In the US our zoning is done very restrictively: in this place you can build a detached single family home with this kind of set back and up to this height. In this spot you can build low density commercial. Etc you can ONLY build what the zoning board says. Then there are also complications from HUD, like they dont give FHA loans for condos or if developments have straight roads.
In japan the national government has a zoning policy. The most common zoning is “light industrial”. But if you have a zoning policy, you can build anything at that level or below. So in light industrial you can build a coffee shop, or a house or an apartment or a machine shop.
But they still manage to keep the beautiful simplicity of life that makes their culture one of the world's richest.
Housing is the biggest expenditure for people in America and many parts of the world. Housing is cheap is Japan so people can get by on much less.
That's not what its downstream from, that's restating the same thing in financial terms. What it's actually downstream from is that Japan is a fully urbanized society. The reason why Americans cannot implement this is because houses are their little homesteads and castles, Fukuyama used the term "suburban villager" for this attitude (also prevalent in Greece and Eastern Europe etc.)
If you operate a rental in any area outside of the core of the major cities, you are in the business of charging a significant monthly premium over a property value that is rapidly depreciating to zero. This is fundamentally different than the US.
When you're able to operate a place like that, your fixed costs (i.e. rent) are drastically lower and you are able to sell at lower prices because of it. With more housing, your employees don't need high wages to afford a basic apartment.
Issues like that, while perhaps sensible to someone, are barriers toward economic prosperity.
But a new oil change location? Approved, insured, permitted in 5 minutes. Construction done in 2 months.
We're really hellbent on making anything but the new highway to the new Wal-Mart and $60 Starbucks dinner (paid over time of course) for the kids on the way to soccer practice in the Jeep Wagoner illegal.
That said, there are probably 0 employees and long hours involved.
It also doesn't have to be your primary source of income. If you can run it from a structure like this you could just operate a cocktail bar on the weekends. Even in the US I know of a small pizza place that offers takeout only on a few days each month and it's operated out of the owners mom's kitchen. Not sure how legal that is and turning that inti a sit-down place would certainly be an issue.
I hate to even sound like this, I hate the cynicism in my comment, and maybe the answer is to actually just do it and not declare premature defeat, but having watched how other initiatives in my own local area have gone I can't help but feel that we don't have the real secret weapon that works for places like Japan, and makes stuff like Star Trek work outside of all the fancy tech, and that's sufficiently advanced culture to not immediately race this all to the bottom.
Several years ago our next door neighbor applied for a zoning variance to allow their home to be used as an AirBNB. All was fine for the first month or two, then a graduation party booked it, 20 vehicles show up and parked on all the neighbors yards, loud party late into the night, etc.
All of this was reported for noise violations, parking violations, etc. to both the police and to AirBNB. Neither took any action.
Months later a college fraternity booked this AirBNB for the entire summer. All of the above plus nightly backyard ragers going until 2 AM. Neither the police nor AirBNB did a damn thing about it. We reached out to zoning to see if we could protest the variance after the fact and told no, the only way for the variance to be revoked would be for the police to make so many calls to the house that it is deemed a public nuisance. Except the police won’t show for nuisance calls and even if they did it would take years of this for a hearing to be held which may or may not decide on our favor.
So… as much as I love the idea of the Japanese civic style. I would never give up strict zoning in America for it. People suck.
Life Where I'm From, on zoning: https://youtu.be/wfm2xCKOCNk
Not Just Bikes, narrow streets: https://youtu.be/jlwQ2Y4By0U
For one reason or another, the Japanese school of story-telling has a pretty prominent streak of this type of low-stakes, downtempo "slice of life" premise like this, that I find very satisfying. The director Hirokazu Koreeda has made many films of this type as well. For a while my wife and I would alternate watching Spanish films by Pedro Almodóvar and Koreeda on movie night, working through both catalogs, which somehow made a lot of sense together.
It’s far from exclusive to Hacker News. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be that prevalent here, as when it’s mentioned it at least tends to be in relevant context. Reddit, Tumblr, Imgur, and plenty of other communities both on and offline have an appreciation for Japanese culture.
