Long-Term Building in Japan | Hacker News Reader

Long-Term Building in Japan

longnow.org

137 pointstosh126 comments

The pedant in me is slightly miffed by the very conscious use of that five-digit year notation (e.g., 02033) in the article (this being the home of that jarring monstrosity), the neat use of macrons (the dashes over long vowels in transcribed Japanese, as in 'Jingū'), and then oddly referring to a Long Now member from the Netherlands as “a […] member in Holland” (which many Dutch perceive as like being called English when you are born in Edinburgh).

The no-smoking sign at Hōryū-ji mentioned in the article doesn't just prohibit smoking, but open flame of any kind as well as taking combustibles inside (think contractors doing some job). That last bit got dropped by whoever put the English translation on the sign. It makes a little more sense that way.

> The pedant in me is slightly miffed by the very conscious use of that five-digit year notation (e.g., 02033) in the article (this being the home of that jarring monstrosity)

Yes its a bit of an affectation, and it does seem to annoy some people, but I do think it has some value as a subtle hint that "there is more after that". That observation by Danny Hillis:

"When I was a child, people used to talk about what would happen by the year 2000. For the next thirty years they kept talking about what would happen by the year 2000, and now no one mentions a future date at all." [1]

...is still pretty true. There is very little mention of the future that isn't either gadget-focussed or terrifying (ie the climate crisis). We just don't have any signifiers that people want to use. I'd like to be able to say that Long Now has had some influence regarding this, but sadly (outside of a smallish bubble) I don't think it has. At least they're trying though and doing interesting stuff, I guess.

(Disclosure: Long Now charter member fwiw)

[1] https://longnow.org/about/ (I removed the leading zeroes because I'm pretty sure they weren't in the original quote)

    > and now no one mentions a future date at all

It might be that works of Mark Fisher (aka k-punk) hold an answer to that. He convincingly argues that somewhere around 1990s the humanity lost the ability to conjure alternative futures, or having ideas about the future at all, because capitalism now sets the limit of what is thinkable. According to Fisher, any future without capitalism doesn’t appear to be thinkable, so all humanity is left to do is infinitely rehashing ideas of last 50-60 years (post-WWII period, coinciding with emergence of the late capitalism).

Thanks for sharing that thought.

My intuition tells me that at least in the US, the lack of apparent future visualization is due to a lack of optimism. Nobody wants to share their nightmares, it just isn't polite or enjoyable for anyone.

Edit: reminders that our experience is a tiny sliver of time that has passed and the thought we can gift the future our efforts today is consoling.

There are many people mentioning future dates. It's just that it's mostly scientists telling us how many years we have before something terrible happens if we don't change our ways radically right now.

> but I do think it has some value as a subtle hint that "there is more after that".

I think it does the opposite. 4-digit years that don't start with 0 don't necessarily imply it ends at 9999, because that's just not how numbers work in general. On the other hand, including the 0 prefix implies that 5 digits is significant in some way, more like an ID than a simple count or like a combination lock which requires N digits, and as such implies there isn't anything after 99999.

> and then oddly referring to a Long Now member from the Netherlands as “a […] member in Holland” (which many Dutch perceive as like being called English when you are born in Edinburgh).

Assuming this[1] is the same Daniel Erasmus, then his office is indeed in Amsterdam, which is in North Holland. It doesn't say he's from there. So this more like being called a member in England, when you are living in England.

[1]: https://danielerasmus.com/

Well yeah, but you don't usually refer to someone's province (or similar subdivision) of residence in an international context like this. It's like saying the member from Thüringen, Bouches du Rhône, or Saitama.

Or from California, Lombardia, Bavaria, or Provence - all very common.

The pedant in me has to add all needed dashes: Bouches-du-Rhône.

Very respectable. On a side note though, I often see people complain about how things aren't "built to last" anymore and sometimes I wonder (as a person naive to construction) is that even a good thing?

I've lived in a few places over the years and it seems the older houses were consistently not great while the newer ones might have felt cheaper, but all the while felt "designed" for modern life.

Perhaps since my family was never really well off growing up, I'm used to "cheap, old houses" and now that things have gotten a bit better, I find myself in newer, more expensive houses... idk, just seems like any house built now wouldn't really suit most people 100 years from now, no matter the quality.

