Why Japan Is Crazy About Housing

http://www.archdaily.com/450212/why-japan-is-crazy-about-housing/

by ezl • 13 years ago

153 120 13 years ago

ezl• 13 years ago

i found it interesting that depreciation is expected on your property and houses are expected to have no resale value.

segmondy• 13 years ago

same way i find it interesting that the same piece of property can cost $100k in one place and $1 million else where simply because of location. Man can be a very irrational animal, and once he has rationalized some useless idea into being, he can't shake it off his head.

jonnathanson• 13 years ago

Location isn't irrational. In fact, it's probably one of the most rational factors in real estate pricing in the US. It's one of the few factors that's driven largely by the market forces of supply and demand.

Locations are "hot" because they're in places with good jobs, good services, good schools (though this one needs an asterisk), access to amenities and culture, etc.

Locations are "cold" to the degree that they're in high-crime, poor-service areas, or in remote areas without job prospects. Nobody wants to live in these areas, so with reduced demand come lower prices.

A 2,000 square-foot home costs $100k in rural Montana and $1M in Southern California because millions of people want to live in SoCal, and relatively few people want to live in rural Montana. Housing prices in Detroit are low because the job market in Detroit has been cratering for decades while crime has been increasing. A home with a seaside view is worth more than a similarly proportioned home abutting a freeway, because people would rather look at the former than the latter. A home in San Francisco is worth a fortune because lots of people with lots of money want to live here, but the inventory (supply) is limited. Etc.

Plenty of factors in real estate pricing are highly irrational. With few exceptions, location isn't one of them. When people pay for location, they're not paying for the house on that location; they're paying for the location itself. That's why comparing X square feet in Y area to X square feet in Z area isn't apples to apples.

randomdata• 13 years ago

Even in North America, houses are considered a depreciating asset. The property on which the house sits is what tends to appreciate, hopefully offsetting the losses on the house (at least from the owner's point of view).

But with negative population growth and virtual no immigration as is the case with Japan, fewer properties are needed to sustain the decreasing number of people. Supply exceeds demand, so prices fall.

tostitos19792• 13 years ago

How does this work for condos?

girvo• 13 years ago

Every time in read about the Japanese "salaryman" culture, it makes me sad... And then wonder whether the West will end up somewhere similar in the future.

This article had that effect on me, but it also made me angry; taking it at face value, it shows that salarymen have it even worse than I thought :(

They do get interesting architecture out of it, but that's hardly a good trade off for geographic permanence and a lack of financial movement... Or is it? It's hard to grok other cultures, despite my best efforts. Maybe it is worth it to them?

One thing seems to be certain across cultures: no one is happy and everything sucks ;)

yxhuvud• 13 years ago

Probably not - the West used to have much more of a salaryman culture with lifelong employment, but the trend is going in the other direction.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

a good trade off for geographic permanence and a lack of financial movement

Many people, even Americans, see things the opposite way. They don't like the idea of having to move far away from their parents to find a decent job, or have to uproot their families at the drop of a hat when a job ends.

I grew up in D.C., went to college and worked in Atlanta, went to graduate school in Chicago, got a job after in New York. My wife grew up in Oregon, went to college in Iowa, worked in Chicago and D.C., went to graduate school in Chicago.[1] Now we work in Wilmington and Philadelphia, and next year we're moving to Baltimore. This is the nature of the modern American economy, where you move around to find opportunities, but unless you're a single childless early 20-something it makes the rest of life very logistically complicated. Certainly among my friends, who are getting into their 30's, long-distance relationships are quite common and nobody is really thrilled about them.

[1] In comparison, my wife's parents grew up in the same city and went to high school together, less than 50 miles from where her dad's family settled during the wagon trail days.

tostitos19792• 13 years ago

It is interesting to read your comment.

Curious if you know married couples who have to be apart and how this affects their marriage? When both husband and wife have specialized jobs, it seems the choices are to compromise on one person's career or too live apart for at least some periods of time.

ceras• 13 years ago

This is certainly true of Americans in "upper middle class" culture, but how true is it for the rest? I went to an average / below average American high school, and most of my high school peers are still living in my hometown. It's only a subset of the highly ambitious among us who left (some who entered spread out professions like health stayed; engineers left).

