Tokyo

"Japan as number one. We became one of the richest countries in the world. We had nothing to fear. The people and the politicians thought it was the case. However, it was just a temporary bubble economy. As soon as the inflated bubble beyond its substance burst entering the 1990s, the Japanese economy began to shrink rapidly. The Nikkei average stock price, which hit a high of 38,915 yen at the end of '89, plummeted to nearly half in just over nine months. The land prices in large urban areas such as Tokyo and Osaka also fell rapidly. At that point, the Japanese should have awakened from the dream and made up their minds. They should have needed to take the first step towards the future by restructuring companies with excess debt and employees, reconfiguring the old industrial structure, and actively paying the price of the bubble. However, Japan did not do that."

"I was much happier to live in Shanghai, where many streets have remained human-scaled rather than being built for cars. The French Concession, where I lived, remains leafy and full of cafés. Shanghai is highly walkable, and one is rarely more than a fifteen-minute walk from one of the city’s many subway stations. Shanghai has vowed to open [120 new parks every year](private://read/01k3jwt46q240aq6fe12mqkyr0/16_Notes.xhtml#_idTextAnchor307) until 2025, when the city will reach 1,000 green spaces. The city of twenty-five million people works remarkably well. Like Tokyo, it has flourishing spaces for commerce, where little dumpling shops are tucked away even in subway stations. And Shanghai is superbly connected by high-speed rail to nearby cities—for example, Hangzhou, home to tech companies like Alibaba, and Suzhou, where many multinationals have manufacturing operations—which are themselves some of China’s most successful cities."