houses

The urban landscape in osaka is pretty mental. It's like a chaos theory. Or like looking at kanji for the first time - it's interesting but it's difficult to define what you see.

There's certainly no consistency - a massive jigsaw puzzle of old-meets-new. apartment buildings, 'detached' houses, shops and then the vegetable plots. For one, that probably explains why vegetables are so expensive in japan: considering I live 14 minutes by train from the 2nd most 'expensive' city centre in the world (and having been to a supermarket) I know that the veggies in my neighbourhood are worth their weight in gold. (maybe I should get up in the middle of the night and start pinching them).

but back to the buildings, and in particular houses: I've been having trouble understanding how they have developed as they have. Today we have houses popping in a matter of weeks, some of which look as if they have been built by the disney faction of Ikea: scantily clad in bright, brick-effect, plastic panels. All bling until you see up the sides and they look like a poor public building designed by John Major.

Indeed most are lifeless, bland, temporary looking boxes and when I first questioned this during an early visit to japan I thought it had something to do with earthquakes. or typhoons. you know, nature - the big bad wolf. huff, puff, blow your house down.

So why am I curious? Well, because traditional Japanese houses are not so bad to look at.

I've read a couple of things which may or may not be true but certainly could explain this phenomenon. A single-family detached house in Japan apparently lasts an average of 26 years. this is an astounding fact, but correlates with the culture of replacing that exists and has existed in Japan - ie. a house is replaced not just for structural reasons, but more commonly for aesthetics.

Also, a 'demolish and rebuild' philosophy seems to have remained due to the short life span of the typical Japanese house and the need to replace large numbers of cramped, poorly built (and visibly sick looking) homes constructed after the Second World War. There's also a very small second hand house market here and it would appear the buyer essentially pays for the land, with the assumption that they will rebuild.

So, it would appear my initial idea that earthquakes have something to do with the flimsy nature of buildings was not correct. Perhaps though, with changing views regards sustainability, and in a land with state of the art, disaster-proof engineering, there may be a future of more quality, permanent housing and less that look like plutos kennel.