If you can look beyond the piled up trash bags on garbage day, it's really not a very dirty city, especially if you're in Manhattan.

There's a lot I love about it:

• Endless places to eat, every possible cuisine is represented.  A recent highlight was having camel at a berber restaurant.  Prices have gone up, but you can still eat relatively cheaply at delis and diners.
• Practically every street corner has some historical event or person associated with it.
• If I ever want to shop for something (clothes, books, stereo equipment) there's a place I can go in the city to try it out or buy it outright rather than dealing with online ordering.  A lot of times I'll change my mind completely after seeing other options in person.
• If I'm ever bored, I just get on the train and walk around somewhere new.  There's thousands of weird little spots to be seen, parks and stores and museums.  Just walking around the city is stimulating.

I could go on.  Obviously it's noisy and occasionally smells weird or whatever, but I'm a city slicker so I'm not bothered by any of that.  It's not a dangerous place to be unless you stand right on the edge of the subway platform or go deep into the Bronx and act like an asshole.  I truly can't think of a better city, and I plan to spend the rest of my life here.

I pretty much agree. The problem is that the cost of living is too high and I don't want to share an apartment with roommates. I'd probably rather live in Tokyo because it is just as historic and also significantly cheaper.

Tokyo is cheaper? That would surprise me.

Dallas, Texas is more expensive than Tokyo. As far as I know, NYC is significantly more expensive than Dallas.

According to Wikipedia, Osaka is the only place in Japan to make it on to the top ten list of  costliest cities. I don't even know if I believe these statistics because Osaka was the cheapest city I visited in Japan.

What's going on in NYC? I saw some headline about the National Guard being deployed in the subway. Is there a crime wave or something?

They shot all the mutant zombies that came out of the sewers during a flood

Tokyo is cheap in part because it's so huge that you can live an hour outside of the center on the train and still be within the Tokyo Metro.  They also actually build a poo pooload of housing, unlike US cities.  Being an hour out isn't bad though, every neighborhood is for the most part walkable and has its own little urban core of shops and essentials.

Our goal was to move to Tokyo, but the big pay cut and likely racial difficulties dissuaded us.  I'd still like to have a place out there some day.

What's going on in NYC? I saw some headline about the National Guard being deployed in the subway. Is there a crime wave or something?

Just the usual boomers getting worked up about a "crime wave" (which is nowhere to be seen statistically but people do occasionally get mugged or pushed onto the tracks (fix: don't stand at the edge of the platform)) and instead of embarking on any kind of long term approach, the governor just picked up the National Guard hammer, which only served to make everyone more on edge and made the whole city look bad.

I'd rather invest in the S&P500 than buy a place in Tokyo. The pay in Japan is not great and I don't think you can stay in Japan for longer than 3 months without a work visa or a Japanese passport. It's definitely a great country for traveling but I wouldn't want to live there unless I could find a job that paid $60,000 per year.

I didn't really encounter any racial problems. I'm sure blacks would run into more problems. I know a half Japanese half Polish woman who says she felt like she was always being excluded when she lived in Japan.

the race stuff only comes into play if you want to live there.  they love taking tourist money but they don't want anyone sticking around

and yeah there's zero reason to buy real estate there.  unlike most other places, japanese housing consistently depreciates (1980s aside) and it's customary to tear down whatever is there and build your own house (which will then begin depreciating)