A "simple" example, we do have a vacation cottage that was built in the 1800s, passed down each generation, with very few changes. It's holding up well but it feels like it was made for elves and "fixing" that would be next to impossible without redoing most of the building. Again nice to visit but you would have to make a ton of changes to make it more livable...

100 years ago no one would have imagined that a couple in their 20s would want a room dedicated to their desktop computers.... or even that each of them might want a separate "office". And I say "office" in quotes cause it's really a nerd cave that I might work in as well.

I imagine some folks on HN would even want a dedicated VR space with a cleared out 10x10 square.

What is considered luxury housing changes overtime.

> 100 years ago no one would have imagined that a couple in their 20s would want a room dedicated to their desktop computers.... or even that each of them might want a separate "office". And I say "office" in quotes cause it's really a nerd cave that I might work in as well.

They were refered to as smoking rooms and boudoirs, but they very much existed.

As well as cabinets, drawing rooms, parlours (possibly multiple), solars, sunrooms, studies, recreation rooms (billiard rooms), …

100 years ago people wanted extra space, they could rarely afford it. A piano for example takes up quite a bit of space, let alone ballrooms or billiards rooms etc.

It’s interesting to look at the ownership history of old buildings over time. Often people kept adding additions even though the owners where less wealthy in relative terms they tend to be more wealthy in absolute terms.

I wasn't even trying to say that extra space wasn't used 100 years ago. More that the requirements of the space are ever changing. But got downvoted for it anyway. shrug

100 year old buildings in European city centers have high ceilings and large windows. Nobody builds that high rooms any more, I would guess in order to fit more stories in the building. They do show their age sometimes with weird floorplans, lack of ventilation, and perhaps noticeable draft. But these will be very livable for a long, long time still.

Granted, some survivorship bias is surely in effect, and these were probably the fancy buildings of their time with better construction quality.

We have some relatives living an apartment (I think) a couple centuries old- I would guess from the early 1800s or 1700s, I have lived in multiple late 19th century and early 20th century apartments and all of them felt a lot more modern than that one. One weird thing is that there is only 1 sink in it, so if you go to the toilet you have to wash your hands in the kitchen sink afterwards.

Also only 1 toilet & there's no space for a dishwasher or some other modern appliances.

It looks nice but I would definitely prefer to live in a more modern apartment long-term.

Yep, that's another good example. Plumbing has always been an issue in the older houses I've been in mostly because it's next to impossible to change it.

Right, I do think you get diminishing returns once you get to "high end and well maintained early 20th or very late 19th century" buildings, a lot of these can accommodate more or less modern lifestyles quite well (albeit not all of them and they'd have to be renovated with stuff like adding elevators to 5-6 story buildings).

Survivorship bias is less of a factor than commonly assumed. If you check, for example, this map showing the age of buildings in Berlin (https://interaktiv.morgenpost.de/so-alt-wohnt-berlin/), you will note that it is neighborhoods rather than individual buildings that survived (or didn't). Large parts of Berlin were built in the early 1900s, and the differences between individual buildings is rather small. Survival depended on the war and, to a lesser degree, the east/west split, with policy in the east being more inclined to tear down intact city blocks and replace them with architecture better representing the ideology of the times.

> east being more inclined to tear down intact city blocks

I thought this was the other way around in the divided Germany? Many beautiful buildings were torn down in the West to be replaced with modern ones (like in so many other European countries), while East was poorer and couldn't afford the same so ending up with keeping the historical buildings. I've learned that this is the reason for places like Regensburg having an intact historical centre.

I guess I'm spoiled from growing up in America, but my pet peeve about old buildings in Europe is that so many of them seem to have super tiny toilets, where there's barely enough room to close the door after you sit down. They make the worst toilets in America seem like luxury mansions in comparison.

There are definitely differences. My bathroom is larger than my bedroom. I'm not sure, but I think there was originally no apartment specific bathrooms at all (instead just a communal one in the inner yard) and this room used to serve some other purpose.

A lot of these are now considered protected, like the canal houses in Amsterdam; they cannot just rebuild those. They will often be gutted and modernized on the inside and have their foundations replaced though.

