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Over my four years of residing in Japan/Tokyo, I've often come to a love-hate relationship.  But I assume any place is the same in that you have negatives and positives.  What is clear to me is the extremist view I've taken in terms of my sojourn here: living in Japan/Tokyo is much better than working here.

Comparing LA vs Tokyo in terms of negatives and positives, here is my assessment:

LA Positives

• Excellent weather
• Wide roads
• Cheap low end food
• Mostly free parking
• Reasonable working hours
• Generally good working environments
• Casual lifestyle
• Nice homes
• Proximity to the beach
• Banning of smoking in public places
• Relative distance to other entertaining areas (e.g. Las Vegas, San Francisco, etc.)
• Better dentists
• Great internet minded culture
• IT engineers can earn reasonable salaries

LA Negatives

• High crime rate
• Rising cost of gas
• Rising cost of homes
• Terrible traffic
• Polluted skies
• Lack of a good public transportation system
• Prone to fires
• Sedate lifestyle (i.e. limited drinking areas, bars close by 3 am, inability to access fun areas without significant amount of planning via freeway, etc.)
• Double tax rate (California's state tax along with federal tax)
• Natural foods are outrageously imbued by chemicals
• Fast food nation
• Mostly encouraging unhealthy lifestyle (no exercise, eat, sleep, shit, get fat)
• Alienated feeling
• Many rude people
• Too many ugly women
• You mostly have to tip
• Poor internet service

Japan/Tokyo Positives

• Great night life
• Mostly safe (about 99% of the time)
• Excellent transportation system
• Easy to access friends
• Lower tax rate (for me at least)
  
• Excellent cuisine
• Average women are gorgeous and marriage minded (rather than this feminist garbage that has been injected into American women; watch Fight Club to see what I mean)
  
• Excellent internet access
• Bleeding edge cellphone technology
• No wasted space (from a conservation point of view)
• Inflation has been mostly tame (a ticket from Minowa  to Ueno had cost me 160-en in 1999 and is the same now)
• Smaller portions for food
• Mostly a clean city (by all accounts of foreigners that i've spoken to)

Japan/Tokyo Negatives

• Stressful work environment
• Emphasis on old schools of thought in terms of fashion (i.e. people MUST wear suits even in the summer)
• Long hours for work
• Transportation is open only until roughly 12:45 am
• Horribly expensive spot to live in
• Tiny housing
• 3-10 years behind in terms of software development and internet culture
• Extremely polluted skies
• Can be exceptionally dirty in certain spots (Shibuya, Roppongi, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro)
• VERY high maintenance women
• Old people just WON'T go away (hand the damn torch over to the younger generations already!!!!)
  
• HUGE bugs
• Smaller portions for food
• Closed way of thinking (common sense exist; but not in the "intelligent" category)
  
• Group thinking
• 2 faced society
• Terrible, ignored homeless problem
• Jobs can provide bad money for an IT engineer
• No such thing as work-life balance

I'm certain I'm missing more.  But it's not a situation where the quantity of items overtakes another. It is a situation of degree and where one's value lies.