At the 2021 annual conference of the Japan Association for Urban Sociology, we held a symposium on “Neighborhood Effects and Cities in Japan.” Although we planned this symposium as an international one, the pandemic of Covid-19 made it impossible to invite presenters from abroad. Thus we invited three leading researchers in this field living in Japan to the symposium. The three presenters referred to some important topics such as ethnographic research, urban subcultures, urban crimes, neighborhood disorder, health inequalities, and deprivation. The presentations and the discussion raise some important questions. (1) What contexts are important in the research of neighborhood effects? (2) What kind of social process works in neighborhood effects? (3) How can we measure neighborhood environments in the context of social research? We expect that this symposium stimulates theoretical and empirical research on neighborhood effects in the field of urban sociology.