I don't have a positive impression of Tokyo, but they just got the Olympics.

In My Humble Opinion
41

It might not be the best place for the Olympics (but you know that NYC had a bid in 4 years ago and most of the problems that will be for Tokyo would have been the same). But I loved visiting Tokyo and I would like to address some of the OP’s issues:

  1. It is crowded in a way that would make a Chicagoan nervous.

Similar to NY, in fact.

  1. Everybody smokes cigarettes, with few restrictions.

Sadly true.

  1. English is rare, and most signs are in Japanese only.

There are lots of signs in English. Subway stops are labeled in Kanji, Kana, and Roman script.

  1. The train system is fantastic, but impossible to learn for a foreigner.

No worse than NYC, good signage and good maps.

  1. It is a male dominated culture, women are still second class.

It may be, but it doesn’t impinge on tourists.

  1. The weather is unbearably hot and humid, with a cold winter.

The winters are mild, especially compared to Chicago. Nights might just get below freezing and days generally well above. I haven’t been there is the summer, but I imagine it is a lot like New Orleans. In fact, I think it is generally like New Orleans.

  1. Most men work well over 40 hours a week.

At least they need only one job to support a family.

  1. A beer in a bar costs at least US $ 20. Food is also incredibly expensive. If you only speak English, it is impossible to find inexpensive noodle shops.

That was what surprised me. I found the food surprisingly reasonable. Hotels were impossible. One restaurant I frequented had fixed meals (you chose meat or fish, but otherwise no choice) charged 1000 Yen (about $10) for dinner and another couple hundred for a bottle of beer. In the airport, I got a nice steak dinner for about 2000 Y. Noodle places were easy to find. The staff likely wouldn’t speak any English, but most places had pictorial (or even bilingual menus) so it wasn’t that important.

42

Hatred?

43

1. It is crowded in a way that would make a Chicagoan nervous.
The trains in the morning are -definitely- more crowded, and there are parts of the city that can be pretty overwhelming (the Shibuya crossing on a late Saturday afternoon) but otherwise - nah, anyone from any other big city would feel right at home.

2. Everybody smokes cigarettes, with few restrictions.
True - after living in New York and London I now hate going to Japan where smoking is still allowed in all the restaurants and bars.

3. English is rare, and most signs are in Japanese only.
Most definitely not true. English signage is extremely common. In Tokyo at least English is reasonable well-understood by anyone you’re likely to come in contact with.

4. The train system is fantastic, but impossible to learn for a foreigner.
The train system is indeed fantastic, and is relatively simple to learn even for a non Japanese-speaking foreigner, unless you’ve never had to use a mass transit system before. I managed the Tokyo and Osaka subway/bus systems having never been on a train or subway before in my life as an 18yr-old, completely new to Japan and didn’t speak a word of Japanese at the time.

5. It is a male dominated culture, women are still second class.
Male-dominated doesn’t necessarily have to equate to ‘women are second-class’. In the work place, yeah I’d probably agree to that? But in the home? Heh - you’d be shocked at how much control women have in the home, often to the chagrin of an unsuspecting young western lad…

6. The weather is unbearably hot and humid, with a cold winter.
Summer? Oh my yes. They almost certainly could not hold the Olympics in July or August. IIRC, the '64 Olympics in Tokyo were held in October, so that’s when they’ll probably hold it this time as well. Winters at least in Tokyo are fine, certainly no worse than Chicago or New York - in fact, almost certainly warmer with less snow…but the vast majority of houses (and even some public schools and universities) don’t have central heating so you’re still freezing anyway.

7. Most men work well over 40 hours a week.
Average number of hours worked per year over past 3 years: Japan 1,735. US 1785
Yes, that is somewhat skewed because men work longer hours than women - having worked at Japanese companies for 20 years, I’d say that Japanese men work longer, but definitely not ‘harder’ or ‘better’. Mostly they’re just killing time to avoid going home (see point 5 above).

7. A beer in a bar costs at least US $ 20. Food is also incredibly expensive. If you only speak English, it is impossible to find inexpensive noodle shops.
Laughably wrong. A beer in Tokyo will be on par with a somewhat expensive NY bar, maybe slightly higher but nowhere near $20. Food can be expensive, or can be reasonable - from a US perspective the food is OUTSTANDING. Amazing quality, way ahead of anything you could find in the US except maybe in New York. Did I mention service is fantastic and there’s no tipping?

