Long-Term Building in Japan

https://longnow.org/ideas/02019/09/11/long-term-building-in-japan/

by tosh • 4 years ago

137 126 4 years ago

pcurve5• 4 years ago

For those wondering about the cost...

I found it elsewhere: "The most recent rebuilding required 14,000 cypress timbers, 25,000 sheaves of reeds, took 9 years to complete, and cost over $500 million."

"Obtaining large enough timber posts, for instance, requires trees 300 to 500 years old"

I seriously hope they can give it a rest for a while.

earleybird• 4 years ago

There are 300+ yr old timber frame barns etc in Europe, so it seems to be plausibly a net zero impact.

pcurve5• 4 years ago

Hrm, I figured Japanese is doing this in a sustainable way, but I can't help but wonder about the half a billion dollar price tag. It's a massive public works project since it's partly tax funded that benefits particular sectors.

Since they've been doing it for 1400 years, superstitiously inclined people will be adamantly against making changes to the interval.

ricardobeat• 4 years ago

Is that for all 80000 shrines? That’s 6k per unit.

I’m sure the USA builds more backyard sheds than that, at a higher price tag, every year.

denkmoon• 4 years ago

On the other hand, most backyard sheds don't use materials that take 300-500 years to produce. Well, except the petro-plastics...

pcurve5• 4 years ago

no, it's just that particular shrine... Ise Shrine.

https://theprepared.org/features-feed/ise-jingu-and-the-pyra....

80,000 is number of shrine in the entire region.

morninglight• 4 years ago

The cost is minuscule compared to the ROI.

Religion in Japan is big business, just like your home country. Rest assured that when you visit a shrine in Japan, the first thing to greet you will be an offering box.

pcurve5• 4 years ago

Oh yeah tell me about it. Every single shrine I hit in Kyoto... it was 500-600 yen.. and this was when exchange rate was 90 yen per dollar!

alephnan5• 4 years ago

The cost is minuscule compared to the ROI. Religion in Japan is big business, just like your home country.

That's a very western way of looking at things.

Alternatively, it can be viewed as a community crowdsourcing and preserving culture.

Aeolun• 4 years ago

This makes it sound like that $500 million is just the cost of reconstruction of one shrine.

Every 20 years exact copies of Naiku, Geku, and 14 other shrines are built on empty sites next to the existing structures
the rebuilding also includes creating exact copies of thousands of ceremonial treasures and artifacts

But the real value in this whole deal is that the entire reconstruction happens using traditional techniques, passing them on to the next generation.

$500 million feels like a steal for preserving your cultural heritage like that.

throw0101a• 4 years ago

Contrast with Japanese residential housing:

An unusual feature of Japanese housing is that houses are presumed to have a limited lifespan, and are generally torn down and rebuilt after a few decades, generally twenty years for wooden buildings and thirty years for concrete buildings – see (§) regulations for details. Refurbishing properties, rather than rebuilding them, is a relatively uncommon practice in Japan, though its prevalence is increasing, indicating that attitudes towards older houses may be changing.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Japan

Raze, rebuild, repeat: why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years

* https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...

Japanese Homes Aren’t Built to Last—and That’s the Point

* https://robbreport.com/shelter/home-design/japanese-homes-ar...

gamegoblin• 4 years ago

The main subject of the post is a temple that has been torn down and rebuilt every 20 years for over a thousand years. It’s an example of continual, dynamic renewal rather than static permanence.

donw2• 4 years ago

It is fantastically frustrating, as it makes wealth-building through home ownership impossible. The land will nominally hold its value, but the $300k+ you spend to build a house literally just... vanishes.

This might have made sense back when houses were cheap to build, but now, houses in Japan are probably twice as expensive per unit area compared to the US. Salaries are low as well, so building a house here is basically a one-way ticket to 35 years of wage-slavery.

Don't even think about a used house, because they were built to a level of cheapness that defies logic, along with a complete disregard for utility. A 1970s rubber-stamp development home in the US has better design, no joke. Windows, light switches, and walls will be allocated by a pseudo-random algorithm that somehow maximizes inconvenience:

"Hmm... what could we do on this wall? I know, a gigantic off-center window that looks directly out upon the wall of the neighbor's house! Let's also make sure the kitchen sink underneath it is also off-center, but differently. That 'sketched by a drunken, retarded misanthrope' effect doesn't just happen on its own: you gotta work for it."

"We've got this other wall over here, how can we make it even more useless? We've already sketched in a massive off-center window that looks right into the neighbor's lavatory, but I dunno. Something's missing. I think we left some utility... ah, that's it, we need to drop the window below countertop height."

