To go along with Urbie's earlier pic of the army of taxis outside Sendai Station、which serviced 113,000 people per workday in 2005 according to the Japanese-language Wikipedia.
Ex-Ith, here's some ground-level shots of that long mall (you'll find malls like these in every major and most minor cities in Japan):
And a nice to way to round things up:
EDIT: a bunch of the pics arent showing up, I forgot that Geocities sucks.
Kawasaki is a spitting image of Newark-Jersey City and environs, right down to the steel and petrol processing plants (and the accompanying smell) and its location "across the River" from Tokyo. My friend Ryoko who grew up in Teaneck, NJ refers to Kawasaki and northern Yokohama as "The Jersey Turnpike."
The closest you will find to Rustbelt cities are the Sea of Japan mini-cities like Niigata, Akita and Aomori. The Sea of Japan-side of the country has lagged behind the Pacific Coast in terms of development and job retention. Most of these cities are losing population to Tokyo, Yokohama, Fukuoka and the booming Kyoto suburbs in Shiga Prefecture.
One exception to this rule is Kita-Kyushu, a city of a million people less than 30 minutes north of Fukuoka. It is a dirty-industry hub and frankly is uglier than some of those faceless Chinese cities whose skylines are obscured by yellow haze. I'll try to dig up some pics of Kita-Kyushu. Trivia: Kokura (one of Kita-Kyushu's wards) was the primary target of the nuclear weapon Fat Man on August 9, 1945. Major Charles Sweeney had orders to drop the bomb visually, but the city was obscured by clouds. Hence Nagasaki, the secondary target, was where the bomb was dropped. The expression "Kokura's luck" thereafter became common in Japan to refer to occasions when someone avoids something unpleasant without his knowledge.