44

Hmmm, your comments sound vaguely familiar…

  • said lots and lots of people in the UK before the Oympics last year. Guess what - on balance things were just fine. I have yet to talk to anyone here in London that now regrets it.

Not saying there weren’t downsides for some, but for all the dire predictions specifically about ‘prices going up, housing shortages, traffic fucked up, mass transit slammed with people’…all ended up being mostly irrelevant.

There are lots of reasons to think a Tokyo Olympics isn’t a great thing; your mindless drivel ain’t any of them.

:eek:

45

nm

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Not Lynn Minmei?:smiley:

47

The Tokyo Olympics will be held from July 24 to August 9, 2020.

48

Alright you geeks making Animé references, you do realize that what you’ll get in the opening/closing ceremony will probably be Hello Kitty, or if we’re really, really lucky a Miyazaki tribute. For some reason I have a bit of a hard time thinking that the Japanese will be as willing as the Brits to say “heck, yeah, you know us from these pop culture ephemera references, so here you have them”. OTOH it will be 2020 and maybe someone will have lightened up somewhere.

49

As for not having a positive impression of Tokyo – Tokyo fuckin’ rocks. It’s a technological and social marvel. There’s cheap, delicious food everywhere. Everything works, nothing’s broken, everything’s meticulously clean, it’s easy to get around, …

If anyone can put on a flawless Olympics, it’s the Japanese.

50

I’ve been living in Tokyo for the past few years and while I may quibble over a few points, I would strongly agree with Sleel’s assessment. The weather is truly awful during the summer, things are expensive, the city is generally pretty depressing and shallow.

The level of English is very weird. Learning English is kinda like the national hobby here, where everyone says they want to get better at it but also are pretty crappy at it. Don’t let the six years of compulsory English classes fool you, hardly anyone actually picks up any significant communication skills from it. I can’t imagine it being a significant hindrance to the games, though. Train stations have enough English to be navigable, virtually every restaurant in the city will have time to prepare an English menu, and there aren’t any dangerous neighborhoods for visitors to get lost in. Not really a big deal.

The whole male-dominated culture thing is also not really a big deal. Pop culture is pretty female driven, but business and government is very much an old boys club. Women aren’t treated like second class citizens, but if you’re a career minded woman you’re going to have a shitty time in the Japanese working world. There are certainly some darker elements there that need to be discussed and brought into the open, but nothing that is really relevant to the Olympics. No female visitors are going to have any problems being disrespected or treated poorly on account of gender.

The biggest issue, in my estimation, is public transport. Simply put, the public transportation system is not equipped to deal with the kind of influx of visitors expected for the Olympics. If you come to Japan as a tourist, doing a lot of traveling on big lines during the middle of the day, everything will seem golden. However, there are three stress points during the day: early morning rush hour, evening rush hour, and last train. Those are the times when busy lines are crammed so full of people the passengers by the door have to brace themselves not to be forced out of the train. Delays are rampant. Especially depending on where the Olympic facilities are located, it seems to me that the current train system won’t be able to handle the influx of visitors at those times. It’s also worth noting that trains stop running pretty early in Tokyo, with most people having to catch their last train before midnight and taxis being ludicrously expensive. I certainly hope the city uses the Olympics as an incentive to improve the system.

51

Building all the Olympic infrastructure is sort of pointless if Tetsuo and Akira are just gonna destroy it.

52

I agree with all your points, but I would put this one differently:

Not everyone in Tokyo speaks English. But Tokyo has so many people, and most places are so crowded, that anywhere you go you probably will find someone who does speak English.

When I’ve been there, anytime I’ve looked the least bit puzzled – say I’m looking at a subway station map trying to figure out where to go – within five minutes somebody would come up to me and ask, in English, if I needed any help.

53

Well, they have seven years to reconsider their folly; kinda like how they’re re-considering having the Qatar World Cup in the middle of the summer. I hope they push the Olympics back. Tokyo in late summer is just *brutal. *Face-meltingly hot. I’ve been in Manhattan, Chicago, even Atlanta in peak summer heat, and Tokyo feels significantly hotter and more humid.