Meanwhile in the rest of the country, houses will get demolished after a certain time, 50-100 years after they're built. They could be kept around longer, but it's a factor of maintenance costs, energy bills, attractiveness and value. In a lot of cases they will replace older, small houses in desirable locations with bigger ones and charge higher rent for example.

> Nobody builds that high rooms any more [...]

All luxury apartments are built like that. Everyone is aware that it's "better" (I guess almost everyone would prefer to live in a high ceiling room with big windows, who doesn't have some kind of reverse-claustrophobia)

But since half of the world has an irrational hard on for suburban ghettos, mostly that's where we waste our economic surplus.

> reverse-claustrophobia

Agoraphobia ;)

I was thinking of that term, but I have no idea whether it applies indoors..? :)

Anyway, thanks!

I live in Nice, a city at the border of France and Italia.

My area is full of beautiful buildings that would never be built anymore:

- the fancy wall sculptures, round corners and marble stairs would be way too expensive to build today.

- they have a lot of volume: high ceiling, corridors, spacious stairways, that would be "optimized" today into the required minimum allowed by law.

- they are not too high, because they didn't have the mean to do that. So I see the sky, and the sun reaches my windows.

- they have "buffer areas". Entrances, places with green, fancy chiseled property doors, around the building. I don't come out and arrive right on the street. My bike rack, mailbox and trash disposal area are behind a light and elegant fence.

- there are a lot of windows, and large ones, so I have a lot of light.

- some rooms have old style wooden floor. It's pretty, and warm to the feet. It would be ruinous to add that today, you would get a premade cheap one at most if you had the budget.

- I have a spot in a tower. It's useless, nobody in their damn mind would build that anymore. I love it. And all my friends are always mentioning it when we talk about the flat. For some reason, it's very pleasing.

Mostly, they are charming to live in, those old buildings.

One could value that or not, but after living in a lot of different places, I find I often prefer older buildings even if they are less comfortable. They bring me more joy.

Unfortunatly, it's not just about the cost: we are loosing the skill we used to have to make those.

Not to mention we used to treat construction workers very badly so it made building a lot of things possible at the time that would be indecent today.

I live in the old Lyon district and I agree entirely, but it's hard to buy into the argument that "we can't build this anymore because it'd too expensive", as if the people at the time were all incredibly rich. As far as I know people back then were much poorer than we are today, especially in the cities.

Now I'm not saying I understand why it was done this way -- it's honestly quite puzzling how we seem to have abandoned these myriads of techniques that made everything we built so beautiful.

My theory is that it was more likely a culture thing -- back then, you wouldn't conceive of an entrance door without some wood sculpture or at least some elegantly carved stairs. That just wasn't something any architect or artisan/builder would do.

Also in these times of "climate crisis" it's striking how old urban planning makes the temperature much more balanced and the air flows much more nicely. There's a 3°C difference between the town center and my old district, because mine has very few concrete (old paved ways), no cars and has stone walls. My friend in the city center has 27°C in her kitchen. I'm still at 20°C.

In Lyon it's even more obvious. There are some restaurants with truely huge spaces that you rarely see anymore in France, like near the sucrerie, or the brasserie georges.

But I think it's definitly about money, not culture.

Today, we are more numerous, and there are more building to buid. Hence the projects are in competitions for the resources to build them, like stone or wood. Cement being cheap compared to stone, it wins.

For the same reason, space is now a premium, and so it's expensive to have big volume for new constructions.

What's more, a rich country mean rich people, and so richer workers. 80 years ago, you could abuse your workers so much, and pay them so little, it was much cheaper to build things that took a lot of time. Today, time makes or breaks a project rentability way quicker.

Add to that you have to make everything up to code now, which is even more expensive. And with insurances everywhere, on top of that, environmnent risk evaluations, etc.

And of course, a lot of building used to be constructed either by the state, or rich families. Now, you must borrow money to build, which mean you add the cost of the financial system.

All those things add up.

Yes, I guess the remarks on population density and on workers' wages make sense. Thanks for clarifying.

100 to 200 years ago labour was so cheap to the upper class as to cost zero. A truly upper class family could have dozens of full-time servants. An upper-middle-class family could have 3 or 4. Even 50 years ago it was common for a middle-class household family in Lisbon to have a live-in maid for pennies. Try having even one full-time maid on an engineer's salary today. Or just supporting a family of 4 on a single salary, for the matter.