And as an adult, many of my peers who grew up in economic centers like NYC and the SF Bay Area were able to stick around, regardless of profession.

squozzer• 13 years ago

A very interesting piece, revealing a cultural side-effect I had not expected. The stereotype we hold in the West about Japan is that conformity is the norm, which for the most part holds. But not in housing it seems. They have my admiration AND sympathy.

snogglethorpe2• 13 years ago

The houses shown are far from typical... :]

ggreer3• 13 years ago

They glossed over one of the biggest reasons houses are demolished after a few decades: earthquakes. Thirty years of earthquakes will ruin any house that's not a bomb shelter.

userulluipeste• 13 years ago

That's not really a reason. Romania has an active epicenter of earthquakes and the houses are not demolished/rebuilt that often. When designing and constructing buildings, there are also just some seismic requirements, that's all. There isn't any planned obsolescence involved and I haven't heard of much earthquake damage since 1977.

ggreer3• 13 years ago

In the past ten years, Japan has had 21 earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or greater. In the past 100 years, Romania has had 5.

Retric2• 13 years ago

Yet San Francisco is filled with older homes...

No, the real reason is the delta between a tiny but valuable home and junk in 30 years is not that high because construction is cheap due to climate and the time value of money eat's what little value might be there. For most people they get most of there value from simply living in the house.

PS: US, also spends a lot of our GDP on housing construction we just value the land vs home differently because of cultural reasons and construction materials. Despite the demonstration from the rust belt that it's mostly the land that's valuable not cheap homes. aka location location location

ggreer3• 13 years ago

I live in San Francisco, and I can tell you that old houses here suck. Many door frames have shifted, so doors have trouble closing. Often, the door has been replaced with a smaller one, leaving giant air gaps. Ditto for windows. They don't seal well, or they jam easily. Floors aren't level. Pillars are noticeably crooked. It's crazy, but San Francisco makes it really hard to build new stuff.

Also, the bay area isn't nearly as geologically active as the Kanto region. If San Francisco had earthquakes of the frequency and scale of Tokyo, hardly any low-rise in the city would last more than 30 years.

Alexx• 13 years ago

Fascinating. I had absolutely no idea.

As someone who lives in a property that's over 140 years old, which has been fully renovated, modernised, and improved (at a guess) maybe 10 times over its life I find the idea of housing as a disposable assets rather alien. Granted, there are no earthquakes here.

I wonder what the social and economic trade off is between maintaining and modernising a building for hundreds of years (considering energy efficiency and standard of living too) vs just knocking it down and building a new one every 30 years.

The article doesn't mention the effect this has on the rental market - If the asset depreciates I can't imagine being a landlord is a very lucrative proposition?

fjk• 13 years ago

"If the asset depreciates I can't imagine being a landlord is a very lucrative proposition"

That's not necessarily the case. Traditionally, landlords make money on 1) cash flow from tenant rents and 2) appreciation of the property at the eventual exit. In Japan, it seems like 2) is out of the equation, but if 1) is high enough, owning rental properties could be very lucrative for landlords, especially if there's high demand for rental properties. Detroit is a market that's experiencing an increase in rental properties even though appreciation is practically nothing in most areas.

staunch• 13 years ago

The brand new apartment I moved into near the center of Tokyo in 2006 is now something like 30% cheaper than it was then. Whereas refinished 1930s era apartments in LA are like 50% more expensive. I absolutely love the constant push to modernize everyone's home. Why shouldn't home technology evolve like any other. Of course it's expensive and wasteful, but so is buying an iPhone 5s.

rayiner4• 13 years ago

Why shouldn't home technology evolve like any other.

