Is Tokyo actually better?

Musings on the largest developed city

The first thing I noticed while going through Haneda immigration was the people. For one thing, there were a fucking ton of them. Not other travelers—the entire process was efficient and took less than 10 minutes. The airport teemed with employees, middle-aged men and women holding signs bearing self-evident text like “arrivals,” standing not fifteen feet from each other. For another thing, there was not one immigrant. Everyone looked very much Japanese—not Chinese, not Philippino, not Bangladeshi. The guy cleaning the toilets, Japanese. The guy sweeping trash off the steps at 6am. Virtually every waiter I had over the course of a week was a young Japanese person.

For this reason, Japan is the envy of immigration restrictionists everywhere. But is it actually better? At Heathrow, the staff seem about 10% ethnic Brits. I lived in the UK for seven years and I’m not sure I ever saw a janitor-level job done by a non-immigrant. Even most of the waiters are immigrants. In America, this labor class is similarly non-native within major cities. And the reason is simple—the native populations of America and the UK—don’t really want to do those jobs, certainly not for the same wages. But if you know anything about the Japanese economy, they certainly don’t suffer from runaway wage inflation; wages are low across the board. In fact, low-wage work is paid significantly less in Japan than the US or the UK.

The successes of Tokyo are many and have been explained to death: it is extremely clean, there is no crime, there is no homelessness. There’s more of an emphasis on craftsmanship, which is why everyone loves Japanese artisanal goods. It has the best food in the world, whether measured by Michelin stars or by walking into random cheap restaurants. The underground system is so clean that there are restaurants in the stations and no one talks on the subway cars at all—a far cry from the hellscape of schizos, blaring music, and filth one encounters at West 4th Street. I’m not sure I’ve ever ridden a New York taxi that was clean, and I’ve never been in a dirty one in Tokyo.

A big part of how they achieved these successes is a very strong national identity. To anyone who doubts this, I recommend visiting Yasukuni Shrine, in which every Japanese military episode of the last thousand years is portrayed not only without apology, but in glorified propaganda. Some of the worst war criminals of World War II are extolled for dying with honor for Emperor and country, even if they died by execution for ordering the Bataan Death March. The analogous museum in the UK, the US, or Germany is laughably unthinkable—you can’t go to a museum of British history without being bombarded by apologia about how the greatest empire ever assembled was awkshaully built by slaves and would’ve been impossible without the Black trans community, to whom we owe reparations to this day.

I do think this is a lode-bearing part of the culture. The reason Japanese people are willing to do low-wage jobs is primarily not that there’s no alternative and they’re therefore able to charge a “living wage.” It’s a general feeling that the country has your back, and so you have its back, and you should take pride in your work because you’re representing a nation when you clean the toilets. This impulse is desperately lacking in America, and we would do well to import it.

Having said that, its strength is its weakness. Japan far outdoes its population size in artistic and artisanal domains, but is utterly hamstrung in commerce by that same collectivism. There is no meaningful entrepreneurship in Japan. It’s trivial to start a shop out of your living room, but there has not been real Japanese global economic contribution since the 80s, especially compared to America or China. Famously, if you work in Japan, you have to do a bunch of very inefficient labor—staying out late drinking, putting in unnecessary face time, leaning on fax machines and physical documents. The commitment to national order—immortalized in the “thou shalt not jaywalk” signs—makes Japanese business sclerotic, and this shows up in any measure of economic activity in Japan for the last two decades. Worse yet, the smartest people often emigrate for more promising, lucrative, and interesting careers in the West.

I love Tokyo, but I could never live there. I am a Westerner at heart, and will trade some urban dysfunction for dynamism and risk-taking. A middle way is possible, in which enough laws are enforced to institutionalize dangerous criminals and keep the streets clean, without extinguishing the Faustian spirit by way of a stifling commitment to order.