"Remember, electricity is a fad. One 20A circuit is plenty to cover an entire six-meter wall. In the kitchen."

Did I also mention that a "big" housing lot is 1/20 of an acre? Usually no yard, just concrete.

(You are correct in observing that I have spent way too much time on this over the past year, as I very much would like to buy a home)

throwaway1777• 4 years ago

Fantastically frustrating to someone with an American point of view. What do the Japanese think about it? Perhaps there’s a different point of view?

warning26• 4 years ago

It is fantastically frustrating, as it makes wealth-building through home ownership impossible

TBH this seems more like a feature than a bug. Home ownership should be less about investment income and more about, well, owning a home.

BlargMcLarg2• 4 years ago

but the $300k+

Japanese homes aren't that expensive unless you want a very big space / luxurious place.

houses in Japan are probably twice as expensive per unit area compared to the US

You might be surprised this goes for most of the world. The US is spoiled in regards to cost per square meter after adjusting for office worker salary (let alone tech salaries). Until you go to the big cities, where the problems are far, far worse than e.g. Tokyo.

Salaries are low as well

Salaries in most of Japan aren't even that low when compared to the remainder of the West. You can find quite a few anecdotes pointing out the opposite, calling Japan more affordable if anything (truth probably being somewhere in the middle).

Try looking in big cities around most of Europe and even Canada. You'll find similar issues, both in salaries and in housing prices vs housing sizes.

dangus2• 4 years ago

It is fantastically frustrating, as it makes wealth-building through home ownership impossible

I think this could bring up a debate: should we expect personal home ownership be a wealth-building tool? Is it the most ideal method of building personal wealth? The expectation that our home is an investment on top of being a place to live could perhaps be one of the factors in areas with a housing affordability crisis. It's in the best interest of the current homeowner to discourage development that would reduce costs for other buyers.

houses in Japan are probably twice as expensive per unit area compared to the US

I don't see this as particularly alarming, as homes built in the US consume and waste a tremendous amount of space. I think about the typical single family suburban home's attached 2 or 3 car garage and how much of the home's sheltered space that feature takes up.

I also think about the American expectation for luxuries like walk-in closets, having more bathrooms than people, and rooms dedicated to "man caves" and other single-use pursuits. To me, the American suburban lifestyle represents a place to store excess goods consumption – the home is a place to store a bunch of stuff that ends up in the landfill.

Tokyo fits the entire population of California in an area the size of LA County, and I personally consider that to be more of a good thing than a bad thing. When we spread out we waste finite resources and emit carbon dioxide with personal vehicle travel and destroy more natural habitat.

Did I also mention that a "big" housing lot is 1/20 of an acre? Usually no yard, just concrete.

Much of the overall plot of North American homes are consumed by driveways, yards, and dead space between homes that are usually completely unused for most of the day.

Yards and driveways are major contributors to car dependence and poor public transit in North America. Yards usually offer very little utility and sit unused most of the day, offering zero habitat for animals or people. They reduce walkability of neighborhoods by increasing walking distances between homes and in the street grid.

"But where will my kids play?" Probably at a communal playground, park, sports field, and really they're probably not going to be all that excited by an empty field in the front of your house.

https://twitter.com/officialmitchll/status/13827099403521351...

Finally, I'll point out that to someone in a vertical housing unit like a residential tower, ground acreage is entirely irrelevant. I don't think the owner of the penthouse unit of 432 Park Avenue is upset that their home represents almost no acreage once the building's plot is divided by the quantity of residents.

I'll drop a couple of articles that discuss some of the negatives of misusing open space in urban planning:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/7/23/the-problem-of...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/the-clamor-for-ope...

"Designing green spaces nobody wants" in the article below:

https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/jul/28/urba...

presentation• 4 years ago

At least it's possible for a budget-conscious person to rent a simple apartment within a 10 minute commute of central Tokyo for ~$500. Try doing that in San Francisco. Different expectations

fomine3• 4 years ago

This is a bit myth. Though taxable value would become near zero and it can't be priced much (except land), usually houses won't be rebuilt at 20 years. Original residents continue to live there. No market value != no value.

burntoutfire• 4 years ago

Does that mean it's possible to buy a 20-30 year old house for just the price of land? That sounds fantastic.

thematrixturtle• 4 years ago

(02019)

hoseja• 4 years ago

Honestly I like the +10k (12019) better.

diebeforei485• 4 years ago

I think getting rid of (or renovating) old structures is a good thing. 100 year old houses are not generally fun to live in, unless they have been very very well maintained to the point that it would have been cheaper to rebuild.