> although I've come to realize that it's mostly Americans holding up an example of everything they feel they lack domestically, and in that sense isn't so much about Japan as it is about America
Also not related to America at all. It’s just as common in Europe and western countries in general. Generation probably plays a role. Find anyone who had their mind blown by an anime at a formative age, and you’ll find someone who to this day is likely to have some degree of fascination with Japan.
I'm honestly convinced it's a bit more prevalent in America, and I've explored this in earnest conversations with American friends. I don't mean to villify it either, as it makes a certain amount of sense. Their take is roughly that Japan is the benchmark case for a sufficiently alternative/different culture from an American POV and thus invites comparison. As in, yes, you could also cite equivalent examples in Europe (say, cozy hole-in-the-wall cafés in 200 year old structures with vines hanging off of them ...), but since the cultural overlap is much larger (or presumed to be), it's less striking. To quote one friend, "if you're going to make the comparison, why not go for the maximum you can?"
Add the surplus in shared history, the far greater exposure to Japanese products (e.g. car brands) inviting more interest, and so on.
Sure, you can find manga/anime fand pining for that Japanese lifestyle also in Europe, and Europeans are certainly no strangers to orientalism through the ages. But the incidence of finding "look at how the Japanese are doing it differently" in random mainstream media is a lot higher in US publications. And it's also largely been US-based consulting companies and/or organizations that have taken the hoishin and the kaizen and what not global in corporate culture and particularly in tech.
There’s a ridiculous number of Japan-centric things that make it to the front page compared to any other culture. Tech has always had a Japan obsession.
But is there a ridiculous number of Japan-centric things that make it to the front page compared to any other community? Are Japan-centric things discussed on HN more than Reddit, Tumblr, Imgur? Because that was my point; Japan is popular in general, not just popular on HN to the point it’s even worth singling out.
On the arthouse circuit, I think he's best known for After Life, which is a bit more challenging (honestly: I found it a bit dull) but worth biting into.
Do you know that pang of melancholic joy-and-regret you feel after you've had a wonderful day and you know no matter how much you and the others involved try, you can probably never quite recreate that magic a second time? Grateful for the memory you'll always have, yet at the same time sad? That's how his movies feel to me, where I'm often both happy and sad I've seen them. It's pretty damn great when a movie can do that.
So maybe I would enjoy his other movies, if you liked them!
In a jazz cafe, I assume the music plays low most of the time and so it probably doesn't matter much.
"Now that I think about it, there was nothing in this shop that would tell you it isn’t still, say, 1960."
I'd go for 1980s based on the amplifier, turntable and speakers. It would be a radiogram, probably valve based, in actual 1960s. Nice though.
But besides that, those speakers are placed terribly for stereo imaging. Even tucked in the cubby, why place them with the drivers together rather than apart? And those speakers appear to be dreadful anyway. A single 12" driver in a vented / untuned baffle with no midrange or tweeter elements?
So this is definitely set up for aesthetic, not sound quality.
> It’s such a curious, almost uncanny, feeling to enter one of these places. The inside feels much bigger and grander than the outside.
It makes sense for people to have an innate desire to be in places that are, you know, good for people to be in. The most obvious way to tell if a place is good for you is if it carries evidence that it has historically been good to other people.
Maybe we have some subsconcious processing that picks up on signs of human activity. That means wear and tear, built things, modifications. The way humans leave their mark on an environment when they spent time on it. All of that spent time is like accumulated votes that "yup, this is a good human place."
At the same time, we don't want to find ourselves hanging out in a dumping ground, slag heap, or other environment that humans have left their mark in by expoiting it. That's not a good place to be, because it's not just used, it's used up. So what we want to look for is not just signs of human activity (which a landfill has in spades), but a certain kind of caring activity. Marks in the space that seem to have been done to leave it more appealing to be in.
I think that's what the author is picking up on here. These tiny, aged spaces have a deep accumulation of caring attention. They feel bigger than they are because we pick up on that huge information density of all of the past people that have left their mark on a place. The place isn't large spatially, but it's large in time.
It's the exact opposite of how walking into a giant mall or corporate office can still feel claustrophobic because there's nothing—no things—there, no sense of history or connection to any lived experience.
Now, you could do that with any space, like a machine shop. But the "good human place"-ness of the shop will depend on the forces that shape that shop. If all the forces are purely commercial, you're going to end up with something that works commercially, but might not be so human-friendly. I think the disconnect between bland American commercial spaces and more intimate Japanese ones is the relationship of the owner-proprietor to commercialism.
