Tokyo Neighbourhood Tour: Shin-Koiwa Station

hello world today i'm going to do a rough uh kind of video a walk around just a normal tokyo neighborhood because someone asked me on patreon what does like the neighborhood look like what will you find schools shops that kind of stuff so i'm just going to walk around and point out things as i see it it's going to be really rough and then what i would like you guys to do is in the comments ask me to further talk about certain things or say like oh that stuff was born but this stuff was interesting and then i'll make a real video on the main channel talking about what you guys want to know about um so anyways i'm right now i'm in the middle of a kind of greenway and we're close to a station called shin koiwa i think it's a fairly major station around here and everything in tokyo i find it's centered around the train stations so if you're looking to rent a place or buy a place they will say we're like 10 minutes away from this station or 15 minutes away from this station so i'm probably about i don't know a five minute walk away from shin koiwa but the problem is we have our bikes and we can't just leave our bikes here you actually have to have bike parking so we're gonna go find some bike parking park our bikes and then walk around so we're just moving the bike up the parking garage and we're going to the third floor so if you hold your brakes this helps you bring it up it's kind of like electronic you can see there's tons of bike parking and it's because it's right next to a station that's why there's so much bike parking so you're pretty much free to park your bike anywhere in this parking lot and you'll see most bikes they just have what's called a wheel lock like this and that's the only thing i mean they have some security guards downstairs but i don't think anybody really steals these bikes so this bike parking is 100 yen which is about one us dollar so it's not free but it's not crazy expensive either and look cherry blossoms so i'm just walking to shinkoyawa station and uh there's a bike parking lot right behind me and obviously this is a very commercial district so you can probably find anything you want over here that's convenience store this is a grocery store over on this side we got restaurants but right in the mix of it you'll see here is we have an apartment building our monsoon and at the bottom there's a restaurant so it's mixed use you can use it for residential you can use it for commercial purposes but as you notice there's like no on-street parking it'd be you can load stuff in and out but it's illegal to have any parking on the street so what you do is they have parking like over here both for bikes and for cars so this is an example of a drugstore so you'd find like tissue papers soap detergents toothpaste all that kind of stuff so when my wife and i go shopping for groceries at a grocery store we don't pick up these types of things at a grocery store we actually pick them up at a drug store whereas whereas at a grocery store we pick up food only okay this is shin koiwa station and that's a pachinko and slot machines pachinko is like this kind of gambling game although technically it's not gambling but it's kind of gambling really loud in there and then this is the station itself so this one looks like it has a walk through so you can walk right from one side to the other right under the trains and then in the middle of it is where you can actually enter and get on the tracks okay so this is the jr line and that's where you'd enter to catch the train and as you can see there's lots of people doing that and this is around i don't know 11 o'clock in the day but in the mornings it'd probably pretty crazy busy okay so this is show 10 guy right right you're so nervous no i mean they don't even they ask you they just ask you what you're doing so this is the other side of the station shinkoewa so over there is the koba which is like a little police station you can actually see the police guy right over there and then there's bathrooms over here there's always free public bathrooms around and you can see the trains coming and it's a pretty big commercial area so i'm just going to do a big sweep of it and we're going to go into the show 10 guy over there can you comfortably do this like by yourself you'll just chill [Music] i'll just talk to you and explain to you right so this is a show 10 guy and it's pretty much a covered mall but in a covered outdoor mall and you have shops that sell anything so we have over here bags and whatnot clothing eyeglasses shoes they'll probably have restaurants cafes convenience stores yeah suits so i think a big showtime guy like this is only in places that have a big enough population you won't find this by a small train station right so here you're not actually allowed to ride your bike you can take your bike in you'll see bikes but you have to walk your bike through this area i'd say this showtime guy is quite vibrant it doesn't look to be like a lot of clothes shops seems to be a lot of people but when i've gone to other stations around tokyo some of them are kind of like sad because it used to be i think where everyone shop like this was the big mall but nowadays you have like more north american style malls and those seem to be more popular than the show 10 guys uh but this one seems to be a lot of people that seem to be doing well so that store over there it just sells tofu that's it so over here shotengai but if i go to the right hand side you'll see what it looks like just a regular