My weird new hobby: Wandering around Tokyo on Google Maps

In 2009, Google Street View had only been gathering images in Austin for about a year, I think. I pulled up right behind the Street View car at a red light, and I waved out the window, hoping that would get captured. I sent an email to my friends with a link to the location and said, "check this out in a couple of months!"

When I checked later that year, there was no image of me, so I thought the camera had not been active, and I forgot all about it.

Then, while looking through old emails a couple of weeks ago, I found that one and clicked the link. I clicked to see images from 2009, and sure enough, there was my little white Honda. And when I moved around the map, I found an image where my hand was out the window, waving! It was like I was waving to myself from the past. Pretty neat!

I had to click this title!

For some months now I do basically the same, but without the clicking in Streetview. There are some channels on Youtube where someone walks through neighborhoods in Tokyo, I found I really enjoy these. The streets are so clean and the houses so beautiful. Indeed, once in a while a Japanese sports car pops up around a corner, just standing there on somebody's driveway.

I also enjoy the walk-throughs of neighborhoods in New York (edit: now that I think about it, this started with following ari@home, a streamer who makes electronic music on the fly while walking and having an open mic). I tried Dallas once, I guess, but it was all way too big and bulky (but it was down town I guess, so that's to be expected of a lot of cities on this planet).

Does anybody have ideas for other nice spots on this beautiful planet!? I think I know Tokyo by now. ;)

Not Tokyo, but I put up a UK site a couple of years back with old maps going back to Victorian times. Search for "Knowle Winchester" and you'll see (in satellite view) a modern housing estate. But on the 1937-61 maps you can see it was built on the remains of a huge old mental hospital: Knowle Hospital. And on the 1888-1913 maps and you can see it was originally called County Lunatic Asylum! Both geography and language change substantially over time. I like chasing up old train lines with it. Geeky fun. https://solentmaps.uk

Many years ago, I found an image via Goggle that I used as a desktop image: an old copper stamp mill in Calumet MI[1]. That image had a ghost image in it and I got a little obsessed.

After more research than I should have ever put into this question, I found a copy of the photo responsible for the ghost image[2].

Not being able to leave things at that... I had to try and find where the photo had been taken in Google Maps and street view. And I did[3]!

Wandering around maps and street view I found a number of houses in the original photo that are still there, like [4]. The intersection that is front and center on the photo [2] is the current intersection of Oak St & Spruce St. The duplex home at the bend in that intersection, where the woman is walking in front, is still there, though clearly it's seen better days.

Definitely spent too much time, even if virtually, in Calumet, MI.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-prev...

[2] https://www.shorpy.com/node/11417

[3] http://goo.gl/maps/xYctZ

[4] http://goo.gl/maps/BSkFj

I appreciate this hobby.

I've visited San Francsico a few times but haven't been since 2007.

At one point, back in about 2013 or 2014, I got a little bit obsessed with the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. It started innocently enough (reading an article about the Pulgas Water Temple), and I ended up spending many evenings in bed using Google Earth and Google Maps street view to trace the route of the aqueduct and look at the things around it. Where the pipes run under cities it's easy to see their "mark" on the land (since no permanent structures are permitted to be built above them). Following them up into the mountains was fun, too.

A few years later I got into looking at abandoned rail lines in the Midwest and spent evenings "flying" the routes of old railroads. They're similar to the aqueduct insofar as you can see the "scar" they've left on the (and in the oddly-shaped parcels of land left after they were sold-off).

This is a hobby of mine, too. It's one of the most fantastic things available on the internet. The ability to travel anywhere in the world and - as the author of the blog also said - the ability to travel back in time as well!

I did some road trips in 2009 and made pictures with a compact camera. I was able to determine the almost exact locations I shot these pictures thanks to street view, so I could see route that we took back then. One picture was shot in the dark but had a distinctive logo sign on the side of the road. Given the timestamp on the photo and the extremely blurry restaurant and motel logos on the sign, I had a good idea of where to look, but it turned out this sign was only up in a single year and it was quite hard to navigate to!

Unfortunately, I don't think you can "lock" the street view date? Nor does the map view on go back in time? I guess you can use Google Earth to view satellite images. There is a whole neighborhood in Seoul that's been completely leveled on the satellite pictures, yet you can still use street view from 2018 to travel around.

