Japanese streets

From time to time, whenever I'm waiting for a computer to finish doing something else, I'll spend an idle few minutes wandering around a random area of Japan on Google Street View, mainly in order to look at the signs by roadsides and on shops.  It's a painless way of getting exposure to written material in a useful context; it's also an interesting lesson in how much of Japan looks very different from one's preconceptions of what Japan ought to look like.  Like many people in the West, I have vague images of City Japan and Country Japan.  City Japan is a Blade Runner-ish set of skyscrapers gleaming with neon and glass, and Country Japan is well-tended formal gardens with temples dotted around.  But drop the little orange Google Street View man almost anywhere in Japan and you'll see something else: low-rise buildings, a lot of rather shabby concrete, surprisingly narrow streets.  The abundance of overhead wires (far more than you'd ever see in Britain) makes me think of small-town America, or at least one of my possibly-false clichés of small-town America, no doubt influenced by Wichita Lineman.  It all looks quite prosperous, but ugly—much of Japan looks no better than the post-war areas of relatively decent housing anywhere in Britain, on a more cramped scale.  When I started reading Alex Kerr's books about the failures of modern Japan I thought his opinions on modern Japanese city architecture were surprisingly harsh; but Street View rather supports them.  On the other hand it's really striking to see vending machines out in the open, on every street, in working order.  Anywhere I've ever lived, such exposed machines would be vandalised and stripped of their beer/coffee/Pocari Sweat loads the first night they were installed.