Tokyo vs Sydney

Tokyo was one of my other choices to move to. It got ruled out naturally with the 3/11 earthquake, but it's good to check if I had made the right choice between Tokyo and Sydney were the earthquake didn't happen.

The Tokyo office of my company is located in the Mori Tower in the Roppongi Hills complex. Since there was a tropical storm (Aere) during my visit there last week, I booked Grand Hyatt that was in the same complex to avoid getting wet. The rooms are big, new, and modern (but expensive!), and it takes just 3 minutes to walk to the office within the complex.

View out of Tokyo office
in Roppongi Hills

I am always impressed by how clean and organized Japan is, even in the world's largest metro, Tokyo (with a mind-blowing 35+ million population). You can easily tell the difference of how clean/organized it is by strolling around or looking out of the window (e.g., compared to the view at Taipei 101 where I currently work in). And Japanese people are always very polite, hard-working, and civilized. Although language is a barrier (most Japanese has relatively poor English), I would probably still prefer Tokyo over Taipei.

It's clear I favor Sydney over Tokyo however after I've visited both. Language is not the biggest issue since learning Japanese may just take months, but there are many other considerations. Timezone definitely matters as the extra 1~2 hours overlap with the U.S. is important -- video conference and other communication technologies may vastly improve within 10 years but the timezone issue will not. I prefer Sydney's environment more as it feels very natural. Also, Tokyo is already so packed I don't want to contribute more -- let's spread out more evenly on Earth? ;)