Because it doesn't. Home technology evolves so slowly, that the analogous situation in the tech world would be if you could simply upgrade the memory and hard drive on your 286 to be able to use the latest and greatest software.

blacksmith_tb• 13 years ago

Yes and no - the idea of insulating existed 100 years ago, but the materials weren't the greatest (attics full of horsehair, etc.). And the cheapness of fossil fuels made it seem mostly unnecessary. Moving from a drafty 1921 home to a passive house that was built this year, the difference for me was striking. Some of the improvements can be retrofitted onto older homes (PV, blown-in insulation, attic insulation), others, not so much (windows and doors are more painful to replace, e.g.).

DrewAllyn• 13 years ago

It shouldn't because it doesn't? That seems like a circular argument. Home technology would evolve much faster if we invested more into it, and it we rebuilt homes every 30 years, we would be investing a lot more into building...

svachalek• 13 years ago

An iPhone depreciates about $200 a year. It sounds like these houses depreciate... $10,000/yr? I think the modernization is cool and all but, just wow.

nostromo• 13 years ago

Do building codes & zoning play a role in this?

I've seen some crazy structures in the US, including a castle in Northern Idaho, but they tend to be in places with lax building codes (or lax building code enforcement) no HOAs and no urban zoning.

Just in the start of the article they mention a few things that we be hard to build legally in the US: handrail-less stairs, rail-less balconies, windowless rooms & houses.

kohsuke• 13 years ago

A Japanese here. I think this article fell into the same trap that many other similar articles fell into. Namely, in trying to make the article interesting, it attributes more to the culture and psyche, ignoring more mandane logical reasons.

One of the primary reasons houses depreciate in value so rapidly in Japan is simply because that is the accounting rules. If you look at http://www1.m-net.ne.jp/k-web/genkasyokyaku/genka-tatemono.h... (and I hope Google Translate translates it well), you see that the typical wooden houses (the kinds you see in California, where I live) depreciate competely in just 20 years in the eyes of tax agency. This has real effect on mortgage.

The rules around the market are different, too. For example, in California most houses are sold and bought as-is. In Japan, the seller is on the hook for up to an year for problems that weren't discovered at the point of sale.

These differences depress the existing house market, and that is made up by the new house market, which in turn translates into a lot more new houses.

I find this report from Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism highly educational. It comes with lots of numbers: http://www.mlit.go.jp/common/001002572.pdf more

ChuckMcM• 13 years ago

Thanks for the links, Google Translate did enough :-)

I find this fascinating: "The rules around the market are different, too. For example, in California most houses are sold and bought as-is. In Japan, the seller is on the hook for up to an year for problems that weren't discovered at the point of sale."

In California there are many rules, permits, and processes that must be followed before building a new house. This comes from voters (residents) seeking to limit the rate of change in their neighborhood, and restrict change they would find objectionable (like multi-floor houses in a neighbor with all single floor houses). So buying an existing house is always "easier" than building a new one. Buyers are not responsible for any problems that were disclosed at the time of purchase and signed off on by the buyers. The buyer has the option (and should) to get a thorough home inspection prior to the purchase.

Contrast that to Las Vegas were my I spent my formative years where new houses were the norm and 'old' houses were depreciating because why buy an 'old' house when a 'new' one was the same price? This continued for a long time and pretty much covered the valley floor there with very similar looking houses. That has slowed some now that land to build on is quite far away from the rest of town. But I could see that tearing down houses on land closer to town and rebuilding them might improve the value of those houses.

The bottom line for me is that clearly municipal regulation has a lot more influence on home 'value' than a nominally open market would suggest. I always knew it had a some effect but it seems possible that it is perhaps the dominant effect.

aidenn03• 13 years ago

No kidding about building a new house in California. I was quoted an estimate of $250k by a builder just for for permits to build a 2200 sq-ft. home.

Additionally the used home that I did buy would be illegal to build today (as the house is nearly double the size of what is allowed on the lot by current zoning).

twelvechairs2• 13 years ago

I'm an architect (of the building kind) who has worked across countries (though not Japan). I have to concur that one of the things which most frequently dictates what gets built is half-baked rules by mortgagers and financiers.

