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Backyard Coffee and Jazz in Kyoto

(thedeletedscenes.substack.com)
592 points wyclif | 1 comments | 23 Jun 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.243s | source
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mupuff1234 ◴[23 Jun 25 15:01 UTC] No.44356504[source]▶
It all goes back to zoning laws and regulations.
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ajmurmann ◴[23 Jun 25 15:45 UTC] No.44356937[source]▶
Yes! Every zoning and housing regulation commission should evaluate every proposal by the question if it enables our cities to be as quirky and wonderful as Japanese cities. If not, it's out!
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jgon ◴[23 Jun 25 16:52 UTC] No.44357664[source]▶
I generally agree with the sentiment behind this, but like many other things, underneath the zoning issues what it actually actually goes back to is cultural issues. For a large number of other countries you could loosen zoning up and ultimately someone would start operating an abattoir next to an elementary school and it would make the 5 o'clock news and then the city council would throw a bunch of new regulations in and the whole thing would be over.

I hate to even sound like this, I hate the cynicism in my comment, and maybe the answer is to actually just do it and not declare premature defeat, but having watched how other initiatives in my own local area have gone I can't help but feel that we don't have the real secret weapon that works for places like Japan, and makes stuff like Star Trek work outside of all the fancy tech, and that's sufficiently advanced culture to not immediately race this all to the bottom.

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ajmurmann ◴[23 Jun 25 19:27 UTC] No.44359171[source]▶
Nuisance-based zoning exists as a solution to this. E.g. you can operate a flower shop but not a noisy arcade. Yet somehow this concept doesn't seem to be able to get a hold.
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1. jgon ◴[23 Jun 25 20:20 UTC] No.44359658[source]▶
It doesn't get a hold, because, again, culturally it is very hard for it to take hold. Just like your other response that says "well we should just start enforcing existing laws", the problem is that by the time you get into defining a nuisance in the face of some profit-oriented rules lawyer, or getting bylaw enforcement some breathing room in their workload from the 10000x other calls they have regarding bylaw infractions, you're downstream of the underlying cause and just trying to bandaid things up as best you can. You don't need nuisance based bylaws if people are starting out from a mindset of not wanting to be a nuisance to their neighbors, and Japan probably has bylaw enforcement and its probably really great, but it doesn't just get enforced by magic it gets enforced because they likely have a much smaller workload than exists for bylaw enforcement in my area, and that smaller workload is serviced by a number of people that is probably more sustainable as people generally don't constantly try to oppose any sort of taxes collected and so the department has sufficient funding that isn't at risk of being continually cut every civic election cycle.

On and on up the chain I could go, turning this comment into a wall of text as we work our way up the cause and effect ladder until we ultimately arrive at the things a society values, aka its culture. Its ultimately all downstream of a society and culture that either is constantly looking for a loophole to grab whatever profit there is in a desperate race to the bottom, winner-takes-all struggle, or a society that prizes something different.