Come see me speak about Japan!

Plus: A bunch of fun posts I've written about Japanese urbanism and Japanese society.

If you happen to be somewhere near Palo Alto on the evening of Friday, August 9, and you’d like to come hear me give a talk about Japan, come on down! I’m doing a free event with the Japan Society of Northern California. Officially the topic is why so many people want to visit — and, increasingly, move to — Japan. I’ll be interviewed by Rochelle Kopp.

Here are the event details:

And here is a registration link for the event:

I’ll be around to chat before and after the event as well.

Anyway, here are some posts of mine for a bit of background. The post that got everyone’s attention, and which resulted in the title of my talk on 8/9, was “Tokyo is the new Paris”:

In this post I argued that Tokyo is now the greatest city on Earth — a much nicer place to live than any booming industrial megalopolis, and more efficient and dynamic than old favorites like New York City and London. Increasingly, smart people I know who have their pick of where to live are choosing Tokyo out of all the places on Earth. Honestly, I’m considering it too. Between the rising tide of expats and the tourism boom, Tokyo has become a truly cosmopolitan place, but it retains the characteristic Japanese combination of impeccable style and incredible convenience that makes it stand out among all the cities of the world.

By the way, here is a very good article about the tourism boom, by Bloomberg’s Marika Katanuma. It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly this is changing the feel of the country. I’ll be coming out soon with a tourist guide to Tokyo, followed by another for the rest of Japan.

(As an aside, I personally think that the tourism boom is too large — the country’s infrastructure, legendary as it is, is straining to accommodate the inflows, and it can be hard to get around or find a restaurant reservation in the trendier neighborhoods of Tokyo these days. I think the Japanese government will have to step in soon. The most reasonable policy would be a surcharge on hotel reservations made outside the country; this would allow the government to collect more revenue from tourism directly, while also allowing a great degree of control over how many people come to the country. I’ll write more about this later as well.)

Anyway, I also had two other posts about Japanese urbanism. This March, I wrote a post arguing that commercial density is just as important as housing density for creating walkable urbanism, and explained how Japan manages to pack so many little restaurants and shops into its charming mixed-use neighborhoods:

I followed that up with a post reviewing the excellent book Emergent Tokyo, which goes into many of the historical and architectural details that create Tokyo’s characteristic shopping districts:

And back in January of last year, I wrote a post arguing that Japan’s true secret to good urbanism — and much else besides — is constant self-reinvention:

Westerners tend to imagine Japan as constant, static, and unchanging. But those who know the country well have seen the incredible changes that have overtaken it in the last two decades — the flood of women into the workforce, the end of the lifetime employment system, the big influx of immigrants, the tourism boom, the rise of online culture, the revolutions in retail and entertainment, and the constant redevelopment of the urban landscape. The Japan that everyone loves to visit today is not the same Japan I lived in two decades ago.

The changes in Japan’s population are perhaps the most surprising to Westerners who are used to thinking of Japan as a closed-off, homogeneous country. So far almost all the immigrants are from Asia, which means the ethnic changes are not always visible to visiting Westerners. But it’s a very big deal to Japanese people.

I’ve written a couple of posts about the immigration boom. First, I wrote a post arguing that Japan is less homogeneous than Westerners tend to think, especially after immigration ramped up in earnest in the early 2010s:

Of course, the question of whether Japan will welcome these immigrants is an important one. I wrote a post arguing that Japanese people are almost astonishingly sanguine about the population influx:

Whether Japan’s sclerotic economy can provide upward mobility for the immigrants, and how the country assimilates newcomers, are still open questions. But for right now, the Japanese people are welcoming immigrants with open arms.

Anyway, I’ll have lots more to write about this in the coming months. For now, if you’d like to hear me talk about all this and more, come to my talk in Palo Alto!

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