neighborhood okay so this is a monthly parking you would think that this is parking for the showtime guy but this is actually monthly parking that you pay so what was the price for this so it's like 2 700 yen are like maybe 27 us dollars yeah here we go here's the pricing oh but for if you're a student it's even cheaper yeah so yeah this could be like exactly where you park your bike right over here every day before you go to the station and go off to school or go to work um yeah this is just one block away from the show 10 guy and as you can see it's quite residential area nothing special but really small streets and you can actually drive a car through here i think it's really narrow you wouldn't think so but i wouldn't be surprised if you saw a car drive through here so my wife was saying even in a residential area you could have your own restaurant and actually i think right over here on the right hand side this is a restaurant as you can see here this is going to be a little grocery store actually at the bottom of a three-story apartment building our mansion so this is just a path between homes there should be a place a little park or a place to sit soon i bet you it's uh so this is one of my favorite things about tokyo is that you have these little green ways and people can have like little gardens in their whatever front yard or backyard these little tiny yards they have although i'm pretty sure what we're walking on right now is public space so there's kind of like gorilla gardening okay so here this is probably like a um daycare center so i'm not going to show any kids here but um yeah oh kindergarten technically but yeah like for example in this house like over here that's up to a point it's got to be you know owned by the person but i don't know about this place right here i don't know if that's a city or if that's owned by the person but i'm pretty sure all these plants like any of these plants you see along this side here they're probably officially maintained by the city but people can just put their own plants sometimes and it's kind of like a mix is what i notice don't you think i kind of expected to find a park by now i'm sure there is one i may have to look at my map and find what kind of place do you think this is athlete this is an athlete center but there's like no one here an athlete hotel i don't know so pretty much in every neighborhood you're gonna find things like this in tokyo this is a construction site and so they completely block it off with panels while they're doing their construction and when cars are leaving they'll wash them off and usually at the corners they'll have like a see-through panels where you can see what's happening so for like the curious onlookers i know here we go here's the panel so let's check out what's going on this is funny so they have a see-through panel but then it's blocked so you can't see but they'll tell you what they're building so what are we building here community center oh so they're building a community center there that's why i was marked green on the map so my go-to place in japan to kind of eat stuff or hang out without a park and since there's lots of kids around i'll just turn off the camera so in the park there's always a public bathroom that you can use and i see a lot of people who are say blue-collar workers like delivery drivers construction workers um because there's parks all throughout tokyo so it's always a good place to use the washroom that's free to use and they're generally fairly clean they're not the nicest washrooms but they're generally clean and then there's also water fountains in every single place so i'll go through the water fountain and show you so the water falcon's cool huh so this is the water fountain and they have them at every single park so this is a wallet that's just left here and maybe someone dropped it and maybe someone's just leaving it here i don't know so i don't know if you should get to the police officer or just leave it over here but maybe this is a test i don't know but it's literally just a wallet in a neighborhood but the security camera is watching us well there's a name in there so we're going to try to call it and see if we can find out who's it is but then i won't show you the name so how much money was in there like you say like uh maybe ichiman okay so there's more than a hundred dollars in this wallet so we're gonna and there's credit cards and all personal identification so we're just gonna bring it to a local police box and return it but if you we have to go back this way probably then so we're gonna have to go back to the show 10 guy so at first i thought there was just like a hundred dollars in there but there was definitely at least a thousand dollars in there and maybe even a couple thousand it looked like the guy just went to the bank and pulled out a whole bunch of money because i had one of these envelopes from the atm and so we just took it to the local police station and our police box called koban and uh just give a few little details about where you found it and your phone number and if you want to claim a percentage of the money because i think you could legally claim 20 um but we declined that we don't need the 20 of the guys money and we knew was a pretty a senior person i think because of the type of card that was in the wallet so i think he was over 75 years old um but it sounds like the police said they were gonna they were going to be able to find them quite quickly so maybe he had called in already about it missing um but yeah that's kind of