This article also conflates the 'average' and the 'architecture' (as seen on arch daily) which is very much atypical.Though even with the average there is a stronger actual interest in space than in the west (probably due to actual exposure of average people to different spaces). For instance, I remember looking at the website of a mass house-builder in Japan and the big item being advertised was a 1.5m (approx.) half-height 'nook' space in your living room. This would never happen in the west (most people would think 'whatever would I use that for?'.

bcbrown• 13 years ago

I'm curious, what would that nook space be used for?

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

That doesn't surprise me. I hear automobiles also have short lives in Japan, for similar regulatory reasons.

repsilat2• 13 years ago

"Old" Japanese cars can be shipped off to New Zealand, though -- the steering wheel is on the right side, and import tariffs are low because there isn't a local manufacturing economy to protect. They stay reliable and economical for a long time.

Unfortunately it isn't quite as easy to ship old Japanese houses overseas...

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

I'd heard this specifically with regard to automobile engines: that regulations, fees, and/or taxes are such that relatively low-mileage engines are considered obsolete, and are frequently available outside of Japan as low-cost used or rebuilt engines, often in very good condition.

I found a few general-information sites which suggest this or similar reasons, but cannot find a definitive source.

nourishingvoid2• 13 years ago

It becomes prohibitively expensive to own cars for a long time here in Japan because the government mandates regular inspections, which can cost up to $1000 USD. The period of validity for the inspection depends on the type of vehicle, but in general an inspection on a new car is valid for two to three years and must be done every year or two after that.

molsongolden• 13 years ago

Apologies if this is imposing but do you have any links or insight regarding Japanese estate tax or real estate transfer? A family member passed away recently and was the owner of land in Tokyo. I have visited multiple times but do not speak Japanese and cannot figure out if we need to report the transfer of ownership, pay tax for the transfer, etc... The land is currently used by other family members who own the house that was built on the land.

pwim• 13 years ago

This sounds confusing even for someone who is fluent in Japanese. Perhaps seeking professional help would be wise. It sounds like the kind of thing this guy does: http://www.langleyesquire.com/

bane• 13 years ago

To echo this, this guy [1] has a fantastic series on buying and refurbishing property in Japan and talks about what you're mentioning.

It's actually surprisingly fascinating. He also has some interesting videos on the recycling culture in Japan including videos of open air recycling centers full of perfectly working appliances.

1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZfoMTPXZXE&list=SPE0D149A2A5...

hrktb• 13 years ago

Just to throw it in there. Accounting rules more or less matches repair rules. Especially for buildings, there is a defined schedule for the exterior and water/gas pipes maintenance, which is something like every 10 years for the exterior, and every 30 year for the pipes and other basic structures(a quick link in english [1]).

And after 50~60 years there is a major overhaul of most buildings that could cost the same amount as just scrapping and rebuilding everything (which is the prefered solution). It may seems short compared to other countries' building repair schedules, but earthquake resisting buildings are build with very different norms, like more "moving" or bending parts, possibly flexible pipes which won't last as long as other rigid materials, elevators which will cost a lot more to maintain that basic ones, etc.

Also as years go by architects are better at designing resisting buildings, and after 30 years there is a gap in the materials and technology used, which can justify a hefty premium on new buildings.

[1] http://japanpropertycentral.com/2013/08/large-scale-repairs-...

nourishingvoid2• 13 years ago

Thank you for the links, they were very informative. I also found the article a bit cursory. I was particularly surprised that they didn't mention Japan's construction industry. It makes up a much larger part of the economy than in countries like the United States or the United Kingdom, and it exerts a lot of political power. A large number of the laws promoting new construction over renovation or purchase of existing buildings benefit the construction industry more than property owners.

I recommend Alex Kerr's Dogs and Demons for a more detailed discussion of real estate and zoning laws in Japan.

harisenbon3• 13 years ago

Hi Kohsuke,

In Japan, the seller is on the hook for up to an year for problems that weren't discovered at the point of sale.

Actually, it's 5 years in Japan now. My contractor just had to do a complete re-wallpapering of my house because the paper suddenly split.

