On my recent first trip to Japan, I couldn't believe the number and quality of 7-Elevens/Family Marts/Lawsons.
You're never more than a five-minute walk from one in Tokyo, and they've got good stuff.
Unfortunately, a side effect of the devaluation of the yen is that food quality at conbinis has decreased as they try to maintain price points. I recently spent a few weeks in Tokyo and there was noticeable difference in quality versus a few years ago.
The best part is when you realize the conbinis actually have some of the lowest quality stuff. Not because it’s bad, but because the rest is just that much better :)
For anyone else whose only experience with Japanese convenience stores is the Yakuza games wondering which one Poppo is supposed to be:
> Poppo appears to be based on two of Japan's leading convenience store chains, Lawson and FamilyMart, as evidenced by most of the outlets in the series being placed in locations that correspond to branches in the real world.
At first I struggled to make sense of the numbers in the circles. Surely there can't be 10,110 locations in a space the size of the SF Bay area? But yes, yes there are...
One thing that struck me when visiting Tokyo (as an American living in San Francisco), was that it was not uncommon to go to a restaurant or bar on, say the 3rd or 4th floor of a building.
In America and Europe, restaurants and shops are basically all zoned to be on the ground floor, with residential or office units above. This gives the density a different feeling, because commercial/dining space extends upward.
In the US, Chicago is also like this. I've been to a "shopping mall" that had ten stores but was spread among four floors.
Makes it hard to believe Americans when they claim their city is "very dense" when it is mostly single story buildings surrounded by parking lots.
THIS! I was just talking to a city council member about my trip to Japan and how this level of density (multiple stores in the same location vertically but not horizontally) Had some interesting effects on walkability, sales tax revenue per sq mile, and mixed use residential.
Oh, interesting point. So when I see a marker on every block in places, that doesn't mean you can just walk off the street into them, they might be upstairs?
Convenience stores are almost always ground floor. I can only think of times where there is a mezzanine or similar that they might be on an upper floor. They are always placed to have high foot or vehicle traffic.
Exceptions would be places like railway stations, where there might be more people on a different level.
Japan is _dense_ in the major cities. As someone from London, not exactly a quiet village, it's on a completely different level.
This is cool. One of the things I miss most after my trip to Japan is 7-Eleven/FamilyMart. So many nice snacks and drinks, and you never need to walk more than two minutes to find a store. I liked the onigiri a lot.
Japan made me want walkable cities in the US. I'd love it if I could just stroll down my street and pick up melon bread and Boss coffee in the morning.
Why do you write 'conbini' instead of 'konbini' in the usual romanization form?
For the todōfuken I would leave out the suffixes (mostly 'ken') in the English labels, except for Hokkaidō obviously.
Love this! I just got back from Tokyo and was thinking something similar about what determined the density of which brands. Nice work!
I need to see if I can modify this to finally make my ‘inaka or not’ map by determining the distance to the closest combini.
I can’t quite use this one as the radius for every store seems to be a bit large.
Ill post the backend code to the github soon, and there you could easily change the diameter of influence each store has.
What is "inaka or not"? A google search just pulls up an athletic clothing brand.
It means "countryside or not"; that is, measuring whether a location really counts as being in an urban vs a rural area.
This is really excellent UI.
One suggestion.
When zooming in, eventually the stores turn into a uniform blue dot. A light blue icon.
I'd like to see the individual icons keep the color of the convenience store when zoomed in.
Know the map color changes, but it isn't as obvious as the icon.
There is bit of a disjoint in how my eye is tracking the colors where some icons are still a color of the store, but some have turned blue.
Good feedback, I will see what I can do. I agree, I originally wanted to also use logo based icons.
I appreciate that the map renders the regional name and character set of the territories
That’s the OpenStreetMap default.
Interesting! 7-Eleven, Family Mart and Lawson are all in Thailand too, but I think 7-Eleven is overwhelmingly dominant, eg on my street in a 100m radius there were three 7-Elevens to just one FM and one Lawson.
Update: some stats, it's not even close... ~200 Lawson in Thailand, ~200 Family Mart (now Tops Daily), and 14,000 7-Elevens. Guess I just spent a lot of time in places with Lawson and Family Mart. This also means the 7-Eleven population density is about the same in Japan and Thailand, around one per 5k people.