super random to find a wallet on the street like i kind of was looking around thinking might be some type of social experiment they're seeing what we're gonna do with the wallet but it's not the first time my family's found money because my wife and daughter found just ichimaen which is 100 bill on the street and they had returned it also to the police station except at that time the police officer kind of seemed a little bit upset about it because like mendoci like it's the pain in the butt to have to take care of the missing money because by reporting the money then either they could claim i think 20 right away or they could um wait three months and then they'll get the whole amount and so you have to fill out all those paperwork so it took a bit of time to do all that stuff but in the end of course no one claimed the 100 bill lying on the street and we got 100 so this feels like a pretty major road and it's just right alongside the shotengai which is the covered shopping district and as you can see we have the sidewalks so it's not on pedestrian friendly but it's not as nice as the showtime guy for just walking around and i'll see a lot more traffic more noisy so it's kind of nice that the area has a showtime guy for shopping but there's obviously a lot of commercial buildings over here so you'll see this all the time they're doing um like a renovation and so they'll have scaffolding always always scaffolding it's probably the law and uh they're maybe just painting or power washing the place maybe doing something deeper i don't know but that's interesting for me because in canada i think scaffolding is kind of expensive so i used to actually paint houses and we'd hardly ever ever use scaffolding but in japan it's like the norm for anything you do on a house you always use scaffolding so over here just in like the garage really it's a fruit stand and then above it is the house so i'll just turn the camera once we get past here and show you so it really is just like a regular house and at the bottom selling fruits out of garage totally legal doable and oh yeah over there that's bike parking and so now you'll see you got these uh like what is it three-story marshall or four-story marshall apartment building and then your little single houses wooden apartment buildings which are called apopto like a really big mix because we're close to the station so it's a little bit denser and over here is a little pub and above is probably where the owners live and then of course what is ubiquitous in japan are these hambaiki which are vending machines we don't actually know how it works but you know people just put machines on their private property and either renting it out or maybe they get a cut of the sales maybe we can call hachiyo and ask them how much money do you make so my wife thinks some people own the vending machine and they get a cut of the profits of course or some people just rent out the space okay so what does you know over here what is this oh it's just like ah quilting so this place over here they're just doing quilting and again it's just above as residential and over here body functioning studio so it's probably kind of some type of physiotherapy i believe yeah acupuncture maybe and then here's this is like um okay so you have these barriers right so that means that they don't want cars to go through um but motorbikes probably go through even if they're not allowed supposed to bikes obviously and at the very end you'll see a school there but we're walking this way so i feel like when you're walking in a neighborhood like this this to me could be almost anywhere in tokyo and in some ways almost anywhere in japan like it's a very i guess this is probably kind of like the ugly streets that maybe people think about and if you live here i'm sorry don't mean to call your place ugly but you know there's not a lot of um much of anything there's no like lawns and stuff there's no big yards but you know people do stuff so like over here they do have some hedges that they plant and they have a little garden over here and whatnot but i mean it's a fairly bland street but the nice thing is that there's no traffic so we're walking in the middle of the road there's in fact no sidewalks and if cars come we'll go to the side but um cars also the speed limit is 30 kilometers an hour which is like 20 miles per hour i think roughly and they won't run you over like it'd be their fault if they run you over if you're walking in the middle of the road as a pedestrian it'd be the fault of the car driver and over here this is a parking lot so one of the things about uh the residential areas is parking is not required so people are renting this for uh 40 minutes is 200 yen during the day time yeah and then what you see over here is a bunch like four new houses so this could have been either two old houses that they made into four new houses or it could be one big old house that they made into four different houses and that's kind of why people can afford property still even in tokyo is because they just split the land to smaller and smaller pieces so everyone can afford their little piece but if you look there's like hardly any space like if i walked up to that wall it's not even like three feet maybe it's three feet exactly space between the houses and i'll just keep on walking you see each house just has like three feet of space but you can afford to have your own single detached home in this way all right so this is co-op deli and we use one as well and they're a food delivery service so they're