In the US, I have been in a few cafes where I had to step back outside to check if I had accidentally walked into someone's living room. Same for hostels; the best ones feel like you're in someone's home. Their layout was not driven by commercial interest, but by a person just wanting to feel cozy. The space is them.
Whereas a Starbucks isn't a person, it's a chemical factory. If the music is too loud, it doesn't matter if I complain; the factory workers (supposedly) can't control the music. If the air is too cold, it doesn't matter if I'm shivering; the factory workers are paid to make coffee, not care about my discomfort. Our human connection to the space is irrelevant to the manufacturing and selling of chemical stimulants.
That made me cringe a bit. The whole look of the place is deliberate. I mean, somebody put in a lot of effort to make it look just that way. Notice how every inch of it is spotless and nothing could be said to be out of place.
For example, consider the vines that are growing on that shed. Is that dirty? Should we clean them to get a pristine shed? Yes, you have to sweep the floor everyday to clean the dust, but should you cut down that small plant growing between the cracks of your building? Or the vines overtaking the roof? I think if you answers no to this, then you understand that sense of aesthetics.
For some people tho, they think its a bad thing (1), which I simply don't understand? I don't understand how people can willingly spend every couple of hours every week to trim their lawn to a pristine, perfect cube of grass. Is this beautiful? I think not. In my apartment, I have trees growing from the cracks of the building, and I think that's beautiful.
I don't know how they do it, it is not simply just being clean. I think parts of it is "allowing nature to take its course" which gives a typical structure depth and age.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/landscaping/comments/vs1n0n/help_wh...
They have this word called koselig that we don't have in English that means cozy plus a lot more things, and these Japanese coffee shops really do embody that word.
That’s not what you should be worrying about.
> I have trees growing from the cracks of the building, and I think that's beautiful.
It probably is beautiful. It may also be inconvenient or outright dangerous. As the trees continue to grow and expand the cracks, the building’s structure becomes ever more compromised. Maybe the cracks will expand and more rain will come in, causing mold and making your home less effective at keeping its temperature. Or maybe they’ll expand in a way that a whole wall will fall off.
Seeing plants sprouting from the ground in cities is fun and aesthetically pleasing, I agree. But it is not always safe to let them keep growing.
on what timescale though? and in an invisible way?
I believe buildings are seen as more temporary in japan than in the west; maybe point at which the damage is excessive would outlive the building?
Short enough to kill you or your direct descendants. These things can look fine for years and then collapse in one day.
> and in an invisible way?
Makes no difference how visible it is if you don’t understand the risk and do nothing until something happens. And the longer you wait, the harder it will be to remedy.
> I believe buildings are seen as more temporary in japan than in the west
I’m not talking about Japan, I’m addressing the general point.
Depends on how extensive the growth is and how structurally stable the thing is in the first place. But expect major problems on the decades-timescale.
> "and in an invisible way?"
Yes. This is the main problem with allowing unconstrained plant growth near/in/under structures - the degree of structural compromise is hard to assess (especially without spending a lot of $$$), and failure can be sudden. You're not gonna get as much warning as you'd want.
In the US it's a popular look to have vines growing against brick walls. They're beautiful but often hazardous for structural safety, especially if not proactively maintained and constantly monitored (which is $$$!)
[edit] I think overall the focus on the "pleasantly ramshackle" aesthetics of the shack misses the forest for the trees. There's a lot of daylight between "permit small businesses in possibly unsafe structures" and "western status quo norms for business licensure".
I think something Japan gets done really well is making it easy and inexpensive to run businesses, especially hobby businesses. There are a ton of policies that encourage this outcome, and we can and should adopt entire rafts of them without changing existing regs about the physical structural stability of said businesses ;)
If we were talking about public infra where thousands will die if a structure fails prematurely, then sure, let's be careful about vines. But if a private land owner wishes to grow vines (or allow vines to grow) on their private building, I think it's fine.
I’m not talking about the building in the article, or even Japan specifically, but addressing the general point of trees and other growths which cause literal cracks and compromise structural integrity.
