You could drop the sarcastic/cynical first half of your comment without losing anything.
It doesn’t seem to me that the claim that Japan has a worse quality of life than the USA is supportable by data: surveys of self-reported satisfaction are notoriously incomparable across cultures. But there are also many differences between these countries besides urban planning and zoning laws (e.g. the USA is much less densely populated, is younger, has more immigrants, has more natural resources, uses much more energy per capita, has much higher GPD per capita, has a shorter life expectancy, has a far larger number of drug addicts, has dramatically more violence, ...).
A cheap 10–15 minute standing rush-hour subway commute is much less objectionable than a 1.5-hour highway traffic-jam commute. I haven’t been to Japan, but the subways in China and various European countries are clean, orderly, quiet/smooth, and have trains every few minutes. They put even the best US subway systems like NYC and Boston to shame.
I know multiple groups of people in San Francisco who live with ~4 unrelated adults in a 1-story 2-bedroom single-family house, either sharing bedrooms or using every room in the house as a makeshift bedroom, and still pay out the nose for the privilege (the only other choice they could afford was living 1+ hours away in a suburban wasteland) who would much prefer to have their own separate 600–800 square foot apartments instead. The Bay Area housing market is such that people get locked into their current place and cannot afford to move if their needs change (e.g. get married, get divorced, have kids, have their kids move out of the house, get a higher-paying job, get a lower-paying job, ...). People who work full time for decades still can’t dream of scraping together a down payment unless a wealthy relative dies and they land a sizable inheritance. Building a couple hundred thousand additional small apartments throughout the Bay Area would relieve a ton of market pressure and drive down the price of housing of all shapes and sizes, including larger condos and houses.
It doesn’t seem to me that the claim that Japan has a worse quality of life than the USA is supportable by data: surveys of self-reported satisfaction are notoriously incomparable across cultures. But there are also many differences between these countries besides urban planning and zoning laws (e.g. the USA is much less densely populated, is younger, has more immigrants, has more natural resources, uses much more energy per capita, has much higher GPD per capita, has a shorter life expectancy, has a far larger number of drug addicts, has dramatically more violence, ...).
A cheap 10–15 minute standing rush-hour subway commute is much less objectionable than a 1.5-hour highway traffic-jam commute. I haven’t been to Japan, but the subways in China and various European countries are clean, orderly, quiet/smooth, and have trains every few minutes. They put even the best US subway systems like NYC and Boston to shame.
I know multiple groups of people in San Francisco who live with ~4 unrelated adults in a 1-story 2-bedroom single-family house, either sharing bedrooms or using every room in the house as a makeshift bedroom, and still pay out the nose for the privilege (the only other choice they could afford was living 1+ hours away in a suburban wasteland) who would much prefer to have their own separate 600–800 square foot apartments instead. The Bay Area housing market is such that people get locked into their current place and cannot afford to move if their needs change (e.g. get married, get divorced, have kids, have their kids move out of the house, get a higher-paying job, get a lower-paying job, ...). People who work full time for decades still can’t dream of scraping together a down payment unless a wealthy relative dies and they land a sizable inheritance. Building a couple hundred thousand additional small apartments throughout the Bay Area would relieve a ton of market pressure and drive down the price of housing of all shapes and sizes, including larger condos and houses.