WalterBright5• 13 years ago

It seems a lot like cars in the US, where people regularly discard perfectly good cars and buy new ones. In my extended family, we tend to keep cars for decades, driving them daily. If you keep them maintained (and maintenance is cheap), you can keep them operating just fine for a long time.

Heck, my truck is 25 years old, I've had it for 20 years, costs me about $300/yr in maintenance, insurance is cheap (no collision), no worries about somebody stealing or damaging it, and I go out on a frosty morning, turn the key, and it starts right up.

I don't feel any urge to replace it with a new one.

TylerE5• 13 years ago

The japanese are even more insane there. Their inspections are insanely expensive, to the point where cars older than 5-6 years have essentially negative value, as the biannual inspection would cost something like $5k.

http://followrory.blogspot.com/2013/06/shaken-car-inspection...

WalterBright5• 13 years ago

Other than the absurd "cash for clunkers" program, the government here is fairly friendly to us old car drivers. For example, a couple days ago was the last time I have to have my truck emissions tested. At 25 years of age it drops off the radar.

My 40 year old Dodge now qualifies for "collector plates" where, for a one time fee, I never have to pay the annual registration fee again.

And, of course, there is quite an industry in the US providing repair/maintenance parts for those old machines for far less money than parts for new cars. It's really quite nice if you like having those cars.

patio11• 13 years ago

There's a perfectly rational reason for shaken (車検), though most HNers won't like it. It's designed to help a few parts of the auto industry value chain, from manufacturers (who get a domestic market which is, basically, forced into a 6-year upgrade cycle) to smaller-scale exporters (who get a constant stream of perfectly usable cars for essentially scrap value, then resell them to emerging markets for significant fractions of their off-the-lot value, because "everyone knows" that Japanese cars last forever).

TwoBit2• 13 years ago

I'll bet that the auto industry lobbied for those expensive inspections.

ableal2• 13 years ago

If you haven't seen it, you should look up the "modus vs. volvo" crash experiment (videos come up top in search results). It is half-drowned in "breathless TV", but it's interesting.

Car manufacturers did up their safety game over the last decades. My daily drive is also a car of a certain age, and that's the only doubt I have about it ...

henrikschroder2• 13 years ago

When I got my driver's license last year I had to go through some education on driving risks, and they showed us some cars that had been in actual accidents. The main takeaway from that was that you really, REALLY, want a car from this side of the 2000's. There has been a tremendous amount of work put into safety features in the last 15 years across the board, and you SHOULD take advantage of that.

drderidder• 13 years ago

Avante garde houses like those shown in the article are still very much the exception and not the norm in Japan. It's true that some Japanese architects are pushing the envelope but vernacular housing in Japan today is exemplified by companies like Daikyo, Mitsue, etc and not by these modernist custom designs.

bhewes• 13 years ago

Actual the fact a house deprecates makes more financial sense then what he have in the US. A house is an expensive durable good. Land is the asset that appreciates. Nothing crazy about separating the two.

mosselman• 13 years ago

I read 'hosting'.

VexXtreme• 13 years ago

I live in Japan and I find the housing here completely abysmal. The construction practices are very poor and even if you shell out for an apartment in a new mansion, expect to find paper-thin walls, no heat insulation and overall very shoddy construction quality. In the winter my (fairly new) apartment gets almost as cold as outside and getting up in the morning always requires running the AC for half an hour first. Single pane windows are standard, there is no central heating and walls are hollow and very thin. I can literally hear my neighbor taking a shower every night, and don't get me started on being able to hear passersby on the street all night long, despite the fact that I live pretty high up.

This is an absolutely amazing 1st world country with 3rd world construction practices. I blame it on several factors:

1. Cheap and scammy construction companies that try to maximize their profit margin by using cheap materials and poor building practices.

2. People who don't know any better. Most Japanese people assume that what they get is standard and fair.

3. The pervasive Japanese mindset that everything is disposable, replaceable and ephemeral. In Japan, little value is generally placed on long term value of things.

The house where I grew up in Europe is built like a castle compared to even some of the best houses I've seen here.

