Makes total sense that car ownership is more necessary in countryside than in Tokyo.
If you live in a mansion 3 minutes walk from Kichijoji or Musashi Kosugi Station and you commute by train and all the shopping you need is within 5min walk, you really don't need a car most of the time and it would be cost-ineffective to own a car. But in Kofu, pretty much everyone has a driver's license since many places aren't easily accessible for public transport and much higher % of people live in single family homes as compared to Tokyo.
Even within Tokyo's 23 wards, there are areas where I would think car ownership is highly prevalent. My brother lives in one of the wards but lives ~10min walk from the nearest train station. It seems that most households in his mansion have cars.
Originally Posted by
Steve M
That addresses the numerator, but what about the denominator? How is "household" defined? If "one household = one koseki (family registry)" then the number may be very misleading. It would not surprise me if koseki was used to define household, as this would be an exact number that was readily available to whomever compiled the car ownership statistics. But isn't it true that most young adults remain on their parents' koseki until such time that they get married? If so, then most single adults, many of whom live by themselves, would be counted as part of their parents' household and not as their own household. While comparing the changes in the ratio between different time periods would be equally useful no matter how it's calculated as long as it's consistent, trying to make sense of the ratio in isolation (such as by observing that the number seems high) may be in conflict to what you'd think it might be, depending on how they define household.
That's a good question. When they talk about number of households in Jpn, I think they're usually talking about "setai." Setai is defined the same way as households are defined in US. I don't know how they determine the number of setai's... maybe via census.