Moving a 320 year old house across an ocean from Japan to California | Hacker News Reader

Moving a 320 year old house across an ocean from Japan to California

atlasobscura.com

57 pointsatanpur15 comments

My father worked for a Swiss company in the 80s tut was specialized in moving buildings. Sometimes they were huge buildings that only needed to be moved a few meters so that a new rail could be added. But my father worked as foreman for the small buildings like historical churches that were in the way of a new road or something. One of my early memories are when my father was working so near our house that my mother went with me to assist the move. It was so slow except my father that was running in circles around the wooden church yelling at everyone and everything, super stressed out. He loved the work so much that it gave him ulcers so he moved back to Portugal and now restores old houses for the rich guys that want a classy summer house in the countryside.

That's very interesting. Please, if you have any stories, photos or anecdotes to share, do so.

> He loved the work so much that it gave him ulcers.

I can well imagine. It sounds like the sort of process that only works if someone with great amount of expertise and passion ensures that everything is accounted for. I've never tried to relocate a building, but I assume that any sort of problem quickly cascades from "oh dear" to "oh sh*t" with little to no warning and no possible recovery.

There’s photos but in physical format, next time I visit my parents I will try to scan them. It’s mostly my father looking at buildings and pointing at things with a concerned look in his face. :)

And yes, things could go wrong really fast and the problem is that it’s not obvious something went wrong. The building won’t collapse immediately but the structure gets compromised and will degrade much faster than expected and there’s very little you could do except add some support beams which changes the aesthetics and the client most definitely didn’t paid for that. So my father would basically worry about every single decision and be super cautions at the same time he was juggling tight deadlines (roads need to be closed on specific days at specific hours, can’t be late but can’t rush the job either...).

He misses the job but not my mother :)

There are two open-air museums in Inuyama, Japan that this reminded me of: (1) Meiji Mura, and (2) Little World.

Meiji Mura is an impressive collection of Meiji-era buildings that have been gathered from around Japan, including the lobby of the Tokyo Imperial Hotel (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) and two full-size churches from Kyoto.

Little World is primarily a collection of traditional houses that have been transported to Japan and reconstructed from around the world.

The amount of effort that went into moving and re-building the dozens of buildings at each site must have been incredible. Both are worth visiting if you are near Nagoya.

(1) https://www.meijimura.com/english/

(2) http://www.littleworld.jp/english/index.html

There's also the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum outside of Tokyo[1] (in Koganei, not the one in Ryogoku) that has some three dozen buildings that have been moved there. They go back as far as the Edo period. Well worth the time if you're in the area (though admittedly, kinda hard to get to).

[1] https://www.tatemonoen.jp/english/

There's been quite a few buildings and churches deconstructed and transported to the US over the years.

Here's two neighbouring properties in Richmond, Virginia, moved in the 20s - one a 16th century priory, that's now next to a 15th century manor house. They weren't even in neighbouring counties in England:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_House

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agecroft_Hall

Fascinating. My grandparents and now parents live in Stratford Hills. I've looked across the river at those places my entire life and never knew the stories. Thanks for that!

I’m glad it’s for a museum and not Larry Ellison’s personal Japanese village.

While it is pretty cool it can be done, it still seems like such a waste of resources, time and effort. It would be cheaper to build an identical house using traditional techniques and the end result would be the same. There are lots of reasons to need to move an existing building, there are very little reasons to move that building half way across the globe.

It just seems like extravagance for extravagance sake.

This reminded me of London Bridge getting sold to the developer of Lake Havasu, AZ.

https://www.history.com/news/how-london-bridge-ended-up-in-a...

It's actually not unusual to dismantle and reconstruct these houses. There's a famous story about an American journalist who moved to Japan and lived in a rebuilt 18th century minka which had been stored dismantled for several years, video: https://www.nytimes.com/video/travel/100000003554407/minka-a...

If you've watched season one of The Good Place you've seen the Huntington Garden - it was used for quite a few of the outdoor locations for the Neighborhood.

>The wooden structure survived the firebombing campaigns

Yeah, and Mount Vernon survived 9/11. Marugame was never firebombed or targeted for firebombing.

> Between 1603 and 1867, Japan existed in a state of harmony and economic growth.

That's a woefully untrue fantasy. Japan endured multiple famines and economic crises prior to Meiji.

I upvoted this submission just because of the title. Apologies.

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