> If we were talking about public infra where thousands will die if a structure fails prematurely
That is exactly what I’m talking about. Well, maybe not thousands, even a four story building with a compromised structure can lead to unnecessary deaths.
Structural integrity or uniformity (or some other qualitative)? Yes, occasionally there is an actual structural problem (MSME here) but far, far more often things are torn down or discarded when a slight repair would suffice (other than the preference).
I once went out of town for two weeks figuring much the same and came back to a freshly cut lawn and a five-day-old notice from the town posted at my door stating that I had three days to trim the lawn or they'd do it for $300.
> I don't understand how people can willingly spend every couple of hours every week to trim their lawn to a pristine, perfect cube of grass.
The funny thing is that you will fine plenty of Western-style gardens in Japan too: perfectly trimmed, symmetrical, sometime even next to Japanese garden. Japanese aristocrats quite love this back in the day.
And I dont think that part of Japan is pretty when I visited it. I understand that its not all perfect, of course.
Both are very beautiful to me, because I haven never seen either of them.
What do you mean? Are trees dirty?
Coming from SF, a couple of thoughts came to mind: first: wow these bikes have been sitting here for a long time. And second: this must be a _really_ safe place, because in SF, a bike parked outside won't last a day or two.
Funny thing is: the area didn't look rundown or anything. It was clean and well maintained. Except for the bikes in vines.
[1] The Essential Pruning Companion by John Malins
I do ours because our lawn is 70% tumbleweeds (kochia) and cutting it before any of it can go to seed increases the chance that one day it will be only 30% kochia.
* Poor economic mobility
* Individual compliance with the social contract
* Liberty to run small businesses
* Good land use laws
Perfect mobility is awful because all the capable people get to maximize earnings. The better The Sort (as patio11 calls it) the more capable people move out of doing things with high positive externalities.
Lots of people in North America work in jobs with positive externalities (teachers, nurses, etc) and they're generally treated like shit compared to 9-5 office workers. I don't think the issue is that the former is group is less capable, they're just not sociopathic resource-collecting robots.
Maybe you mean poor job mobility for office work. Economic mobility as a whole is high enough for whole towns and villages to become desolate as former residents decamp for the cities.
mostly forgot about it until reading this article because there is a lot to take in while visiting Japan from the US
Many restaurants and bars are small mom-and-pop places that gain clientele through neighborhood word-of-mouth, and don't invest in advertising.
When my partner and I travel, we don't do a ton of planning for specifics so if we're in a big city we'll usually pick a neighborhood or 2 for the day and bebop around until we're tired. The start to any day is almost always finding a coffee shop and doing the crossword during our first cup. In Europe depending on the city this can be difficult because a lot of coffee shops just pump out overextracted espresso and then give the option to add water for an americano. There's still tons of amazing cafes in the European cities I've visited. Some really memorable ones are Café Tacuba in Lucerne, Faro in Rome, and Monks Coffee Roasters. in Amsterdam.
In Tokyo, we actually started off with a pretty mediocre coffee because nothing opened before 10 besides a cafe chain, but after we got adjusted we couldn't stop finding great spots. The first day we were going to the national museum and found AOYAMA COFFEE ROASTER in Yanaka. At first the owner was a bit standoffish because we were 2 Americans coming in at the very beginning of the day and I assume she has a lot of bad experiences with tourists, but we started talking after she noticed my portafilter/coffee plant tattoo and had a really great time. For the rest of the week, we walked into shop after shop that had at most 4 or 5 seats with one barista making drinks and each one felt special.
The one that connected me most to this post was the one from our day in Sumida City when we were going to a bunch of small museums (highly recommend the Hokusai museum). We stopped into CHILL OUT COFFEE &...RECORDS and it was one of the coziest coffee experiences I've ever had. The shop is a coffee bar with a couch and a couple of chairs. I forget what kind of cup I had but I remember it being just a really balanced cup with a little bit of berry and chocolate notes. I wish we could've stayed longer but after about 15 minutes a family of tourists with 2 toddlers came in and we figured it was time to go after we finished our drinks.
