Welcome to the Urbanist Agenda, the podcast that

loves Shin Kansan. I'm joined today by Greg from the YouTube channel Life Where I'm From. Hi, welcome to the podcast. Hello, thanks for having me. Thank you very much. So we've been talking a bunch lately on the Nebula Slack because I am going to Japan in a few weeks in May. And of course, when I think of Japan, one of the things I think about is your channel because, well, maybe you could explain a little bit about your channel. I've watched it several times. I love it, but I don't know if everybody listening has watched it before. Thank you. Yeah.

The channel is basically me trying to explain Japanese culture to people from North America because I'm from Canada, like yourself.

So that's the lens I take it from. Yes, exactly. Fellow Canadian here. Yeah.

And sometimes I dip into urban type discussions, talking about the train systems, or talking about housing, just because I was here and I want to know, why is this done differently in Japan versus Canada? Why can I afford rent over here? Why don't I need to own a car? Why do I enjoy biking again? All these types of things. So I'm

trying to explain it. Well, in many ways, like our channels are quite similar in that regard, right? Like we're contrasting our home country of Canada to the place where we've lived. Right. You took off to the Netherlands? Yes. Yeah. And I've been to Japan many times before, as I mentioned to you, I think I've probably been a dozen times, 15 times, something like that. But I have never been to Japan as a tourist. I've only ever been for business travel. And so it's a very, very different situation. So I've experienced Japan and I've been to many of the places that a tourist wouldn't go. In fact, I've never been to a place that a tourist would go. I don't think of the train station. So I've experienced kind of the real Japan, but always being led around by a sales rep, right? Somebody who's a local. So it's a very strange situation. But I have experienced Japan and I'm really excited to go there and make some videos about it. But here in this conversation, I just want to talk broad strokes about some of the big differences you've seen with respect to urban planning and mobility between Canada and Japan. So that's really it. And I think there's way more that we could talk about that we could fit into like a 45 minute hour long podcast anyway. So why don't we just get started with trains? Let's just start really quickly with trains. I know Canada doesn't have a lot of them, so this should hopefully be a quick conversation. But talk to me about

trains. Sure. Well, I mean, actually coming from Vancouver, we have the Skytrain, which is pretty well known, I think. And when you're on the Skytrain route, it's pretty damn good, actually. I really enjoyed the Skytrain. The problem is that there's just not enough of them everywhere. So as they built the network, it's been getting better. But in Tokyo, the network is just incredible. Anywhere you want to go, there's basically a train going there. And if you have to walk, I mean, you don't usually walk more than 50 minutes away from the station because then there's another station, right? Right. So you're always within 50 minutes of a hub and in the more central areas, it could be five or 10 minutes. And if you're really far out in areas, like just have to be somewhere kind of place, you can take your bicycle there and park it at the station. So you don't need to own a car in Japan. It's a luxury, not a necessity. So that's something I've really enjoyed, both from the cost side of things and just from the ease side of things. I don't have to worry about a vehicle. I can just take the train.