The Most Popular Car Park in Japan

Give me a minute to get to the point.

A few days ago, while researching limb ratio of gibbons, I came across an interesting website.

As I’m sure you all know, the maps of the world that we are used to seeing are created using the Mercator Projection. This gives us nice, rectangular maps that can be folded neatly and used for origami in our spare time. Unfortunately it also gives a distorted view of the relative size of various places.

For example, the map here uses the Mercator projection to show the world from 82^o North to 82^o South. Just looking at the map tells you that Greenland is bigger than Australia and that Antarctica makes up about half the world’s landmass. Of course this is not true, but it looks that way.

So the website that I stumbled across allows you to drag countries from one place in the world to another. (For all of you Belgies this means you can drag The Netherlands to South America, but unfortunately it’s only on the website). This allows you to make interesting comparisons. For example, you can take Greenland and drop it straight onto Australia and see it like this;

It’s hours of fun and I’ll leave you to have your own fun comparing Libya and Liberia or whatever takes your fancy. For me, this led to all sorts of comparisons between Japan, Australia and various other parts of the world. Japan is known to be a relatively small country and, being about 12 times the size of Belgium, it’s probably a fair assessment. On the other hand, it’s quite a long country. Japan takes up a little more space than Tasmania and Victoria combined. It’s a little bigger than Germany. At the same time, the main islands alone would reach from Madrid to Berlin, which is a long way to go for sauerkraut and sausages. If you include the chain of islands to the south (Okinawa), you could go all the way from Madrid to Helsinki.

Although why you’d want to leave all that sangria and tapas for reindeer jerky and snow is anybody’s guess.

By now you are starting to wonder what this has to do with the most popular carpark in Japan and the answer is “not much”. It does highlight though that Japan is a very compact place. Much of the 377,000 km² that it occupies is either mountainous or underwater, leaving 127 million people to squeeze into the remaining land.

Within greater Tokyo, the squeeze begins to get tight. Greater Tokyo (including commuter areas) is about the size of Sydney (a little less than half the size of Belgium) but houses nearly 40 million people. Imagine for example that everybody in Belgium AND everybody in Australia all moved to Flanders. Apart from livening the place up, it would also give you an idea of the density of Tokyo.

By way of an aside, I’ll note that I have, until now, refrained from making jokes about the density of Belgians.

Within Tokyo prefecture the squeeze if even greater. Imagine 13 million people living in Adelaide. Apart from killing each other out of boredom, they would give you a fairly good idea of what it’s like in Tokyo. It goes a long way to explaining why Japanese people keep their weight down. It’s all about being able to fit on the train.

Finally, imagine everyone in Belgium wearing a tutu. This is not relevant to my little story, just fun to do.

Funnily enough, it’s not so bad. The population density in Japan that is, not the Belgians wearing tutus. So many people in one place means that you can find just about any damn thing you want. If you are in the market for a green fedora hat that costs between $70 and $90, there is certain to be a shop in Tokyo catering to your very specific desire.

It also means that there is entertainment to be had at just about anytime day or night.

It also means that land is at a premium and putting a car on a piece of land is not something you’ll be allowed to do for free. When you buy or rent a property, carparking is not usually included. There will often be the option of a car park, but it will be at an extra cost. Where I live, the cost of a car park is between 30,000 and 60,000 yen per month. (€250 - €500 or AUD350 to AUD700).

If you buy a car, you need to show evidence of having a car park in order to register it.

All of this leads me to the most popular car park in Japan. Every time I pass it, it’s completely full. The reason for this is that it has space for only one car. It has all the signage, an automated ticket machine and everything that would make it a regular car park, but only one parking space.

So I went there yesterday to take some pictures of it and the space was free! I pass it nearly every day and this is the first time ever. If you’re quick, you might be able to get in.

 And one last thing. That interesting website is at http://thetruesize.com/