delivering groceries basically and they're generally they're not the cheapest option but they're usually have fresh food local food uh sustainable practices that type of thing so this is a community notification board uh can anyone post on here i don't think i don't know if anyone can post on here but i kind of feel like you can though if you apply you could get your notice up in here but you'll see stuff just for your own little neighborhood notices so you'll see this all over japan and this is just blocking off the roads because they're doing construction but pedestrians can walk by over here what you see is another parking lot but this one is not short-term rental like by the day this is actually a term rental so you rent it by the month and maybe this probably cost let's say like 130 150 dollars because places don't have parking necessarily so if you want a car you rent a little lot like this and maybe it's a two minute walk from your house or a five minute walk from your house but there's like little parking lots like that all over the place around tokyo but of course if you have one of these newer houses almost all the newer houses they have at least one parking spot oh okay here we go so this building this is the volunteer fire course as you can read and i guess this is probably in case of like a natural disaster or something or a big fire emergency so the regular fire department probably doesn't use this building i'm assuming but like i bet you if there's like a big earthquake or a big fire pops out then the volunteer course will come here and work stuff out you know this is like a disaster emergency disaster area isn't it yeah yeah so can you explain it a bit yes when something happens like like earthquakes are like you know fire and stuff like that and then just come over come just to evacuate here come here okay so i'll say that okay i was just walking on the main road and then i saw this little path and there's tons of these little paths everywhere throughout tokyo and oh i don't know what kind of place this is but they haven't blocked off a bit but you walk through between the houses and you can kind of cut through okay so over here these are just storage units and i guess they can be placed randomly anywhere where there's some free space oh okay so you'll find this everywhere around tokyo these are politicians and i like i mean no matter what time of year there's always some posters for politicians isn't there this is interesting this is like what did this used to be this lot because there's a little like ginger there a little shrine isn't it so this is probably owned by people don't you think how's that look like ones that are rentals kind of look different but you can see that they have um there's cars underneath this so i don't know if we can see it over here but yeah if you go like look really into the crack there's cars underneath and so really compact use of space yeah yeah this is the place i was trying to get to so this is one of the nicest like river parks that i know of in tokyo edogal has a lot of these river parks but this is like a really big one and you can see you can walk in the middle and then on the left side and right side you can drive along but the left and right hand side they don't drive really fast so it's also a nice biking path so i would actually really like to live right next to a place like this i find it so nice so just right here in the middle of the neighborhood it's a church and then let's go this way okay okay so this is what i consider kind of like a a calmer area so really not a lot of cars but because of this park it's really beautiful so i wonder what the land values are but interestingly if we just pan over this way you'll see it's kind of like light industrial so i don't know what they're doing but some type of servicing to machines so in canada we would never find something like that in like a residential neighborhood but really you can have anything here we just saw a church there's like little restaurants any kind of business you want you can have hey it's editor greg here um i just wanted to put up this pdf from the government about the land use zones there are 12 zones and right now i'm probably in category one or maybe even category two so you can read the descriptions and see how by default they allow residential buildings and small shops and offices elementary slash junior high um what makes me think it's category two is because there's a there's like some really light industrial stuff but yeah in the description i'll link to this land use zone pdf so you can look at it closer yeah for example this place over here is just a dry cleaners at the bottom floor of the house oh that's kind of actually weird though that's a rental car maybe they're not from the neighborhood but people don't usually drive that fast on these roads i find yeah oh okay this is maybe okay this is what i want to show so over here something i kind of want to show is that you see those houses on either side the left and the right and i bet you that the person at the very back doesn't actually own the whole driveway it's probably owned with the other houses so there's one two three four houses they probably each equally own a quarter of this driveway and have to maintain it and pay for it but it's also so like if you sell it you can't just do anything you want with this road so everybody owns it and they keep it as a little driveway here yeah this is see this is the speed cars usually drive at around here like pretty calm oh so i didn't even realize we were