, lots of overhead cables and less street greenery than is usual in London.

The lack of pavements was particularly striking to me. 

These photos are from a mixture of places, not just Tokyo, so you are not simply seeing the space demands of a megalopolis, but rather a more widespread approach to urban planning. You can imagine how much denser housing is possible in quiet residential areas if you forego gardens (front and back) and pavements. 

Whether the British public is prepared to accept this kind of built environment (big roads through cities, small houses with no gardens, no pavements), even in exchange for radically cheaper housing, is another question. One has to imagine a Greater London Metropolitan Area of continuous terraced housing from Crawley to Luton and Reading to Chelmsford: it seems to me that the designers of the Green Belt foresaw such a possibility and shuddered; it is quite possible that their grandchildren would shudder too and pay the price necessary to prevent it happening now, whether that price is restricting immigration or boosting housing demand in other parts of the country. In the piece I linked to above, I expressed some scepticism about the political feasibility of YIMBYs' maximalist demands; going to Japan has only strengthened that scepticism.

I will leave it there. As with child-rearing, I think it is worth looking at the totality of a country's experience of a policy area rather than picking and choosing aspects that appeal to you. Let's just say that turning London into Tokyo would be quite an undertaking.

(3) Religion

The attitude to religion in Japan is different from that of anywhere else I know. I won't discuss Buddhism or Shintoism directly, but I can tell you a bit about Christianity. 

I have been to (Catholic) church in Asia:

- in India (various occasions - well attended);

- in Beijing (English language - well attended);

- in Seoul (English and Korean language - well attended, including on a Holy Day of Obligation, i.e. a Thursday after work); and

- in Singapore (English language - so well attended as to be over-flowing).

In Tokyo, I went to Mass in this church:

(As you can see, it has the reassuringly drab and modern apperance of many English Catholic churches.) Mass was in Japanese and attendance was distinctly scanty - well under 20 people. Of that handful, a fair proportion (say 40%) consisted of foreign-looking people who could not speak Japanese (e.g. me). Although Japan looks a fair bit like Korea, but it is very definitely a different country. 

I have one other observation about attitudes to Christianity and it's a chance to revisit Analog, that second-rate film I mentioned before. 

We see our hero observe appropriate Buddhist funeral rites for his mother (it's that sort of film), but otherwise religion plays no part in the story. But at one point our hero is pushing our heroine's wheelchair (yes, she is now in a wheelchair - it really is that sort of film) when they notice that it is Christmas. Here is the church they are passing. (You will note the cherubic children inside: they are singing Gloria in excelsis Deo with no adult to direct them.) 

Our courting couple enters the church, the children dutifully file out (with still no adult in sight) and then this happens.

I suppose a secular Westener might think that the Neasden Temple or Bevis Marks was a romantic place to propose, but I somehow doubt it. As I say, their ways are not our ways.