20 years old

Need to pay the electricity bill? Don't worry. There is a convenience store five houses away. Wanna get away from your hectic everyday life? No problem, there is a Izakaya pub within 3 minutes' walk. Ditto with drugstores, beef-bowl restaurant, to name a few. This is where I live now.
One of the good things about cities in Japan is that there are lots of businesses that meet people's various needs, all in a comfortably compact piece of land. This convenience is something you can never enjoy if you live in any residential area in US. We must appreciate living in Japan.
Whenever I visited the US I wondered why she had not developed railway systems. Someone told me that, in the early 20th century, some automakers and oil companies bought railway companies only to systematically abolish them for more sales of cars and gasoline. I am not sure if it's true or not. The truth may be that with affluent space and money they did not have to have a densely populated city. The lack of efficiency caused by living sparsely in a city has been covered by automobiles. They use cars to go almost anywhere. They still love freedom in a car. No time table, no jammed passengers. I can understand how happy they feel behind the wheel. But inside their residential area is not "walking convenience" anyway.
My car is twenty years old. It has run only cumulative 40,000kms, which the average American would cover in a matter of a year or two. We do not really need cars in this compact city. Didn't we bought them just because we had longed for cool American life?
Cars don't sell well recently in Japan. We may be going back to what we really are as the US loses its glitter. Young people are becoming less interested in going out of this country whether on a trip or for studying abroad. We are getting more self-satisfied with the convenience in a cozy small country than before. Fair enough. Japan is just different from US. But we only must be prepared for the economic shrinkage that accompanies with this sort of introversive mentality.