I've done this in Google Earth VR, and it's very fun. You can get down to basically street view, but everything is very blocky and blurry..

Or you can stay at "Godzilla scale" and walk around the city with buildings the (relative) size of appliances or furniture.. NYC is kind of fun that way.

If you are somewhere that you've been in real life, it's uncanny how familiar it still seems even at low res..

For somewhere you haven't been, or are planning on going, it can give you a sense of scale/scope/direction that is quite nice.

I have done this for places I visited a lot in my early childhood but since have never returned to. It's a bit eerie to see the memories come back to life. Often I remember just enough of the place to be able to find my way between what were the main attractions to me at that age. Somehow, despite forgetting all the details of the path, something in the back of my head compels me to follow the right road even in confusing intersections. I find it fascinating.

PlaneSpotting in Google Maps had been my favorite for many years. Somehow, I lost that interest now.

https://discussions.flightaware.com/t/aircraft-in-flight-in-...

There is a specific Google Street picture in Rio De Janeiro, (in order to find it I need to go to a specific spot and then change the date to the time when I was living there), where I can see a friend who passed. His face has been blurred as usual, but to anyone who knew him, it's obvious it's him.

With Oculus VR headset on, you can walk through the streets.

I do this sometimes too but the ux has always been lacking. Arrow key directions sometimes don't work if the system thinks the forward image is e.g. not actually forward. You try and resort to clicking, you might miss the click target and end up 600 yards down the road instead of to the next frame. Or you merely zoom in and don't move at all.

It has always been like this ever since they released streetview. I'm surprised they haven't improved it, but then again, maybe I am not surprised. Probably actually a good thing google hasn't felt compelled to touch it recently.

In unrelated news, I got a notice that they are killing google earth pro in January, so get your downloads in now before they stop sharing the packages.

I do the same except with really bad countries as a reminder to myself of how much worse things could be.

The treadmills at my gym have a big display with YouTube. Each time I run for ~1 hour and watch one of those Walking Tour videos.

It's much easier to run with something to distract you from the pain of running. Time really flies by.

Tokyo is a great pick for this kind of thing. It's big, so I usually pick a specific neighborhood (Hiroo, Shibuya...).

I call this a Street viewcation https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Street+View

I've always recommended to people traveling to Tokyo to just walk around. Hit your spots, but walk when and where you can. You'll almost always stumble into some pocket of peace there.

Related, but has anyone else noticed that Maps has gotten really slow in the past several months? I don't think its just my internet connection. Not sure if Google is throttling it or its getting slammed by AI

I love doing this for food in particular. Seeing how and what other countries eat is just really fun for me. Even though I won't be able to visit most of these places it quite often leads me to new local restaurants or new things to cook.

Gaijin moment

Buy a plane ticket and go. I once walked 10 miles in Tokyo and never got bored.

I use google maps at least 15 minutes a day. At least. Mostly looking at places I know, drove through and intrigued me, etc. I can tell when the satellite picture changes. I once saw a plane that was captured in the views (it got edited out soon after).

I just love Google Maps.

The car spotted is just one example. Here's another well preserved over the time: https://maps.app.goo.gl/64iSqCS7d2DLWpt86

I've spent hours doing this in Google Earth VR. The city is just so damn walkable and liveable on the street level, which comes through even in a headset. And it seems to go on in all directions forever. Amazing urbanism.

I wonder how we can get cities to build on a human scale. that is my dream for LA; that would involve massive zoning changes here and breaking up quite a bit of concrete...

reminds me of this scene from the movie 'Smoke' where Auggie shares his photo scrapbook of the same corner, day after day, and his friend being confused by the repetition, but Auggie explaining his view of things... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGV_h36uZ5E

Sometimes I'll do something similar and go back to old streets I used to live on, or the street I current live on but look at it in the past. Google Maps is a cool time capsule

I watch a lot of videos of people just exploring Tokyo and other cities on foot. Good stuff.

Me too! :)

Haha, that’s actually a really cool hobby and the 350Z story makes it even more interesting

I love doing this, in every city, even without Google Maps!

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