I saw this photo and was rather surprised at how dark the area surrounding Tokyo appeared, but I suppose it makes sense when you consider that about 70% of Japan’s land is uninhabited.
13 thoughts on “Tokyo From Space”
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I saw this photo and was rather surprised at how dark the area surrounding Tokyo appeared, but I suppose it makes sense when you consider that about 70% of Japan’s land is uninhabited.
Comments are closed.
Do you have a bigger version?
I once had a really nice view of Tokyo at night from a plance flying out of Kansai (or was it Nagoya?) heading to the US. Looked rather small and insignificant, so much so that my gf didn’t think it could be Tokyo (but it was).
That’s an odd statistic. How do you define uninhabited? Surely there must be people living even in the most inaka inaka?
Any trip 10 klicks outside of Tokyo will tell you that shuttered businesses tend to not shine much light…
The hills in Japan tend to be steep and very unpopulated, while everyone crams in on the flat. And Japan has a lot of hills, most of which are forested rather than used for agriculture.
Tokyo is South Korea, not-Tokyo is North Korea.
Tony:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan#Geography
About 70% to 80% of the country is forested, mountainous,[44][45] and unsuitable for agricultural, industrial, or residential use. This is because of the generally steep elevations, climate and risk of landslides caused by earthquakes, soft ground and heavy rain. This has resulted in an extremely high population density in the habitable zones that are mainly located in coastal areas.
Jade: Not really — the original was 700 pixels, I resized it down to 500 for the blog post. I am looking online for a higher resolution version.
I saw an interesting comment somewhere that Tokyo is one of the few world cities that glow green at night; most glow orange. This is apparently because they use different chemicals in streetlights here.
This page lets you download a night shot of Tokyo in various resolutions. I grabbed the biggest one and stuck it here if you want a quicker way to get at it.
There are quite a few shots of Tokyo (in various places around the world!) available on that site, by the way.
Joe – I don’t know about green as such, but one thing that always strikes me about arriving in most overseas cities at night, especially the US, is the orange glow from the streetlights – orange is from sodium-vapor lamps and white is from mercury vapour gas. I hate the sodium ones – very bleak. But they are cheap and more efficient.
Durf – nice photo.
BTW, you can see the difference clearly in the pic – the industrial areas around the bay use sodium, and are orange.
Lamps in my home town are mercury vapor, I believe. I’ll confirm next week.