A new Japanese magazine about construction workers | Hacker News Reader

A new Japanese magazine about construction workers

ignition.co

68 pointsngym13 comments

Construction works in Japan are fascinating. I've been in Tokyo some years ago and while strolling along the palace we came by an construction site for a new skyscraper there.

We had to take break to watch this perfection. http://imgur.com/a/IFMDl Those workers open the gate just in time for the next truck to come in and open as well as direct the traffic on the 3-lane road for the time the truck needs to get out. All this takes few minutes. There is no jamming up of traffic. The frequency of trucks coming in and leaving was astonishing. There must have been dozens of trucks on the roads of Tokyo at every moment.

I would have loved to see how that works inside.

I live in Germany. A country that is know for their efficiency, accuracy, etc. but if what Germans do is efficiency then what those workers did was something completely different and superior.

Heh, it's good to know I'm not the only one snapping shots of construction sites in Tokyo. I was surprised by how well they dampen the noise so as not to bother the surrounding areas. Also, every site had those same white perimeter privacy walls. I wonder if that's mandated for all projects.

Oh yes. The noise. Especially in this area: http://i.imgur.com/fuz85Fu.jpg Also the marginal dirt traces on the road. Fascinating. I wish I could have photographed the site for a longer span of time.

There is a blog idea ;)

Title should be "Some guys start a magazine about construction."

There's Engineering News-Record. And tons of trade magazines, from Tunnels and Tunneling International to Structure Magazine. There are lots of Discovery Channel specials on construction jobs.

The New York Metropolitan Transportation Agency has a good Flickr feed documenting their construction projects.[1] The East Side Acccess project is impressive. They have built another level of train station underneath Grand Central Station, without interfering with anything above it.

[1] https://www.flickr.com/photos/mtaphotos/

Agreed. Why do I get the sinking feeling that titles and articles like this are the next step in the evolution of clickbait?

We changed the title to something more neutral. If anybody suggests a better title, we can change it again.

This is a bit different though: it's a construction culture magazine, intended for people interested in construction fashion and such.

Which isn't quite as weird as it sounds, as in Japan there's always been a heavy overlap between yankii/chinpira/bosozoku culture and the construction industry, this being one of the few industries in Japan where wannabe-yakuza punks with dyed hair etc could still get jobs.

The difference is that all your examples are focusing on cool engineering work, and perhaps the lead engineers that come up with the cool solutions, while this magazine is focusing on the actual people out there doing the work, rather than the project they are working on.

Look through the flickr page you posted and notice how there are hardly any portraits of the bottom of the rung workers.

It's refreshing to hear soundbites about Japan opening up to foreigners as opposed to the narrative that Japan is building robots so they don't have to let foreigners in.

Love it. Many are unsung heroes with amazing stories.

Excellent. More of this. The builders of the modern world are the underappreciated stoic heroes who help link the generations together.

a shortage in construction workers -> wages per capita goes up -> disposable income goes up -> and hey, would you look at that, all of a sudden there are magazines celebrating the demographic and using the word 'culture' to sell them things.

That's an unusual take on a trade magazine.

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