Local Redditors swear they’ve found a doppelganger of San Francisco (opens in new tab) in the hills of Japan—with some going so far as to say that “someone stole a piece of SF” and deposited it in a quaint residential neighborhood in the city of Hiratsuka (opens in new tab). The sense of deja vu is being stoked by a photo (opens in new tab) posted to the r/sanfrancisco subreddit yesterday. It features a smattering of little boxes on a hillside, each sporting colorfully painted facades.
Look familiar?
Internet sleuths on the Reddit thread say the enclave is called Hinataoka (opens in new tab). Hiratsuka, the town where the homes are located, has a population of over 250,000 and is located approximately 32 miles from Tokyo and near three UNESCO World Heritage sites (opens in new tab).
Some commenters said they were getting serious Glen Park vibes (opens in new tab) from the photo, while others were reminded of Daly City (opens in new tab). Others almost mistook the image for a picture of San Francisco.
One Redditor quipped that Japan hadn’t stolen this twinning neighborhood but that “that part of San Francisco had fled.”
A reverse Google Image search (opens in new tab) of the photo in question suggests that the internet is right on this one. According to a Japanese news article (opens in new tab), the colorful row of houses are a cluster of 1980s tract homes developed by the Tokyu Corporation Group. Some suspect that the homes were designed so that they could be easily viewed through the train windows of a line of Japan’s Shinkansen bullet train that runs nearby—although a spokesperson for the company said that institutional memory around that development is long gone.
Although the homes came in shades of pink, blue, yellow and green, The Standard could not confirm whether the homes were indeed made out of ticky-tacky.
So what do you think? Is this Japanese neighborhood’s San Francisco long lost twin?