If this doesn't sound crazy enough, there are a lot of carbon monoxide related deaths every winter in Japan because many people (especially elderly people) use an ancient heating system called /kotatsu/, where they burn coal under a small table that's covered with a blanket. My girlfriend once got burnt badly because she fell asleep under her kotatsu and accidentally touched the heater. Don't get me started on electric blankets and similar nonsense, which is all over the place.

hoi• 13 years ago

I also used to live in Japan. Construction has to follow guidelines to ensure they comply to earthquake standards and Japan is one of the leaders in earthquake - proof technology. Part of this may come in the compromise of 'thinner walls'.

This in part also explains why tearing down a house and building a new one is desired, as you would want the most modern earthquake proof property.

I haven't lived in a place in Japan that wasn't double glazed and central heating is not really required since most of the year heating is not required (at least in Tokyo).

Without trying to sound 'patronizing', you sound a bit like a foreigner who hasn't yet fully adapted to Japan.

andrewcooke2• 13 years ago

chile also has earthquakes and seems to be completely different (the buildings i have lived in have had thick walls - they help keep the building cool in summer - and there is a strong second-hand market). so i don't think earthquakes explain this.

TwoBit2• 13 years ago

If what's he's saying is right, it doesn't matter if he's a foreigner who hasn't adapted.

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

There are many other earthquake-prone regions which don't rely on thin-wall, disposable architecture.

What you generally will see is an aversion to unreinforced masonry construction -- stone or brick. Where you do see these they've generally been substantially reinforced with either internal or external metal skeletons (or you live in a region with poor building codes and the structures were erected since the last big temblor).

I'd suspect that Japanese construction methods follows engineering to some extent, but is also strongly influenced by tradition.

cmsmith• 13 years ago

Without getting into the general argument here, I'm just going to dispel a few misconceptions about earthquake engineering:

No one (basically) who is involved in earthquake engineering would ever use the term 'earthquake-proof' to describe one building, much less an entire country's construction practices. Instead, we generally design buildings to not require any repair after earthquakes which occur more frequently than once per century, and design buildings not to fall down after earthquakes which occur more frequently than once per 2500 years. There is always a chance that an earthquake will occur outside of those limits, and nothing is designed to withstand those.

While you are correct in assuming that adding weight to a structure (all things being equal) will increase the seismic forces it experiences, the contribution of sound insulation to the weight of the building is pretty insignificant. And for lightweight structures it is much easier to increase their strength than to decrease their weight.

Third, earthquake resistant 'technology' [re: design practices] is not as ever-changing as you might think. While there are some examples of innovative solutions like putting water tanks at the top of skyscrapers, for low-rise structures there really isn't that much to it. If you take a 100 year old house, screw some plywood sheets between the floors, and bolt it to the foundation, then it will be 90% (estimated) as safe as a brand new house. Earthquake resistance is not so much about technology, and is more about making very sure that all of the force generated in the house can make it to the ground without breaking anything (though physicists would say that the force goes in the other direction from the ground to the structure). This means that earthquake safety is fairly proportional to the amount of time and money spent on construction, which is very much not incentivized by disposable construction.

snogglethorpe2• 13 years ago

I've lived in Japan for quite a while, and to the degree I can judge (I'm not an architect or a civil engineer... :), the housing stock seems pretty good on average. While obviously there's a wide range of examples in all countries, certainly modern Japanese housing seems to be of far higher quality and far better finished than "equivalent" modern U.S. housing (U.S. housing from 100 years ago is a completely different thing).

It is very true that there is a somewhat different conception of what housing should be like, with Japanese housing being relatively small, compact, and lightweight (though there are those heavy tile roofs on more traditional houses...). The concept of "insulation" seems to be rather unknown in Japan, which is a real shame given their energy issues (I don't know the amount to which home heating contributes to energy usage though).

I think it's a mistake, though, to conflate all this with with a lack of quality, or to dismiss the cultural differences. Granted, if you, as a European, are trying to find housing, you're going to want what you want, not what the average Japanese wants, but your post does have a whiff of condescension about it ("These poor Japanese, how ignorant they are of our superior European practices!").

