> Now all houses look boring. Only recently people thought to build pretty houses again.

When I visited Japan last year most of my pictures were of old "crummy" looking buildings and older homes. They had character vs the modern flat buildings popping up all over. I even snapped pictures of the overhead wiring, utility poles and building connections. I now understand the prevalence of overhead wires and utility poles in manga/anime. I even read a white paper on Tepco's commitment to move as much of these old overhead wires underground.

Speaking of "crummy," R. Crumb talked about an afternoon he spent driving around the suburbs in the 1980s taking pictures of houses, streets, and strip malls so he could draw realistic backgrounds for his comics.

> “People don’t draw it, all this crap, people don’t focus attention on it because it’s ugly, it’s bleak, it’s depressing,” he says, “The stuff is not created to be visually pleasing and you can’t remember exactly what it looks like. But, this is the world we live in; I wanted my work to reflect that, the background reality of urban life.”

https://time.com/3802766/r-crumbs-snapshots-source-material-...

I don't have a reference for it (it might be from the film "Crumb") but I remember him saying that people would rave about how he artistically exaggerated the proliferation of poles, signage, and overhead lines to create over-the-top dystopian images, when he was just copying backgrounds from photographs of suburban California.