in edogawa before but now we just walked into katushika i mean so this is we're almost close to peak cherry blossom maybe we're a few days away so there seems to be a lot of people chilling around enjoying the nature but as you can see it's also not that busy ah okay yeah so over here they're actually designed like this with the rocks so you can just come walk across so kids like to play on these rocks and me okay so here we have we're in edogawa now so here's a kind of waste disposal area it's probably managed by maybe five households ten households something like that and everyone takes turns keeping it clean and neat and then you can see all the different days for different stuff you have to do i think the balloon that's basically to keep away the crows right yeah yeah i was going to stop here but it's kind of noisy so i just go a little bit further well this is a very common sight so it's a little tiny shinto shrine but behind it is uh and probably you know it probably existed here and it probably took up more space but then they went to build something and so they still left the shrine right there you'll find little shrines everywhere around tokyo around japan and then just behind it over here you'll see in the middle of this residential area you'll see greenhouses and around at least edogawa ward and stuff you'll there's like a lot of little pockets of these greenhouses where they do you know pretty small scale farming but yeah of course here is lots of people taking pictures of cherry blossoms because it's gorgeous what no oh wait okay so this side is kachoshikaku and then this side is so two different cities one city another city do you want to walk so again over here in this park there's just a little bathroom to use so very convenient so the thing about today is some seasons you never get a day like this actually this is pretty much peak cherry blossom and the weather is fantastic it's about 20 degrees celsius i don't know what it is fahrenheit google it and i mean just look at this it's just gorgeous because what happens some years is it gets really cold and really windy and it blows away all the stuff and so you never get to see a full in bloom cherry blossom season but we just lucked out today over there if you see him that's a local delivery courier biking around so they have a lot of those i know here's a local postman in his car but yeah oh he stops so we can go by and see it yeah so over here in green this is a local courier so they go in cars and big trucks but they also have really local stuff on bikes and so he's just dropping off oh this is kind of interesting actually you're just so over here these are all just private gardens of people along the street so these people really like having gardens it's just beautiful i don't know they're like keeping up with the joneses they're all trying to have the nicest garden that seems like because these are all individual households but they all have really nice potted plants and because this is probably a private road i'm going back now but here let's take a look bonsai trees i mean this must be you know what i think this person must run a bonsai business they have to i mean if this person is not running a bone-side business they just love bonsai trees it's crazy so this greenway is essentially about 10-15 minutes away from the uh shin koiwa station so it's not too far yeah so this for example is someone who has a little bit more money i would say because they have their own little garden and you can tell the house takes up more space than the usual houses around here so i would say this house is probably worth like five six hundred thousand dollars so you can see all along on the left again there's just parking monthly parking for all the people whereas over here these are just like this is probably a privately owned street i bet you for all these houses and this is probably all built around the same time i bet you by the look of it what kind of place is this do you think okay so this kind of looks like a care home to us but we'll go to the front and see just no oh no it's a daycare nursery what is care home for kids wow this is a really pretty new nice so this is a daycare wow is this private or public so this is a brand it looks like brand new private uh hui quinn which is a daycare or nursery looks really nice wow okay so this is what i was talking about like just at the corner of the street you'll see a little jinja a little shrine and it could be just owned and maintained by the house because like let's see if you can look behind here it's a this it looks ojizo so it looks like it might be like the you know shrine grounds but i think someone actually lives in there and this is their own personal kind of shrine that is accessible to the public but i could be wrong here's another view of the place and some of the other locations we saw they'd probably fit about like eight houses in the space that there's this one house so if you really want to buy a lot of land you can and build your single house and have a lot of green space or you can have eight houses so it doesn't matter whatever you want actually right beside it is a big house that's more modern um not as i don't know traditional and it could be actually the same owners that own both properties i wouldn't be surprised just down the road you can see here's like a apartment building and in the same type of space they probably have like 12 units or something like that so you can have one house or 12 houses okay so we're behind a school now right yeah so right over here