The enemy, he says, is not individual officials but downright bad bureaucracy. It's the duty of every citizen. Once a loner, Goto has now inspired other activists in Tokyo and elsewhere. Cities are enormously complex hives of human activity. Running them can sometimes be as difficult as taking charge of a whole nation - even more so at a time of economic crisis, when huge migrations from the countryside can overload public services just when budgets are drying up.
Size counts too.
Compare Singapore with Seoul. One is a tidy community of 3.1 million equipped with immigration officers to keep the unwanted outside the city gates. The other has an official population of 11 million - 25 million if you count the surrounding commuter towns. It is home to more people than Malaysia. This helps explain why the South Korean capital slides in this year's Asiaweek rankings from joint-6th position to 14th, which it shares with Cebu, Kaohsiung, Metro Manila and Pusan.