soperj• 4 years ago

I've been in 200+ year old structures in the Netherlands that are nicer than the majority of houses I've been to in NA.

ajmurmann• 4 years ago

How high-end and affordable were these buildings when they got constructed? I remodeled a ~300 year olds house in rural Germany. The building used to house at least two families till the first half of the 20th century. We had to in essence redo everything except for maybe 70% of the oak beams, totally change the layout, dig up and lower the floors to accommodate anyone but tiny people and build out the attic to make the building attractive at all. This building was at the equivalent of the village square when it was constructed. Had the village grown and turned into Al even a town, I'd hoped it would have been replaced a long time ago. I'm proud I got to take part in this work and will in all likelihood own it myself some day. If it wasn't a under heritage protection we'd likely not have preserved it though because it makes little economic sense.

robswc5• 4 years ago

What sort of structures? And how are you deciding "nice" ?

I do believe you, its just when I think of a nice structure to live in, good HVAC is a must and lots of place in Europe simply don't have AC... can't speak as to why that's the case but its one of those things you take for granted lol

michaelt• 4 years ago

That depends on how building standards have shifted in your location in the last 100 years - and the durability of construction methods used.

Here in the UK most homes are built from brick, and in many regards standards of housebuilding have dropped a lot since the 1920s. A 100-year-old house will have its downsides (standards of insulation weren't high 100 years ago) but will often be more desirable than a new-build property.

mbg721• 4 years ago

Some older near-the-city-center suburbs of US cities have the same phenomenon. There are sometimes quirks like entire neighborhoods where all the houses have a different stained-glass window because there was a stained-glass guy nearby when they were built. That usually comes with the obligatory comment from every contractor or insurance person, "Yeah, wow, you couldn't get (x feature) made that way today for any price."

brigandish• 4 years ago

Quality standards have usually gone up, but space standards are the ones that tend to go down, whether that’s de facto because of the market/demand, or actual standards.

The first step to improving this would be to vote out all the MPs who legislate in the interest of landlords- because most MPs are landlords. Reducing overall immigration would probably help too. A removal of housing benefit, which actually benefits businesses and not those receiving the “benefit”, by subsidising wages and inflating housing prices for desirable areas, instead of allowing prices to fall or for businesses to pay what’s needed, should be considered too.

ekianjo12• 4 years ago

getting rid of (or renovating) old structures is a good thing.

It's worse than that in Japan. They build everything cheaply and plan to destroy them in 50-60 years down the line, making investing in property a really bad plan as whatever you buy sees its value go to actual zero. This causes a massive economic strain on Japan.

kalleboo• 4 years ago

It seems like less of an economic strain than having housing becoming an investment that must go up at all costs, pricing everyone out.

sgerenser• 4 years ago

I thought it was more like 30 years?

barry-cotter2• 4 years ago

That’s not how businesses or people plan. Discounted cash flow over 60 years means that a cost that’s 60 years away does not matter. Also, Japan went from bombed out wreck to one of the richest countries in the world with this attitude to property so if it hurts at all it’s a minor cost.

bobthepanda5• 4 years ago

It‘s not necessarily that it‘s cheap, but also constant updating of building regulations when more powerful earthquakes hit. In 1990 if you were buying a house older than ten years it might be the difference between life and death.

The latest (‘80s) regulation buildings have held up even through the 2011 quake, so this is the first generation of 50 year old buildings that also meet the safety standards of their day.

astrange7• 4 years ago

Japan is absolutely full of developed property and in many cases way overdeveloped (there’s nothing they won’t cover in concrete, even creek beds), so it seems to work. I think their theory is it keeps the construction industry working, whereas in California we might end up forgetting how to build houses if we keep using the ones from 1969.

The terrible quality and strange choices of many Japanese buildings is notable though. A lot of residential buildings are covered in what I can only describe as bathroom tiles. And they have no insulation and extremely cheap windows.

Ekaros4• 4 years ago

Also buildings were used differently from back then. Now we expect indoor toilets, bathrooms and so on. In even relatively recent past these really weren't standard. And they place entirely new restrictions and needs for structures that really weren't experienced to work so. Specially with moisture causing mold.

ghostly_s• 4 years ago

(2019), though details in the article seem to indicate this trip took place in 2013.

wodenokoto• 4 years ago

The article buries the lead. What’s the other structure?

Jedd• 4 years ago

The article buries the lead. What’s the other structure?

lede.

And it's towards the end of the article - Hōryū-ji at Nara.

lmm• 4 years ago

"Lead" is perfectly legitimate, arguably more so than "lede" which had almost vanished from use before it got revived as an affectation.

rootos• 4 years ago

What do they do with the old wood? Do they recycle it? Can someone buy it?

robswc5• 4 years ago

Very respectable. On a side note though, I often see people complain about how things aren't "built to last" anymore and sometimes I wonder (as a person naive to construction) is that even a good thing?