As for the trains - I would expect that they’ll have special trains schedules during the Olympics with later run times (maybe even running all night, who knows). And I’m sure companies will be encouraged to implement flex schedules even more than usual - this is the country where companies have been actively encouraging employees to go home early so they can make babies.

Tokyo isn’t really all that expensive unless you a) insist on Midwest American-sized housing and b) only want to eat 'Merican food. Over the years as an adult I’ve lived in Tokyo, Chicago, London, Manhattan and Houston. Housing was most expensive in London, probably followed by New York (although the comparison is a bit unfair, since housing in Tokyo was considerably *smaller). *Fresh fruit and vegetables? More expensive in Tokyo.Taxes? More expensive in London. Utilities? Generally more expensive in Tokyo, but some costs - for example, internet charges - are considerably cheaper (and considerably faster). Eating out? The best food by far in Tokyo, and cost on par with New York (heck might be cheaper since there’s no tipping). But be careful about hopping in a taxi cab to go home when in Tokyo…

As for Tokyo being ‘shallow’ - well, it’s probably true of any big city you’re in, but any city you’re in is going to be shallow if you don’t speak the language or have local friends…That said, in general, I think Tokyo is probably a better city to enjoy if you’re single or married with no kids. Tokyo isn’t really a family-friendly place by any means: aesthetically the city sucks monkey balls; there’s very little green to speak of and it can be a very ugly grey cement jungle. The transport system is definitely not kid-friendly. And things like the arts, while available, are too sporadic and outrageously expensive to really enjoy all that often, particularly compared to London (we love the Proms) and especially New York.

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The dates are part of the bid. In other words, once they’re set, they’re set. They won’t be changed barring a cataclysmic event.

55

So was the World Cup, and we know how that’s going…granted, that’s only one sport and a handful of countries vs every friggin’ sport & country on the planet.

56

If anime has taught me anything, if there’s one city in the world we can count on to have something cataclysmic happen, its Tokyo! :smiley:

57

Hotel and Restaurant are different for tourists - you generally do not have access to a kitchen and if you do get to a grocery store, you can’t get anything that requires actual cooking [other than perhaps a microwave, and a cheater grill made by using foil and an iron college style] Frequently at and near a sports venue prices are higher than near standard worker-bee housing for the middle and lower classes. People attending the Olympics are there for the sports, not wandering around looking for inexpensive food and cheap housing, many will be there on package tours and not willing to divert to some distant neighborhood for the cheap foods - they will be eating at their hotel, in the sports venues and in the specific pathway between their hotel and the sports venue.

58

I do speak Japanese and have Japanese friends, and I still find the personality of Tokyo to be generally bleh. I’ve been living in a Tokyo suburb for the last 5 years or so, so I’m speaking from personal experience. People I met in Kyoto had a much better grounding in their past and were not so concerned about flash and trends. Those in Kobe and Osaka had a more open and international attitude. I spent my first few years out in the countryside, a few hours drive from Tokyo, and found most people there to be a bit more interesting overall than the acquaintances I made later in Tokyo. I’m not counting people I consider to be friends in this group, though, since people I don’t much care for I simply don’t associate with much. Of course, since I’m an oddball and a foreigner to boot, I tend to have more in common with oddball Japanese.

Tokyo attitudes tend to be a lot more conservative, IMO, so I guess it’s not surprising that I found the overall level of English ability higher in the Kansai area. There were more people who actively used English instead of Japanese and their proficiency was higher. Like I said, I speak Japanese just fine, so I don’t care which language someone uses with me, but it was a refreshing change to meet people who wanted to use English. My all-to-common experience in Tokyo is someone looking apprehensive that they might be forced to use English and then comically relieved when it turns out that the “scary foreigner” speaks a civilized tongue after all.

It’s still odd to me that people from Osaka have a reputation in Tokyo for being pushy and aggressive, since I found that people are actually better about personal space and dealing with crowds there. Tokyo is like a big damn mosh pit sometimes, while at the same level of crowding in the Osaka area, everybody more or less forms an orderly flow of traffic, and they (shocker!) actually line up for things like the train instead of forming a loose scrum and then pushing in from the sides.