
Why Japan Is Crazy About Housing - ezl
http://www.archdaily.com/450212/why-japan-is-crazy-about-housing/
======
kohsuke
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...](http://www1.m-net.ne.jp/k-web/genkasyokyaku/genka-tatemono.htm)
(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](http://www.mlit.go.jp/common/001002572.pdf)
more

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

~~~
repsilat
"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...

~~~
seanmcdirmid
A lot of them also wind up in eastern Russia, even though the steering wheel
is on the "wrong" side.

~~~
mithras
Same for South East Asia.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
To be fair, Thailand and Indonesia do drive on the wrong side of the road, but
both have fairly strong automotive lobbies that try and keep the cars out.
Eastern Russia is not only close to Japan, it is (a) not Korea (who love
Korean cars), and (b) it is really far away form Moscow's influence in getting
them to buy more expensive cars of lesser quality made much further away.

------
VexXtreme
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
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.

~~~
cmsmith
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.

------
WalterBright
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.

~~~
TylerE
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...](http://followrory.blogspot.com/2013/06/shaken-car-inspection-
in-japan.html)

~~~
patio11
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).

~~~
prawn
I think many of those cars are then moved on to places like the Solomon
Islands?

~~~
hudibras
Here's one website that specializes in these:
[http://www.tradecarview.com/](http://www.tradecarview.com/)

Don't get too excited at some of the crazy prices. They don't include shipping
costs and none of the cheap cars will be street-legal in Europe or North
America.

------
girvo
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 ;)

~~~
rayiner
> 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.

~~~
tostitos1979
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.

~~~
rayiner
I don't know any married couples that live apart, but I know at least one very
long relationship that broke up because people with two specialized jobs
couldn't make their careers work in the same city.

But yeah, the constant tension compromising one person's career or living
apart for substantial periods of time. This is especially true as competition
becomes more national. 10 years ago I would've said that someone from
Pennsylvania would be crazy to go to Stanford over CMU or Penn, assuming they
wanted to work on the east coast. But today I probably wouldn't say that.

------
Alexx
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
"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
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.

~~~
rayiner
> 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
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.).

~~~
Crito
Old homes may have assumed cheap heating, but new homes seem to assume AC
(cheap electricity). I have _comfortably_ lived in 100-150 year old row homes
without AC, and have _sweltered_ in a 25 year old row home with broken AC in
the same city during comparable summers.

Those drafts are a godsend in the summer, homes without drafts or AC turn into
solar ovens.

 _(Other properties of old homes, like high ceilings, also contribute to
livability in the summer (at the expense of being more expensive to heat
during the winter))_

So basically you have a seemingly balanced tradeoff; do you want to waste
energy in the summer, or in the winter? Of course the tradeoff is not _really_
balanced, you can put on more clothing in the winter so long as you keep your
home above 0C (for the pipes), but you can only take off so much clothing in
the summer.

~~~
WildUtah
One weird trick I use to get the effect of those drafts in the summer is to
open a window.

~~~
Crito
Opened windows _along with_ box fans (or better yet, a house fan:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-
house_fan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole-house_fan)) will help, but you
will still be in a worse situation than if you had a house designed to stay
cool and the same fans.

Houses designed to stay cool without AC, among other things, tend to have more
intelligent window placement, and windows that open much wider than is perhaps
normal (you won't find those rubbish casement windows that only crank open to
an acute angle in homes designed to stay cool without AC:
[http://www.choicesil.com/images/House1-16-08%20017.jpg](http://www.choicesil.com/images/House1-16-08%20017.jpg)).

Given the option of staying in a house that never had AC, or a house with
broken AC, I would chose the former every time. Fans and open windows will
help in either case, but they will be more effective in the home that
prioritized that usecase.

------
ggreer
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.

~~~
Retric
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

~~~
ggreer
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.

~~~
repsilat
It gets colder in Tokyo, too. Those "air gaps" and poorly sealing windows make
for chilly winters indoors. And I'm sure houses these days are built with
better insulation than they were twenty or thirty years ago, too.

~~~
Retric
Not to sound like a 50's handyman.
([http://www.familyhandyman.com/doors/repair/fix-sagging-or-
st...](http://www.familyhandyman.com/doors/repair/fix-sagging-or-sticking-
doors/view-all)) However, replacing / rehanging doors and windows and doors is
generally a fast and easy thing to do and more or less required as wood flows
and settles in an older home. Really what your talking about has more to do
with a generally mild climate enabling a lack of maintenance vs. any kind of
earthquake damage.

PS: I stayed at a a 100 year old farm house made by complete Amateurs and
built on over time where some of the floors and trim sloped more than 5
degrees which is vary noticeable to the naked eye. Yet it had decent
insulation, every door opened freely and most windows opened just fine. It
took a few people a few weekends to get it there, but vary little cash. A
respectable carpenter can do the same thing for you for about 10k every 15-20
years. Again though the difference without cold winters there is far less
incentive to actually deal with such things.

Edit: The science behind it is even fairly interesting, but basically wood
reacts to the forces on it over time so the less symmetric the home the more
extreme the warping can get. Which again hurts Japan with there love of
unusual shaped wooden homes.

------
nostromo
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.

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

~~~
randomdata
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.

~~~
tostitos1979
How does this work for condos?

~~~
ghaff
The numbers I've seen suggest that condos on average actually appreciate more
than houses even in a given location [http://re-sanfrancisco.com/10-years-of-
san-francisco-condo-v...](http://re-sanfrancisco.com/10-years-of-san-
francisco-condo-vs-house-appreciation/)

But I'm not sure how much you can conclude from that as a condo could still
appreciate (i.e. someone would be willing to spend more money for it) even if
the underlying physical plant were deteriorating at some rate. It's probably
also worth noting that, in a lot of cases in the US, single family homes in
particular don't necessarily deteriorate. People do maintenance, redo their
kitchens, add decks, etc.

------
drderidder
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
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.

------
squozzer
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.

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

------
yetanotherphd
"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.

------
mosselman
I read 'hosting'.