we're on the back side of the school so we're probably looking at the kitchen right now and all the schools in japan essentially they provide school lunch called kyushoku i actually made a video about it and um yeah schools are generally within a 10 to 15 minute walking distance of places in tokyo if in a rural area it might be different but in tokyo yeah almost all the sorry i shouldn't say schools i should say elementary schools are almost always within a 10 to 15 minute walk and maybe middle schools they have a bigger catchment area so maybe it could be 10 to 20 minute walk but that's kind of what the norm is when you get to high school it's a whole different ball game because people can travel like on the train or up to like an hour away just to get to a good high school in tokyo so it's a lot different than the elementary middle schools oh so because it's a school what they have right there that is stationery store so very convenient for all the school kids and over here this is probably a um these are probably like one room apartment buildings probably for like single people single young people i bet you in this building here they just sell rice so you have those big machines and they polish the rice in them and package them up so yeah just a little rice shop right in the middle of nowhere so my wife was saying she used to buy rice from a rice shop just like that as well as have by miso over here is a little barber shop so just at the bottom of someone's house they have a beauty salon so over here is a clinic just in the middle of residential neighborhood so you just saw the lady ride by that's very typical to have one kid in the front one kid in the back what seemed a little bit rare to me is most parents don't put helmets on their kids i see it a little bit more nowadays i find but there's so still so many kids who are on bikes that don't wear helmets so this used to be a public bath but uh looks like it's closed but beside it is a daycare and you can notice because they have these little um what is it trolleys no what is it called buggies they have little buggies and the kids will either sit down or stand up in these buggies and they'll take them to the parks and then above it is a manchester apartment building okay so what i've noticed now is we're getting buildings that are a lot taller actually isn't that a love hotel probably yeah that's a love hotel but um i think we're we're not in the residential area anymore we're in a slightly commercial area so you can have buildings that are bigger than usual that's why if you look up you can have something that's like 10 stories high now oh right you can see that's a short-term stay love hotel this is a little convenience store and generally all around tokyo you'll find these little convenience stores so we're almost back at shinkoewa station and um i think commercial areas like this in tokyo each city has maybe i guess depends what city you're in but they might have like four or five of these kinds of areas per city right no maybe less yeah these are the big commercial areas in the city maybe each city will have like three four or five of these in tokyo and if it's a bigger city maybe they might have like it's all like this kind of like if you go to shibuya or shinjuku like it gets really crazy um but as you saw you just walk a little bit and you're in a really calm residential neighborhood [Music] you can buy something there yeah so this is the third floor of a biking garage i mean there must be some car park garages around here but by far there's a lot more parking for bikes than there would be for cars so i think everyone from around the neighborhood if they're gonna bike to this station they park their bikes here then take the train and off they go and i'll show you the train line and of course down below you can see that there's buses so they have buses that feed into the train line this is the north side of the shinkoyawa station so it's not as commercially developed it's more like old school i would say so you can kind of call this like a showtime guy like a shopping street so you can see there's lots of pedestrians cars are allowed to come through here but they'd be coming through really slow and you have pretty much anything you want around here really from real estate to restaurants to cafes to convenience stores physiotherapy banks uh anything you want really and like i said see the cars going really slow so you don't have to really worry about that too much grocery market and and there's a school over here university yeah what's interesting is just in a couple blocks it gets calm really fast and we're going to where we parked our bikes initially and just in front of us is just big monsoons apartment buildings this is the outside of our parking garage and it's really nice because they have cherry trees all outside of it so kind of makes it look pretty even though it's just a bike parking garage all right there's a couple helicopters in the background but who cares um yeah that's it for this video so if you actually made it this far this is just a really really rough look around a neighborhood and if you have anything that you want to know more about or interested in let me know and i'll try to make a specific video that answers that question if enough people want to see it alright thanks for watching see you next time peace

Channel: Life Where I'm From X

Views: 46,546

Rating: 4.9742122 out of 5

Keywords: Japan

Id: cnT_q49kvAs

Length: 47min 3sec (2823 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 28 2021