In Seoul, the shops we visited were all a lot bigger but one thing I couldn't help noticing was that all of the baristas were so deliberate in their movements. This is something that was probably true of folks in shops in general in Tokyo and Seoul, but I noticed it with baristas because I tend to think about it a lot when I'm making drinks at home. You could show me a silhouette of baristas making drinks in Tokyo and some western city and it would be night and day. I feel like that goes a long way in illustrating the differences between eastern and western culture even though we're all making and enjoying the same hot bean water.
I don't know the story behind the structure, but it was a re-purposed storage shed [2] that someone was either subletting or owned outright. Probably the former -- the area is not remote, and is surrounded by new housing. Most likely is that some landowner is making a little bit of cash by renting out the space, and the business owner is exploiting the niche of having a cheap property so near to Nijo castle (a tourist black zone in Kyoto).
Setting aside the aesthetics, the most "Japan" thing about this is that it's possible at all to get a license to run a food establishment, electricity service, etc. in such a marginal space. It would never be allowed in the US.
Secondarily, leaseholder rights in Japan are pretty different than in other parts of the world. It's fairly common, even in major cities, to find underdeveloped, tiny little plots of land where there's a lessee who has a ~perpetual right to the space, independent of the "owner". Landowners will buy and sell the underlying rights to the rental cashflow, almost like a long-term bond, with no hope for redevelopment, and the lessee can independently sell the rental rights [3]. Again, I don't know if that's what is going on here, but it wouldn't surprise me. These kind of situations make it feasible for a business owner to invest in creating a business in what is essentially a potting shed -- one of the major risks would be that no one rationally would want to keep that old building in place in an area of Kyoto that could be more fully developed. But as you can see, this building is completely surrounded by new construction, and has been for many years.
[1] It's here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/3KtWnTAkmatMqN9b6
[2] I could be wrong about this part. The roof is tiled, which is pretty fancy for a shed. My recollection was that it was far too small to ever have been a house, but it's possible that it was originally a section of a larger machiya, which would make sense for the area and the geometry of the lot.
[3] This is sort of like mineral rights or air rights in the US. It's not a totally foreign concept to us, we just don't do it for houses or...shacks.
This streetview gives a better perspective on exactly what is around it -- you have new development in front and behind, and the area immediately to the front of the shop is a dedicated parking area for a nearby business. I suspect that the shop and the parking area are part of the same parcel, owned by the business.
https://www.google.com/maps/@35.0112669,135.7504895,3a,89.9y...
https://archive.thevinylfactory.com/features/kankodori-karao...
If you are in Kyoto, I recommend a similar style bar called Brown Sugar. They tend to have these types of names, for example, in Sapporo there is one called Jim Crow. [0] However, if in Sapporo, I recommend the half note. [1] Most bars and restaurants for that matter will not serve me because I do not speak Japanese, so they say. If I wanted a drink I would stick to Karaoke and jazz bars. I made some friends in Kyoto who were finishing their 4th year studying engineering at University of Kyoto who were from Africa -- these kids are African royalty. They spoke perfect fluent Japanese and they couldn't get access into bars that would let me in. So the names are fitting and likely they know exactly what they mean.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=sapporo+japan+bar+jim+crow
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=sapporo+japan+piano+ba+half+...
Anyway, in the interview, he talked about places that sound like what you are describing in the first paragraph but he called them kissas.
That said, I’m guessing the “jazz izakaya” that gp mentioned would probably just be called a bar or izakaya, possibly with a thematic adjective added.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_kissa
For the interested, Chris Broad (Abroad in Japan) interviewed the owner of such an establishment (Basei) located in Ichinoseki: https://youtube.com/watch?v=1-9RMSbl_Uo
> (There’s one that’s chock-full of Star Wars memorabilia, for example.)
I'd definitely like to know where this one is.
Wabi-sabi spaces are awesome regardless where in the world they are. Portals? Even better. Awesome post.
An astute observation that allowing markets to operate without onerous licensing schemes and regulations often has wonderful upsides, allowing quirky and niche interests to survive and even flourish.
A similar situation was true of Melbourne's small bar scene vs Sydney's. Sydney's more expensive/onerous licensing requirements were prohibitive for tiny bars. Whereas Melbourne's licensing was more permissive and less expensive, resulting in an abundance of quirky and interesting venues. Possibly my favourite example was a tiny indy video game bar (it shut down during covid, I think). https://barsk.com.au/skgames/?p=done
Mistletoe•3h ago