taipei + tokyo notes

some thoughts from recent visits

urban planning

• at first glance the two cities look kind of similar (in terms of street width, mixed zoning everywhere, public transit, shrines, convenience stores, trash policy, etc) but taking a closer look it’s clear there are major design differences

• this is most obvious when looking at parks. having walked through every large green area on the map, i can safely say that central taipei only has 1 very good park (the botanical garden) while central tokyo has at least 5 (shiba, hibiya, meiji jingu, shinjuku, yoyogi, but also many others)

  • i am aware that tokyo is much larger than taipei overall. to control for this, “central” here refers to a 7km x 7km square at the core of each city

  • this comes in part from tokyo having more opportunities to explicitly reset and make space for public goods (due to earthquakes, firebombing, etc)

  • there are also some cultural disagreements over what the purpose of a park should be. taipei design seems more utilitarian in general; whatever parks do exist are often dominated by exercise equipment as opposed to trees and water

• the average building in taipei is clearly much older than in tokyo, eg. walls just look dirtier. at first i assumed this was also due to tokyo getting firebombed, but that doesn’t make sense as taipei’s expansion was mostly post-ww2

  • i think the real reason for this is tax codes! specifically japan has some tax incentives where you can let your property value depreciate heavily and count this as an income deduction. land remains valuable while properties don’t, which incentivizes landowners to demolish and reconstruct buildings every few decades. we also need this in sf

  • taipei does not do this, which also contributes to a few other things (more horizontal sprawl instead of vertical growth, motorbikes and scooters everywhere, etc). of course there are lots of other reasons for differences in sprawl as well, eg. being designed before vs after automobiles

finding your way

• high population density means a lot of information heuristics break down. in sf if you’re trying to decide where to eat you can reasonably use the heuristic i will look at every restaurant in the next few blocks and then pick the best one. if you use this heuristic in a dense asian city you will never get around to eating anything even if you limit exploration to a small neighborhood

  • i think this is how consumption will feel when agi really hits. we’re already starting to see it with code - software used to be scarce enough that when you were looking for a solution to a problem (eg. “download youtube video and extract audio”, “note-taking + journaling system”) you could feasibly go through all the available tools and use the best one, whereas nowadays the barrier to writing new tools is decreasing so rapidly that soon it will not be feasible to exhaustively identify the “best” software for any task (and maybe you just create your own if you feel like it). now imagine the same abundance in every other domain (entertainment, fashion, etc). we will need a lot of new heuristics to make sense of the world and i don’t think anyone knows what they are yet (the default answer is probably “feeds filtered by your personal agent” but we can do much better?)

• another fun case of heuristics breaking down was teamlab borderless (which is less well-known than teamlab planets but more interactive and coherent). it’s an art museum where all the art is constantly evolving and travelling between rooms, so have i seen this before is no longer a reliable indicator of whether you’ve visited a room and have i been to this room already is no longer a reliable indicator of whether you’ve experienced the art yet. as a result you’re incentivized to just walk back and forth a lot in what is essentially a poorly lit maze, which i found very fun

for example, these guys (an animation projected onto a wall) march from room to room and mutate slowly over the course of an hour or so

fashion

• people in both cities are so fashionable that i started experiencing dysmorphia for the first time in my life

• why is the fashion so much better than in the usa? a few hypotheses

  • good clothes are cheaper (even accounting for purchasing power differences)

  • higher social cost to looking sloppy, eg. it’s perceived as rude

  • my friend claire has a theory that east asia has a more superficial understanding of beauty. for example we went to many art exhibits featuring flowers, and they were not particularly thoughtful but they were very popular regardless

other

• i realized (or rediscovered, more accurately) i’m a weird traveller - for instance, my 5 favorite things from taipei were the mosque, the botanical garden, a graffiti alley, renting a good piano for $4/hr, and watching some street performers. none of these are things any of my friends or language models recommended; i found them by staring at maps and walking a lot

• on the topic of street performers, i really enjoyed watching this kid

  

  • his performance was great but talking to the kid afterwards made me pretty sad. i think one day he’s going to mess up and crack his head open. even if he executes this fall perfectly, the pole is not attached to the ground or anything; it’s being held in place by 4 random passerby with ropes and the whole thing wobbles when any of them moves. each show involves several of these falls + other stunts and optimistically 50 people tip him 100 NTD each time so he’s making 5000 NTD = 150 USD and splitting that with a show partner? there are some dubious economics here. like come on i love your work and it’s breathtaking to see live with music but i hope you’re taking care of yourself :(

• visited the your name staircase again. i already went in 2023 so this time i was not really there for the staircase and was instead there mostly to see if anyone else would be present. kind of incredible that shinkai made an ordinary location so meaningful that ten years later people are still going out of their way to see it in the middle of a snowstorm. i think that should be one of my life goals