I've lived in a few places over the years and it seems the older houses were consistently not great while the newer ones might have felt cheaper, but all the while felt "designed" for modern life.

Perhaps since my family was never really well off growing up, I'm used to "cheap, old houses" and now that things have gotten a bit better, I find myself in newer, more expensive houses... idk, just seems like any house built now wouldn't really suit most people 100 years from now, no matter the quality.

A "simple" example, we do have a vacation cottage that was built in the 1800s, passed down each generation, with very few changes. It's holding up well but it feels like it was made for elves and "fixing" that would be next to impossible without redoing most of the building. Again nice to visit but you would have to make a ton of changes to make it more livable...

hparadiz2• 4 years ago

100 years ago no one would have imagined that a couple in their 20s would want a room dedicated to their desktop computers.... or even that each of them might want a separate "office". And I say "office" in quotes cause it's really a nerd cave that I might work in as well.

I imagine some folks on HN would even want a dedicated VR space with a cleared out 10x10 square.

What is considered luxury housing changes overtime.

Bayart• 4 years ago

100 years ago no one would have imagined that a couple in their 20s would want a room dedicated to their desktop computers.... or even that each of them might want a separate "office". And I say "office" in quotes cause it's really a nerd cave that I might work in as well.

They were refered to as smoking rooms and boudoirs, but they very much existed.

Retric• 4 years ago

100 years ago people wanted extra space, they could rarely afford it. A piano for example takes up quite a bit of space, let alone ballrooms or billiards rooms etc.

It’s interesting to look at the ownership history of old buildings over time. Often people kept adding additions even though the owners where less wealthy in relative terms they tend to be more wealthy in absolute terms.

distances3• 4 years ago

100 year old buildings in European city centers have high ceilings and large windows. Nobody builds that high rooms any more, I would guess in order to fit more stories in the building. They do show their age sometimes with weird floorplans, lack of ventilation, and perhaps noticeable draft. But these will be very livable for a long, long time still.

Granted, some survivorship bias is surely in effect, and these were probably the fancy buildings of their time with better construction quality.

ido3• 4 years ago

We have some relatives living an apartment (I think) a couple centuries old- I would guess from the early 1800s or 1700s, I have lived in multiple late 19th century and early 20th century apartments and all of them felt a lot more modern than that one. One weird thing is that there is only 1 sink in it, so if you go to the toilet you have to wash your hands in the kitchen sink afterwards.

Also only 1 toilet & there's no space for a dishwasher or some other modern appliances.

It looks nice but I would definitely prefer to live in a more modern apartment long-term.

IAmEveryone• 4 years ago

Survivorship bias is less of a factor than commonly assumed. If you check, for example, this map showing the age of buildings in Berlin (https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/so-alt-wohnt-berlin/), you will note that it is neighborhoods rather than individual buildings that survived (or didn't). Large parts of Berlin were built in the early 1900s, and the differences between individual buildings is rather small. Survival depended on the war and, to a lesser degree, the east/west split, with policy in the east being more inclined to tear down intact city blocks and replace them with architecture better representing the ideology of the times.

pmoriarty• 4 years ago

I guess I'm spoiled from growing up in America, but my pet peeve about old buildings in Europe is that so many of them seem to have super tiny toilets, where there's barely enough room to close the door after you sit down. They make the worst toilets in America seem like luxury mansions in comparison.

Cthulhu_• 4 years ago

A lot of these are now considered protected, like the canal houses in Amsterdam; they cannot just rebuild those. They will often be gutted and modernized on the inside and have their foundations replaced though.

Meanwhile in the rest of the country, houses will get demolished after a certain time, 50-100 years after they're built. They could be kept around longer, but it's a factor of maintenance costs, energy bills, attractiveness and value. In a lot of cases they will replace older, small houses in desirable locations with bigger ones and charge higher rent for example.

pas2• 4 years ago

Nobody builds that high rooms any more [...]

All luxury apartments are built like that. Everyone is aware that it's "better" (I guess almost everyone would prefer to live in a high ceiling room with big windows, who doesn't have some kind of reverse-claustrophobia)

But since half of the world has an irrational hard on for suburban ghettos, mostly that's where we waste our economic surplus.

BiteCode_dev2• 4 years ago

I live in Nice, a city at the border of France and Italia.

My area is full of beautiful buildings that would never be built anymore:

- the fancy wall sculptures, round corners and marble stairs would be way too expensive to build today.

