When I first moved to Japan loved the city. It was nice and compact and everything is in one place. As long as you are a decent walk away from a train station you can get anywhere pretty easily without the use of a car. If you needed to buy anything that can't be found at a store, no worries you can just order something online and give them a 2 hour window to deliver it to you. You have to live in a shoebox, but that's the price you pay for convenience.

Japan is incredibly convenient because everyone lives so close to each other. There is actually a lot more space in Japan that people can live on. For example, Shimane prefecture is so desperate for people that they are giving away houses as long as you plan on living there for 25 years (kind of). So there is literally free space available for anyone that wants to live out in the countryside.

And cities have been getting a lot of love lately. People are starting to see them as a solution for a lot of problems with the environment as well as just being the new cool and convenient way to live. In recent years, city planners have been making cities much more inhabitable. New York City is a shiny example of that. They have shut down a lot areas to vehicular traffic and making them people-only zones as well as introduced bus lanes and bike lanes to allow for easier transit.

So living together is great for everyone, the environment, and life in general. People love the city. It's almost like a little utopia. So, what could possibly go wrong with it? (queue ominous music)
The Utopian Rat Experiment
John Calhoun did an experiment where he gave rats plenty of food and water and enough space for a good number of rats to live. He eliminated disease, natural predators. Everything just kind of came to these rats without much effort. The idea was to simulate the ideal environment that we humans live in and see what would happen.

Rat population initially grew at a fairly rapid pace after a few months of settling in. Rats were making love and getting down, chowing down on the free grub and generally enjoying life. It was a good time to be alive for the rats.

Then, before the actual physical capacity of their little utopia had been reached the population started to level off. Keep in mind that they still had plenty of food and water. That wasn't limiting them. The population just leveled off. Then after a period of a year or so of this leveling off, the population started to rapidly die off and finally went extinct. This was back in the good old days when killing off animals was no biggy apparently.

During this leveling off, Calhoun noticed a lot of interesting behaviors that pretty much led to the population's downfall. Mothers stopped caring for their young. Fathers would first leave their kids and then their mothers would leave them. Sometimes they acted as if they simply forgot the children existed.

There were other rats that kept themselves immaculately clean, but didn't do much else. They simply ate, slept and cleaned. They didn't even get it on with other rats. And apparently they were pretty stupid as well.

On top of all that, they were constantly fighting with each other toward the end, despite the fact that there was not that much to fight over. There was plenty of food and water to go around. The only thing in limited supply was space. But they blooded each other's tails with bites.
What about Japan
So, is the same thing happening in well-developed countries like Japan? Well, it isn't exactly a rat colony and there are a lot more complexities to the Japanese system obviously. The country isn't a big box in someone's barn or lab, but there are some alarming signs that similar behavior is starting to become more prominent.
Child Abuse
In the rat utopia experiment mother's abandoned their kids.