Why Osaka Gets to Have Nice Things

Just off Triangle Park in the Amerikamura (“American Village”) neighborhood of Osaka, there’s a nondescript building with a strange, occult-looking sign hanging off the side. Go up to the fifth floor of that building, crouch down to pass through a Being John Malkovich-height doorway, and you’ll find yourself in a dimly lit little cocktail bar called Bar Naryuta. There are no menus there; just ask for any standard cocktail, and Bar Naryuta’s proprietor will serve you his particular version of it.

Say you order an old fashioned. The standard version of this drink comes with an orange peel garnish and sometimes a maraschino cherry. Bar Naryuta ditches the cherry; instead, the bartender light some cherry wood chips on fire and infuses a tumbler with the smoke. Then he adds the garnishes: an orange peel and a splinter of cinnamon lightly dusted with powdered sugar. The result is pretty much perfect. Sweet but not cloying (unlike a lot of mediocre old fashioneds I’ve had elsewhere), complex but balanced, and inventive but unfussy.

Having a drink at Bar Naryuta, I had the bittersweet feeling that they were not just serving the best cocktails I had ever had; they were serving the best cocktails I ever would have. Everything they made there, as far as I could tell, was a small masterpiece, a cocktail that you thought you knew, assembled with a level of thoughtfulness and creativity you hadn’t thought was possible.

As I was reminded on a recent vacation, Japan has a lot of places like this: little establishments that do one particular thing at an extraordinarily high level. This is widely known, which is why whiskey nerds are so preoccupied with Japanese whiskey, raw denim nerds covet Japanese denim, and stationery nerds love Japanese paper. (I own examples of all three.)

There are no doubt some cultural-historical reasons for Japan’s abundance of high-quality goods, but any explanation that leans entirely on cultural essentialism is going to be inadequate at best and a little bit racist at worst. There are brilliant craft workers and long traditions of skilled craftsmanship in every country on Earth. But something about the Japanese economy seems to make it particularly hospitable to small business owners who make beautiful things in relatively modest quantities.

Okay, enough being coy. If you’ve read anything else I’ve ever written, you know where I’m going with this: I think you can trace a direct line from Japan’s sensible urban planning to its abundance of extremely good cocktail bars.

When I say sensible urban planning, I’m mostly referring to Japan’s flexible zoning code and the ease with which Japanese cities have been able to add density over the years. Because it’s easy to build in Japan, urban housing stock has expanded alongside urban population growth, keeping rents relatively stable. And because rents have stayed so low, it’s relatively easy for Japanese city-dwellers to pay the bills by doing one thing exceptionally well: if you find a market niche and a core group of dedicated customers, you’ll probably earn enough to cover the rent on both your apartment and your shop, with a little bit left over.

I’m not the first American to make this observation, and I’m not even the first American to do it recently. Here is the last good Twitter account making the same observation a couple days ago:

And here is my big media doppelganger in a recent New York Times essay:

But it isn’t just that Tokyo and Osaka are cheap compared to major American cities. The sheer agglomeration of people in these cities also creates more markets for niche interests. Just as a matter of basic arithmetic, you’re going to find more people who are extremely passionate about hand-crafted leather messenger bags in a city of 14 million (like Tokyo) than you are in a city of 800,000 (like San Francisco). The same goes for any other highly specific retail market you can imagine.

So far in this post, I’ve focused quite a bit on density in Japanese cities, as have most of the sources I’ve cited above. But there’s more to Japan’s better urban planning than just letting people build up. How they let people use all that space is perhaps equally important.

To think about why, let’s go back to Bar Naryuta. (No, seriously, can we please go back to Bar Naryuta?)

As I mentioned, the bar was on the fifth floor of a tower in Amerikamura. This building was narrower than most five-story-or-taller buildings you will find in any American city. Two reasons for this: first, the building had only one staircase. This is illegal in most of the United States for mid-sized or taller buildings, although this may soon change in California. Second, the elevator was smaller than you can find in most post-war American buildings — again, largely because of American building codes.

The bar itself was no larger than 500 square feet, and perhaps a bit smaller. This was not uncommon for bars and restaurants I visited in Japan: many of them are about the size of an American studio apartment and wedged into a multi-level building that includes at least one or two other establishments on different floors. Some of these places can seat no more than a handful of customers at a time, but no matter: you can always take the building’s single staircase up or down a floor to find somewhere else.

This approach to building means Japanese cities use space much more efficiently than American cities do. Without the need for multiple staircases and larger elevators, Japanese developers can build on smaller lots; the result is more discrete commercial spaces with an average lower square footage, which helps keep the rent on those spaces low.

And then there’s parking — or, again, the lack thereof. Wandering around Tokyo and Osaka, I was struck by the lack of both surface parking lots and curbside parking. Parking is one of the most egregious ways that American cities waste space, perhaps second only to single-family zoning; Seattle, for example, has more than five parking spaces for every household in the city. Tokyo has much less parking, and it has many fewer cars: approximately one car for every three households.

In the United States, you’ll often hear white knights for free parking argue that any attempt to replace infrastructure for cars with infrastructure for humans will kill local businesses. After all, how are customers supposed to get to a place like Bar Naryuta if they can’t drive there?

Well, in a city of sufficient density, people have plenty of other options: walking, public transit, biking, various other forms of micro-mobility. Surface parking, not the lack thereof, is the real business killer, because it privileges driving over every other way that one could navigate a city. In particular, by reducing foot traffic, it kills serendipity: the magic of wandering into a shop or restaurant because it caught your eye. That may help to explain why a recent study found that “public transport stops, pedestrian zones, and public parking garages nearby increase the attractiveness of retail locations.”

Given how packed together everything is in Tokyo and Osaka, you might think that these are extremely noisy cities. And they are, at least in some central areas, at certain times of day. But a visitor from the United States might be shocked to discover how quiet these cities can be just outside of those central areas. Walk a few blocks south from the Shibuya Scramble, into the neighborhood of Daikanyama, and the noise will recede almost instantly. There are parts of Daikanyama that, while still dense, are borderline idyllic.

I’ve heard other Americans ascribe this lack of noise pollution to Japanese politeness and a culture of quietness. Again, there’s probably something to that, but cultural essentialism only gets you so far. I suspect a bigger factor is the preponderance of foot and bike traffic, and the relative lack of car infrastructure. Vehicle noise is perhaps the biggest and most toxic source of noise pollution in American cities.

All of which is to say that it’s possible to get your great cocktails and finely-wrought leather goods without the supposed ill effects of greater urban density. Japan’s approach to urban planning isn’t perfect — because their buildings depreciate quickly, they have to do a lot of rebuilding, which in turn leads to greater carbon emissions from their construction sector — but there’s a lot we could learn from them. And if we learn the right lessons, affordability is just one of the potential benefits.