Aomori pop 270k is different — it is somewhat less desirable to someone like me than somewhere close to Sapporo. I don’t think it’s the weather. It’s the isolation.
Most Asian people love living around others. We crave the human energy, the hustle and bustle of economic activity, the opportunities, the food, etc.
Climate is something one lives with. Given the choice between Bakersfield CA and Chicago, I’d choose Chicago any day, only because the opportunities are greater in Chicago. I absolutely loved living in Chicago. Even Seattle where I live now is too small for me.
> Most Asian people love living around others. We crave the human energy, the hustle and bustle of economic activity, the opportunities, the food, etc.
Any statement starting with "Most Asian people" that doesn't end with something like "have two arms and two legs" can be discarded. 4.6 billion people, many of whom are culturally as close to each other as they are to someone from Sweden.
Even here in Seoul, one of the more populous cities, so many people would move in a heartbeat if they could keep the same job and e.g. education for their children. They certainly don't love it.
> Even here in Seoul, one of the more populous cities, so many people would move in a heartbeat if they could keep the same job and e.g. education for their children. They certainly don't love it.
That's interesting -- because Seoul is one of the most overwhelming examples of city preference (perhaps not internal desire, but opportunity seeking behavior) in the world. Korea has a problem in that the population is in fact too concentrated in Seoul, which creates distortions in the economy, and the government has been trying to get people to spread out more (Sejong City is an attempt). People are frustrated with things about Seoul but they still stay for the opportunity.
Let's flip the question this way: if apartment ownership was affordable, opportunities were good, air was clean, most things in life like healthcare, education, etc. were affordable, would people naturally seek to move to a big city?
Tokyo is such a city and the answer for many people has been yes. It may not be the preference of most people you meet online, but empirically the numbers reveal preference.
One of the most common reasons (probably number 1) people here would rather not live in Seoul if they could keep their job and educational opportunities is in fact straight up "too many people, too crowded".
This is nicely worded but I'm not sure what to make of it. No offense, but doesn't make a lot of sense.
Younger populations tend to get attracted to cities, tolerating worse living standards in exchange for better wages and shorter commutes. But higher commodity prices negate benefits, and also lower standards of life suppress offspring, which is politically highly problematic. Isn't that the fundamental defect in concept of a city since the industrial revolution?
A typical luxury condo in Tokyo costs $1m, offer 100m^2(1k sqft) of single floor dwelling, with 300 individual properties on average spanning couple dozen floors. That might be a 0.1% lifestyle, relatively speaking, but objectively and especially in comparison with historical descriptions of opulent life, I can't exactly see how it compares.
Cities did not use to suppress offspring. When countries were developing, and even in developing countries today, cities had high-fertility slums. Look at pictures of New York in the 1900s with multigenerational families sharing a room.
If anything higher standards of living (and higher expectations of what children should get) suppress offspring. Easier access to medical care and family planning in cities also plays a factor.
2) The weather is definitely a big factor. The cold, some of the highest amount of snow fall in the world, strong winds, and houses without insulation make for a poor combination. It is so nasty that even the colleagues from Northern Europe were complaining. But it doesn't matter if you like or not; what matters is if the average Japanese person likes it, and they don't. When I travel around Japan and tell people where I live, they are always shocked and ask me what am I doing in such a cold place.
> Climate is something one lives with. Given the choice between Bakersfield CA and Chicago, I’d choose Chicago any day, only because the opportunities are greater in Chicago. I absolutely loved living in Chicago. Even Seattle where I live now is too small for me.
The data on population changes in the USA indicates the people want to avoid freezing temperatures over hot temperatures.
>The data on population changes in the USA indicates the people want to avoid freezing temperatures over hot temperatures.
That data is probably at least somewhat biased by retirees who turn the air conditioner on and don't want to deal with some of the inevitable physical demands and transportation difficulties associated with snow.
But they do if that's the reality of where they need to live for where they work. It's long been the case that some number of people in the US migrate south when they retire.
To note, the climate isn't just whether you enjoy snow or not.
It's pointed in other comments as well, but winter in the north means trains getting canceled, flights delays if it's really bad up there.
Aomori is land connected so there's still other options, but in the event of an earthquake in the middle of winter you're playing the survival game in hard mode.
Even if it's a smallish shake and you just need your gas checked and restarted by a technician, you might be out of hot water for a few days while it's freezing outside. Elderly for instance regularly die during these kind of disruptions, and you'd think they know what they're doing.
That happened during the Great Tohoku Earthquake of 2011. There is an excellent Netflix series about the Fukushima disaster called The Days which depicts the family of a powerplant worker from Mutsu struggling with the winter weather after the power cuts.
About elder people, we heard from the emergency services that, due the lack of insulation and central heating of most houses here, the most common type of emergency during the winter is elder people moving from a warm room to a cold room like the toilet and suffering from thermal shock.
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Most Asian people love living around others. We crave the human energy, the hustle and bustle of economic activity, the opportunities, the food, etc.
Climate is something one lives with. Given the choice between Bakersfield CA and Chicago, I’d choose Chicago any day, only because the opportunities are greater in Chicago. I absolutely loved living in Chicago. Even Seattle where I live now is too small for me.