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Answerman - Why Do All The Kids Want To Move To Tokyo?

If you want to go to the best college (and getting into a good school is basically Japan's national past time)

I wonder whether the relationship between Mexico City and the rest of the country is similar.

But if you're young, you have big dreams, and you want to give it your best and Aim for the Top, there's only one place to go.

Of course there are the bad things that come along with life in the big city, but those things go on in the small towns too - you just don't hear about it as much.

Somewhere out there on that horizon
Out beyond the neon lights
I know there must be somethin' better
But there's nowhere else in sight
It's survival in the city
When you live from day to day
City streets don't have much pity
When you're down, that's where you'll stay
The Eagles, In The City

Snark aside, this was a great article. The London comparison makes a lot of sense. With a city like Tokyo, it's really hard to get a sense of its scale.

The London comparison makes a lot of sense.

This is something I've often noticed among Americans (disclaimer, I'm American) - they have a hard time grasping how many other countries 'work' because unlike many of them them we don't have One Big City that towers over the nation. (Not just Tokyo and London, but Paris and others scattered across the globe.) A city that's the center of government, media, and culture, and that's also almost always the national seat of industry, finance, and commerce as well.

This article seems to be mixing metropolitan area's and cities together.

Quote:

But if you're young, you have big dreams, and you want to give it your best and Aim for the Top, there's only one place to go.

Suddenly I had a Kumamiko flashback >_<

This is something I've often noticed among Americans (disclaimer, I'm American) - they have a hard time grasping how many other countries 'work' because unlike many of them them we don't have One Big City that towers over the nation. (Not just Tokyo and London, but Paris and others scattered across the globe.) A city that's the center of government, media, and culture, and that's also almost always the national seat of industry, finance, and commerce as well.

The dream of the big city often isn't all that it is cracked up to be.

Mark Gosdin

London has about 20% of the UK's population and around half of its GDP, according to Wikipedia. Paris has about 20% of France's population and 30% of GDP. Tokyo has about 25% of Japan's population and 20-25% of the GDP. Meanwhile, New York City has about 7% of the US population and 8% of GDP.

Looking at many countries in the world, the largest city tends to account for around 20% of the population (when considering the whole metro area rather than just the urban core itself), and a roughly commensurate portion of the economy (London's relationship with the UK is very much an outlier here). The US is a major exception to this rule, as it has several massive cities, so none of them provide quite the dominating factor. If you saw the entire Northeast Corridor as a single megacity, then you start getting roughly comparable numbers, although even then they're on the low side (~17% population, ~20% GDP).

I think the London/UK analogy is perfect. Along with everything else, I don't think you'd get a good "USA" analogy because of sheer landmass. As others have noted, America as a country is so, SO much larger than nations like UK, France & Japan. Those individual nations are more like a small cluster of states in the US, or even just California alone. I don't know how it would go, but it'd be interesting to compare the US to China, which has both population AND landmass.

I'm somewhat surprised that various governments and such aren't putting more effort to use resources like the internet to distribute people in their 30s-40s to "outside" of the city. (encourage telecommuting, etc.) Considering that it is becoming an acknowledged issue that people are fleeing the non-urban areas, it seems like effort should/could be made to do something about that. I understand that 20-somethings fresh out of college have big dreams, but shouldn't really be targeting MOST of what the more urban areas provide aside from: jobs (which, like I said, white collar professional jobs could EASILY be moved) and schools (which... I would think are usually a "suburban" target and thus could also be dealt with, especially since education is USUALLY publicly funded).

The London comparison makes a lot of sense. With a city like Tokyo, it's really hard to get a sense of its scale. I wonder whether the relationship between Mexico City and the rest of the country is similar.