- they have a lot of volume: high ceiling, corridors, spacious stairways, that would be "optimized" today into the required minimum allowed by law.

- they are not too high, because they didn't have the mean to do that. So I see the sky, and the sun reaches my windows.

- they have "buffer areas". Entrances, places with green, fancy chiseled property doors, around the building. I don't come out and arrive right on the street. My bike rack, mailbox and trash disposal area are behind a light and elegant fence.

- there are a lot of windows, and large ones, so I have a lot of light.

- some rooms have old style wooden floor. It's pretty, and warm to the feet. It would be ruinous to add that today, you would get a premade cheap one at most if you had the budget.

- I have a spot in a tower. It's useless, nobody in their damn mind would build that anymore. I love it. And all my friends are always mentioning it when we talk about the flat. For some reason, it's very pleasing.

Mostly, they are charming to live in, those old buildings.

One could value that or not, but after living in a lot of different places, I find I often prefer older buildings even if they are less comfortable. They bring me more joy.

Unfortunatly, it's not just about the cost: we are loosing the skill we used to have to make those.

Not to mention we used to treat construction workers very badly so it made building a lot of things possible at the time that would be indecent today.

Freak_NL2• 4 years ago

The pedant in me is slightly miffed by the very conscious use of that five-digit year notation (e.g., 02033) in the article (this being the home of that jarring monstrosity), the neat use of macrons (the dashes over long vowels in transcribed Japanese, as in 'Jingū'), and then oddly referring to a Long Now member from the Netherlands as “a […] member in Holland” (which many Dutch perceive as like being called English when you are born in Edinburgh).

The no-smoking sign at Hōryū-ji mentioned in the article doesn't just prohibit smoking, but open flame of any kind as well as taking combustibles inside (think contractors doing some job). That last bit got dropped by whoever put the English translation on the sign. It makes a little more sense that way.

andyjohnson0• 4 years ago

The pedant in me is slightly miffed by the very conscious use of that five-digit year notation (e.g., 02033) in the article (this being the home of that jarring monstrosity)

Yes its a bit of an affectation, and it does seem to annoy some people, but I do think it has some value as a subtle hint that "there is more after that". That observation by Danny Hillis:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all." [1]

...is still pretty true. There is very little mention of the future that isn't either gadget-focussed or terrifying (ie the climate crisis). We just don't have any signifiers that people want to use. I'd like to be able to say that Long Now has had some influence regarding this, but sadly (outside of a smallish bubble) I don't think it has. At least they're trying though and doing interesting stuff, I guess.

(Disclosure: Long Now charter member fwiw)

[1] https://longnow.org/about/ (I removed the leading zeroes because I'm pretty sure they weren't in the original quote)

smikhanov• 4 years ago

    > and now no one mentions a future date at all

It might be that works of Mark Fisher (aka k-punk) hold an answer to that. He convincingly argues that somewhere around 1990s the humanity lost the ability to conjure alternative futures, or having ideas about the future at all, because capitalism now sets the limit of what is thinkable. According to Fisher, any future without capitalism doesn’t appear to be thinkable, so all humanity is left to do is infinitely rehashing ideas of last 50-60 years (post-WWII period, coinciding with emergence of the late capitalism).

Izkata• 4 years ago

but I do think it has some value as a subtle hint that "there is more after that".

I think it does the opposite. 4-digit years that don't start with 0 don't necessarily imply it ends at 9999, because that's just not how numbers work in general. On the other hand, including the 0 prefix implies that 5 digits is significant in some way, more like an ID than a simple count or like a combination lock which requires N digits, and as such implies there isn't anything after 99999.

messe• 4 years ago

and then oddly referring to a Long Now member from the Netherlands as “a […] member in Holland” (which many Dutch perceive as like being called English when you are born in Edinburgh).

Assuming this[1] is the same Daniel Erasmus, then his office is indeed in Amsterdam, which is in North Holland. It doesn't say he's from there. So this more like being called a member in England, when you are living in England.

[1] https://danielerasmus.com/

Freak_NL2• 4 years ago

Well yeah, but you don't usually refer to someone's province (or similar subdivision) of residence in an international context like this. It's like saying the member from Thüringen, Bouches du Rhône, or Saitama.

helsinkiandrew• 4 years ago

Reminds me of "Raze, rebuild, repeat: why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years": https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736734

anon2020dot00• 4 years ago

Five-digit year notation seems more like a gimmick instead of something useful given that four-digit notation (2022) will suffice for at least 5000 more years.

Future generations will probably come-up with something more clever than a Five-digit year notation.

Long-Term Building in Japan

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