Keith's Web Blog RSS Feed en-us http://www.keithwatanabe.net/index.php Keith Watanabe's Website Living vs Working In Japan/Tokyo http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/7/21/cb0ea1778f35fd9dc63f266e58b0d7fd.html
Comparing LA vs Tokyo in terms of negatives and positives, here is my assessment:

LA Positives
  • Excellent weather
  • Wide roads
  • Cheap low end food
  • Mostly free parking
  • Reasonable working hours
  • Generally good working environments
  • Casual lifestyle
  • Nice homes
  • Proximity to the beach
  • Banning of smoking in public places
  • Relative distance to other entertaining areas (e.g. Las Vegas, San Francisco, etc.)
  • Better dentists
  • Great internet minded culture
  • IT engineers can earn reasonable salaries
LA Negatives
  • High crime rate
  • Rising cost of gas
  • Rising cost of homes
  • Terrible traffic
  • Polluted skies
  • Lack of a good public transportation system
  • Prone to fires
  • Sedate lifestyle (i.e. limited drinking areas, bars close by 3 am, inability to access fun areas without significant amount of planning via freeway, etc.)
  • Double tax rate (California's state tax along with federal tax)
  • Natural foods are outrageously imbued by chemicals
  • Fast food nation
  • Mostly encouraging unhealthy lifestyle (no exercise, eat, sleep, shit, get fat)
  • Alienated feeling
  • Many rude people
  • Too many ugly women
  • You mostly have to tip
  • Poor internet service
Japan/Tokyo Positives
  • Great night life
  • Mostly safe (about 99% of the time)
  • Excellent transportation system
  • Easy to access friends
  • Lower tax rate (for me at least)
  • Excellent cuisine
  • Average women are gorgeous and marriage minded (rather than this feminist garbage that has been injected into American women; watch Fight Club to see what I mean)
  • Excellent internet access
  • Bleeding edge cellphone technology
  • No wasted space (from a conservation point of view)
  • Inflation has been mostly tame (a ticket from Minowa to Ueno had cost me 160-en in 1999 and is the same now)
  • Smaller portions for food
  • Mostly a clean city (by all accounts of foreigners that i've spoken to)
Japan/Tokyo Negatives
  • Stressful work environment
  • Emphasis on old schools of thought in terms of fashion (i.e. people MUST wear suits even in the summer)
  • Long hours for work
  • Transportation is open only until roughly 12:45 am
  • Horribly expensive spot to live in
  • Tiny housing
  • 3-10 years behind in terms of software development and internet culture
  • Extremely polluted skies
  • Can be exceptionally dirty in certain spots (Shibuya, Roppongi, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro)
  • VERY high maintenance women
  • Old people just WON'T go away (hand the damn torch over to the younger generations already!!!!)
  • HUGE bugs
  • Smaller portions for food
  • Closed way of thinking (common sense exist; but not in the "intelligent" category)
  • Group thinking
  • 2 faced society
  • Terrible, ignored homeless problem
  • Jobs can provide bad money for an IT engineer
  • No such thing as work-life balance
I'm certain I'm missing more. But it's not a situation where the quantity of items overtakes another. It is a situation of degree and where one's value lies.]]> Sat, 21 Jul 2007 23:58:25 -0600 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/7/21/cb0ea1778f35fd9dc63f266e58b0d7fd.html LA vs Tokyo People http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/9/6/9e0fae92fdec9e3b988a1c82b4d5f47e.html
On the other hand, Tokyo is just filled with I'd say up to 60% bad weather. It's pretty rare for a month to go by without at least one droplet of rain. And when it rains, you don't see a few droplets, but often a full day's worth of drizzling up to typhoons (like today). The mood is far more somber out here with people dressing formally and their behavior more rigid. If the climate were any warmer and consistently sunny, I would heavily doubt that people could continue wearing suits and ties to the office on a daily basis.

I can't help to think that the formal wear and the weather play such huge roles in making Tokyo such an uptight culture. I'm not saying everyone has a stick up their ass, but imagine if people were allowed to go to work in shorts and tshirt and didn't have to deal with the crappy weather? I think people would wear a lot more smiles.

In LA, I would meet various people from other cities in the country. My professor once told me that when you move to some place like LA (in coming from Indiana), you never really want to go back, especially in dealing with the winters out there. Or my coworker, who was from Seattle, mentioned how when you look outside and see the sun on a daily basis, you gotta really love LA.

Now, here miserable and trapped in my dinky apartment, I'm starting to see a point.]]> Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:19:03 -0600 http://www.keithwatanabe.net/blogs/2007/9/6/9e0fae92fdec9e3b988a1c82b4d5f47e.html