[I'll note that in my experience living in Japan, it's much quieter than urban living in the U.S., despite the higher densities and relative lack of insulation, simply because people take more care to not be obnoxious. There's some noise but it's more likely to be quiet conversation on the balcony next door, or children laughing as they play, and not so much douchebag-practicing-his-electric-bass-at-3am. The urban U.S. is noisy.]

I once visited a fairly wealthy Japanese family who had a big, newly built (and very cool) house in the countryside. It was a fairly cold windy winter's day when I visited, but the whole family was sitting in a small room with multiple glass doors to the outside wide open, with the wind blowing in, huddled around a portable electric heater watching TV...

I also totally disagree with your dismissal of the kotatsu; it's a fantastic invention (right up there with bathtubs you can easily completely immerse yourself in, with a friend), and there's very little more cozy and wonderful than snuggling up under a kotatsu on a cold winter's evening.... also, cats love kotatsus!! :] [and heating an insulated 0.5m^3 space is a lot more efficient than heating a whole house!]

nitrogen4• 13 years ago

I for one would prefer apartments to provide enough isolation that one could practice their electric bass at 3AM without bothering the neighbors. Society is prejudiced against night owls enough already ;-).

rwhitman• 13 years ago

Sounds like Southern California.

hudibras2• 13 years ago

My experience as a Westerner living in Japan for many years is so obviously different than yours (I never had sound issues when I lived in apartments, my new house is shockingly well-built and designed when compared to the American houses I'm used to, I've never seen a non-electric powered kotatsu outside of a museum, etc.) that I think we'll just have to agree to disagree for the most part.

However, regarding the lack of central heating in Japanese dwellings, I think that's a true cultural difference between Japan and America. It's strange for an American to wake up in a cold room or have to turn on the heat (or AC in summer) when we move into the bedroom after dinner--but it's equally strange to a Japanese person when they see we're heating an entire American house 24 hours/day. It some ways they're right: when the entire family is in one room watching TV or using computers, why should you waste energy heating the entire rest of the house when you could just heat one room--or even just heat up 6 or so cubic feet of space underneath a kotatsu or electric blanket?

harisenbon3• 13 years ago

I've lived in Japan for 11 years now, and have the complete opposite experience from you. While older houses (30~10 years ago) were horribly insulated, houses now are sturdily built, with good insulation (mine has fiberglass and spray-foam composite) and are pretty well put together. If you buy a cheap house, then yeah, you'll have a cheap house -- but that's anywhere in the world.

If this doesn't sound crazy enough, there are a lot of carbon monoxide related deaths every winter in Japan because many people (especially elderly people) use an ancient heating system called /kotatsu/, where they burn coal under a small table that's covered with a blanket.

Umm.. Kotatsu do not produce Carbon Monoxide. They're usually electric, and you're the first foreigner I've ever seen who has complained about them. (I love them, my wife hates them because once inside, I never leave)

Carbon monoxide poisoning usually comes from eldery in older house where they use kerosene heaters (touyu) for heating. Almost all kerosene heaters have a 3-hour timer though, so it is a little safer than you make out.

mathattack• 13 years ago

There is definitely an irony in shoddy construction being done in an earthquake prone country.

I think part of it may also be that the construction companies form a strong political lobby.

astrodust• 13 years ago

Poor quality and earthquake resistant are not mutually exclusive.

Peeling wallpaper is not going to affect the structural integrity of your house.

dicemoose• 13 years ago

This is an absolutely amazing 1st world country with 3rd world construction practices. The earthquake in 2011 probably showed that Japanese houses are built quite sturdily.

Older houses did not have insulation, but insulation has been the norm for a while. I've moved several times in the Tokyo area and the apartment I've had that had thin walls was an olden wooden building that's about 40 years old now. And I'm not living in expensive places either.

yetanotherphd• 13 years ago

"Why Japan/China/Korea does X stupid thing" followed by some orientalist explanation is becoming very common. If you wrote a similar article about an African or Jewish country you would probably lose your job.

Why Japan Is Crazy About Housing

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