From our other sites
The story
A poster who moved from Tokyo to Nagoya declared that it was “so livable it changed my life” and that “there’s no going back to Tokyo,” and the tweet racked up 20,000 likes, sparking discussion on 5ch’s “Nanjo G” (Everything Live) board. When an example surfaced of a 1LDK apartment in central Nagoya renting for just ¥70,000 a month, commenters piled on in disbelief at the gap with Tokyo rents. At the same time, opinions split over quality-of-life factors — the near-disappearance of the Nagoya dialect in favor of standard Japanese, the lack of entertainment and events, and the local temperament — turning the thread into a broader debate over the livability of Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka.
What people said
@NAGOYA_iJU
If you're ever burned out, just come to Nagoya.
I actually want to go out and have fun, so a sleepy backwater with nothing going on is a no for me
What can you actually do for fun in Tokyo that you can't do in Nagoya?
Break the Asian Games (a jab at Nagoya/Aichi's troubled bid to host the Asian Games)
Events there are like a lap behind everywhere else
Tokyo's rough to live in
The cityscape's boring
The food's bad
No events
If you can put up with that, go for it
There are plenty of events
Even the Chiikawa ramen pop-up launched in Nagoya first
If anything, I feel like people walk slower in Tokyo
Everyone's staring at their phone, drifting along at a snail's pace right in the middle of foot traffic — it's so annoying
Even if the job and the environment are great, the people are so awful that you end up leaving anyway
There's no prefecture out there with worse personalities than Tokyoites, is there?
It's a village-mentality society, so it's way harsher than Tokyo
Honestly, both Aichi and Kansai are still way warmer than Tokyo by comparison
Man, Nagoya sounds nice
I'm "emigrating" to Nagoya (lit. "moving to America" — joking that it feels like a different country)
Isn't central Nagoya's city scale more like Tokyo's suburbs?
I wanna get out of Tokyo too 🥺
Zero deaths or serious injuries, only 40 cases of flooding above floor level
For comparison, Chiba was…
Nagoya's all standard Japanese now
The dialect's dead
Even the intonation follows the Tokyo style, so it's basically standard Japanese
Gifu's great, right
It's like 3 seconds from Nagoya, the town's clean, it's the ultimate bedroom community
Not really much reason to pick Osaka, huh
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
Threads like this are a 5ch staple — a recurring “Tokyo vs. the regions” comparison built around rental prices that flares up periodically. This time the spark was a post from an account promoting relocation to Nagoya, and the figure of ¥70,000 for a 1LDK in central Nagoya struck a chord. Compared to rent for the same conditions in Tokyo’s 23 wards, the gap is huge, and that’s what’s driving most of the positive reaction. Where opinion split was over what “livability” actually means: alongside praise for the rent and cost of living, there was disagreement over cultural quality-of-life factors like the decline of the Nagoya dialect, the shortage of events, and complaints about local temperament. It’s worth noting that the “20,000 likes” figure comes from a screenshot of the original tweet and wasn’t verified within the thread’s discussion itself. Also, since the thread contained many blanket generalizations lumping together residents of specific regions, comments amounting to baseless stereotyping have been excluded from this article.
※This article is compiled as an excerpt and summary from the 5ch (Nanjo G) thread “[Photos] Tokyoite: “Moved to Nagoya, it was so livable it changed my life. Can’t go back now.” — 20,000 likes.”
Leave a Reply