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The story
A post titled “After I bought a car, I got to know the geography, the landmarks, and all the good restaurants — my whole range of movement expanded” went up on 5ch’s Nandemo Jikkyo G board (a general live-chat board), drawing over 40 replies. The thread split over whether owning a car itself is what determines your range of movement, or whether the real factor is where you live — city versus countryside. One side argued that cities offer a dense living sphere even without a car, while the other insisted that in rural areas life simply doesn’t function without one — and the two sides never quite met in the middle.
What people said
My range of movement has expanded like crazy, it's amazing
Why the hell don't you guys buy one??
Now I get what women are actually trying to say
Yeah, that's probably true
A woman's idea of an "interesting guy" is "a guy who knows a ton of good restaurants"
It's definitely not a guy who's an expert on Android phones or gacha games
Which one's more popular with women? Plain as day
A car's a status symbol, after all
Money, paperwork, insurance — go through all that and you become a proper adult man
I drove a Prelude my old man forced on me for 20 years, but after I bought a Land Cruiser 300 through a friend's connection, my whole world changed
I can't go back to low-slung cars now lol
High-riding cars are just way easier to drive
Also my girlfriend responds way better to the big car
Women really do love a big car
Sell me that Prelude
If a big car is all it takes, would my Hiace (Toyota van) work too?
The area you can cover in a city without a car is far denser than what you can cover in the countryside with one
Best of both worlds is living in the city AND owning a car though
So, what's your savings balance?
Money is a resource for getting experiences
Cutting experiences just to save money is putting the cart before the horse
There's zero value in having your assets peak the moment you die
Just don't drink then, simple as that
What a loser, drinking with a woman at night and then just heading straight home
depending on where you live, it can take your livability from 0 points to 50
while somewhere else it only goes from like 80 points to 85
After that it's just a question of cost-effectiveness
Trains are usually faster and easier anyway, and if you absolutely need a car, a rental works fine
That's only true if your destination happens to be near a station
For anyone outside central Tokyo, owning a car is just the default
The whole idea that "having a car is more convenient and expands your range" is exactly the kind of thing only a carless Tokyoite would say
If you think about it by population, cities have way more people
So the rural viewpoint is the minority one, isn't it?
Half the country's population lives in what's called the "regions"
Meaning anywhere outside the Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya metro areas
Saying it's "way more" is just wrong
That's why carless working adults are basically only a Tokyo-central-wards thing
I mean, even within Tokyo, once you're outside the 23 wards, isn't owning a car the norm even for Tokyo residents?
Anywhere in the Kanto region besides Tokyo proper, working adults owning a car is the default
Same in Osaka and Nagoya — working adults owning a car is the default there too
One way or another, it's a car-dependent society everywhere, so it's essential
And once that piles up, it adds up to a surprising amount of knowledge
Isn't that more about how urban an area you live in than whether you have a car?
really has a "country bumpkin" vibe to it
Well, I guess in the countryside you can't go anywhere without one
In the countryside a car is mandatory, so people there never even stop to think about the range-of-movement pros and cons of owning one in the first place
Even in the city, most of it is basically suburbs
It's true that a car changes your range of movement there too
jumping from there to "so not having a car means you're poor!" is way too extreme a take
Because by that logic, if you actually had money you'd hire a driver
which would make anyone who drives their own car just as "poor"
Look… the whole "a car is convenient to have" framing is itself a carless person's way of thinking
Seriously, outside central Tokyo, owning a car is just the default
In Osaka, being carless is only excusable if you're a college student living alone
There's no need to deliberately go against that and drive anyway
It's like using an expensive machine to climb the stairs in an apartment building that already has an elevator
Sure, as long as you never leave the city center
You see this opinion a fair amount on Nan-G (this board's regular nickname), but
there's data showing that even among city dwellers, the higher their income, the higher the car ownership rate
So "the city is developed enough that you don't need a car" doesn't really hold up
You're just someone who walks everywhere, aren't you
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
Car ownership rates are higher in rural areas than in cities, so the two sides of this debate start from fundamentally different premises: people in city centers with well-developed public transit who “don’t feel inconvenienced without a car,” versus people whose daily living sphere simply isn’t reached by public transit at all. The thread’s disagreement also never resolved, since some see the expansion of one’s range of movement as an effect of owning a car, while others see it purely as a matter of population density where you live.
As one reply pointed out, higher-income groups do tend to have higher car-ownership rates, and it’s actually been observed that even in urban areas, people are more likely to own a car as their income rises. It’s worth keeping in mind that the simple “city = no car needed” dichotomy tends to ignore factors like disposable income and family situation.
Claims like “owning a car makes you popular with women” or “no car means a narrow range of movement” don’t go beyond personal anecdotes, and no verifiable data was presented in the thread either. It’s entertaining as a read, but shouldn’t be taken as a generalizable conclusion.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Buying a Car Changed My Life.”
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