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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one.

It has little to do with "island nation", most nations use mixed zoning, it's certainly the standard in europe (and recent developments are gravitating towards more mixed zoning e.g. Amsterdam's eastern docklands). It could have to do with being an old nation, but even then that's not actually true, the US existed for a while before cars happened.

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In the US, we invented zoning, mostly to exclude black people from white neighborhoods. And now we use it to prop up property values and continue to keep poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods.

Now I'm speculating, but I wonder if Japan, being mostly Japanese people, didn't have such a large group to exclude from certain neighborhoods? So they didn't entrench the institution of local control and exclusionary zoning?

Japan traditionally had a caste system where certain people were restricted to certain neighbourhoods. There was a lot of official effort to break that up after the war, but you can still tell which neighbourhoods are which.

google burakumin

The public schools I taught at in Japan kept (private) lists of which kids came from burakumin families.

It's my understanding that Japan's housing regulations are mostly driven by a long history of all their buildings falling over in an earthquake every couple of decades.

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