I noticed that my neighborhood is all Lawsons, so I got the location of all Conbinis and ran some basic analysis to see if these pockets of brand territory are common.
I haven't worked much with web frontends before, so feedback is welcomed. I also have some ideas to maybe expand upon, like making the territory calculations based on streets and other geographical features rather than just beeline distance.
The site isn't tested too much on mobile yet, but should be ok.
Currently the frontend code and geojson files can be found at the public repo: https://github.com/kikkia/ConbiniWars. I will upload the backend code soon as I am cleaning it up and reorganizing it.
You're never more than a five-minute walk from one in Tokyo, and they've got good stuff.
It's like visiting Japan, and going to the restroom. If you just came from America, the experience is truly amazing, because 1) the restroom is clean, and 2) the restroom has privacy (no gaps around the doors, no giant gaps so people see your feet and pants pulled down), and 3) random stuff in the restroom isn't broken, and finally 4) there's a washlet.
If you came from a country where stuff is clean and kept in good order, and the bathrooms are pretty nice, then the Japanese bathroom would not be so amazing, except maybe for the washlet. But coming from America, where most of the features of Japanese bathrooms I listed above are not the case for most bathrooms, the Japanese bathroom is an amazing experience.
Basically, things in Japan are how you'd expect a well-run civilized society to be, so when you come from a place that is poorly run and not as civilized as it claims to be, then things in Japan do seem amazing for a while.
I must say, though, that the Family Mart konbini near the hotel I stayed at two months ago was amazing for being able to order off Amazon Japan and picking up deliveries there. This is something I wish I discovered many trips ago.
In general, though, I concur with your assessment; konbini in Japan are nice but they’re not mind-blowing.
In America and Europe, restaurants and shops are basically all zoned to be on the ground floor, with residential or office units above. This gives the density a different feeling, because commercial/dining space extends upward.
Makes it hard to believe Americans when they claim their city is "very dense" when it is mostly single story buildings surrounded by parking lots.
Granted, Tokyo is very large. I got a bit burned out in my first two trips because hauling from one side to the other constantly to hit different sites is kind of exhausting but yes as another comment mentioned - it's totally normal to find restaurants on floors 1 through 10+++ so you can stack a lot of restaurants vertically. Within the city I was told not many people cook and a friend living there told us a lot of apartments don't even have a kitchen beyond a tiny heater for cooking instant noodles or simple stuff.
Yeah, me too. But I realized in about 2 seconds that getting walkable cities in the US within my lifetime is a pipe dream, so instead I just sold my car, packed my stuff, and moved to Tokyo instead.
> Poppo appears to be based on two of Japan's leading convenience store chains, Lawson and FamilyMart, as evidenced by most of the outlets in the series being placed in locations that correspond to branches in the real world.
There's a Lawson-heavy area about a twenty-minute walk from where I live in Yokohama. The three convenience stores closest to me, though, are 7-11. One reason for this clustering, I suspect, is deliveries. Convenience stores are carefully designed for logistical efficiency, and having stores close to each other must shave a bit off the distance traveled by delivery trucks.
You might consider adding Aeon My Basket stores to your map, too. They have sprouted up all over the Tokyo region in recent years. They are positioned as small supermarkets rather than kombini, but their size, locations, and product overlap with kombini puts them in competition with Lawson, 7-11, etc., too.
Seven minutes away was a larger grocery store called Maruetsu, and ten minutes away from my dorm room was Musashi-Nakahara Station, which had a grocery store (I forgot the name) about the same size as Maruetsu. What I loved about these latter two grocery stores was the nice selection of hot foods, especially around lunch time when many workers from Fujitsu and other nearby companies went to buy hot bento. I still remember the ¥300 bento from the grocery store inside the train station. It was tasty and was reasonably filling.
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs6840/2020sp/note/scribe...
https://www.eco.uc3m.es/~mmachado/teaching/oi-i-mei/slides/4...
IIRC the conclusion is that it’s optimal for stores to be positioned at extremes relative to each other (e.g. at two ends of the city) but the socially optimal situation is actually for them to be positioned closer together.
I noticed that my neighborhood is all Lawsons, so I got the location of all Conbinis and ran some basic analysis to see if these pockets of brand territory are common.
One suggestion.
When zooming in, eventually the stores turn into a uniform blue dot. A light blue icon.
I'd like to see the individual icons keep the color of the convenience store when zoomed in.
Know the map color changes, but it isn't as obvious as the icon.
There is bit of a disjoint in how my eye is tracking the colors where some icons are still a color of the store, but some have turned blue.
For the todōfuken I would leave out the suffixes (mostly 'ken') in the English labels, except for Hokkaidō obviously.
Update: some stats, it's not even close... ~200 Lawson in Thailand, ~200 Family Mart (now Tops Daily), and 14,000 7-Elevens. Guess I just spent a lot of time in places with Lawson and Family Mart. This also means the 7-Eleven population density is about the same in Japan and Thailand, around one per 5k people.
I can’t quite use this one as the radius for every store seems to be a bit large.
Inaka: the bus comes every two hours.
Not: the bus comes every ten minutes.
I think Daily Yamazaki is still hanging on in some places? Might have been interesting to add to this map since there are zero where I live but on road trips I'm surprised when I pass by somewhere where there are a lot of them
I’ve been wanting to plot that data for fun for a while.