Category: Society

My brother recommended me Richard Florida’s blog a while ago. It happened that while I was in Hamburg last week, Richard Florida was also there and he was talking in the same conference as Danny. My brother bought one of his books after the conference, Who’s your city. I’ll talk more about this interesting book in other posts, but right now I just wanted to featured this paragraph about Japan’s overpopulation.

Greater Tokyo, home to more than 55 million people and responsible for nearly 2.5 trillion in economic output, is the world’s biggest mega, with world-class strengths in finance, design, and high technology. The second Japanese mega-region, stretching for Osaka to Nagasaki, is home to 36 million people who generate 1.4 trillion in output. Its niche specialties include high-tech innovation and manufacturing- from automobiles to cutting-edge electronics. Fuku-kyushu houses 18 million people and produces 430 billion in LRP, while Greater Sapporo is home to more than 4 million people producing 200 billion in LRP. The boundaries of Japan’s great mega-regions are already blurring. Much of Japan may be well on its way to becoming the world’s first integrated super-mega-region- a single, gargantuan, and geographically overlapping economic entity of more than 100 million people producing 4.5 trillion in LRP.

In this map the super-mega-region structure can be appreciated, almost all Japan is connected.

Map from Richard Florida’s book, extracted from his website.

Read more:

• Tokyo compared with Madrid and Barcelona

I was walking with Danny the other day and we found this interesting sign:

It says that you shouldn’t leave your dog’s shit on the street. Generally Japanese people follow the rules (That’s good for some things, but not so good for other things), in this case is good because it’s very difficult to bump in to a dog shit while you walk. In Spain, where I come from the streets look like mined areas, and you have to walk always looking down if you don’t want to have an nasty accident.

Other posts about shit:

• Learn how to pee and poo with Shimajiro
• The shit building
• Pick up your dog’s shit 2
• The shit vending machine

A study made by Pitzer concludes that Sweden, Vietnam, Denmark, Norway and Japan are the least religious countries in the world. The United States is one of the countries at the end of the list.

It’s interesting that the US is the country with less percentage of atheists and Vietnam is the one with more percentage of atheists. The second country with the highest atheism level (purple bars) is Japan.

In Japan there are many religions, but the main ones are Shintoism and Buddhism. But I know very few Japanese who declare themselves “Buddhist” or “Shintoist”. Most of the people just “believes” and mixes religions, they would marry shinto style and do a funeral following the buddhist tradition. It’s all mixed, and more than believing in a religion, I would say that people is superstitious. Furthermore, Buddhism doesn’t have the concept of Creator God and Shinto is a polytheistic religions. For Japanese people is difficult to think about a God in the western sense.

This chart below shows countries based on their acceptance of the Theory of evolution. It’s interesting that there are some coincidences with the religion chart, but some countries just change the position a lot, for example Spain goes to the top 10 in this chart but the US stays at the bottom.