Old middle-class and above buildings were beautifully built because expert craftspeople and old-growth materials were practically free. They used them all up and we're left with more efficient (but uglier) ways of building. Which is a good thing, means we're not exploiting workers or cutting down forests and mountains quite at the same rate any more. But until we achieve another technological revolution in manufacturing and are able to spec custom parts at the same price as mass-produced ones, we won't be building things as prettily as a century ago.

Contrast with Japanese residential housing:

> An unusual feature of Japanese housing is that houses are presumed to have a limited lifespan, and are generally torn down and rebuilt after a few decades, generally twenty years for wooden buildings and thirty years for concrete buildings – see (§) regulations for details. Refurbishing properties, rather than rebuilding them, is a relatively uncommon practice in Japan, though its prevalence is increasing, indicating that attitudes towards older houses may be changing.[1]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_Japan

> Raze, rebuild, repeat: why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years

* https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...

> Japanese Homes Aren’t Built to Last—and That’s the Point

* https://robbreport.com/shelter/home-design/japanese-homes-ar...

The main subject of the post is a temple that has been torn down and rebuilt every 20 years for over a thousand years. It’s an example of continual, dynamic renewal rather than static permanence.

It is fantastically frustrating, as it makes wealth-building through home ownership impossible. The land will nominally hold its value, but the $300k+ you spend to build a house literally just... vanishes.

This might have made sense back when houses were cheap to build, but now, houses in Japan are probably twice as expensive per unit area compared to the US. Salaries are low as well, so building a house here is basically a one-way ticket to 35 years of wage-slavery.

Don't even think about a used house, because they were built to a level of cheapness that defies logic, along with a complete disregard for utility. A 1970s rubber-stamp development home in the US has better design, no joke. Windows, light switches, and walls will be allocated by a pseudo-random algorithm that somehow maximizes inconvenience:

"Hmm... what could we do on this wall? I know, a gigantic off-center window that looks directly out upon the wall of the neighbor's house! Let's also make sure the kitchen sink underneath it is also off-center, but differently. That 'sketched by a drunken, retarded misanthrope' effect doesn't just happen on its own: you gotta work for it."

"We've got this other wall over here, how can we make it even more useless? We've already sketched in a massive off-center window that looks right into the neighbor's lavatory, but I dunno. Something's missing. I think we left some utility... ah, that's it, we need to drop the window below countertop height."

"Remember, electricity is a fad. One 20A circuit is plenty to cover an entire six-meter wall. In the kitchen."

Did I also mention that a "big" housing lot is 1/20 of an acre? Usually no yard, just concrete.

(You are correct in observing that I have spent way too much time on this over the past year, as I very much would like to buy a home)

Fantastically frustrating to someone with an American point of view. What do the Japanese think about it? Perhaps there’s a different point of view?

Nope, they hate it, too.

They spend their lives buying a house that's worth nothing when they die. Nobody likes it.

Japan's home prices have been flat, over decades, which means housing remains relatively affordable:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-housing-crisis-in-japan-ho...

The West has not kept up with housing demand, which turns homes into more of an investment than they should be in the first place. The CPI adjusted price of a home is over double what it was in the mid-century:

https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/

If each subsequent generation has decreasing levels of home ownership, spending a higher percentage of their income on housing, the fact that you get to retain the value of your property more easily could be seen as a moot point.

You always have to live somewhere, and if the price of your home increases, selling it just means you have to find another place to live that is equally expensive. The only thing this cycle of "investment properties" does is make life worse for the youngest generation.

I don't really care what my house will be worth when I'm die, I'll be dead.

> I don't really care what my house will be worth when I'm die, I'll be dead.

You are completely missing the point. Let's say you have to move when you are in your 60s for any kind of reason. Your properly is absolutely worthless in Japan and you won't be able to buy a new one or even get a loan at that age. You are absolutely hosed.

So does a renter. Keep paying for something and then end up with nothing. Honestly I see it as anomaly that houses have worth after their useful lifespan.

You miss the fact that a renter has flexibility that a home owner does not.

> It is fantastically frustrating, as it makes wealth-building through home ownership impossible

TBH this seems more like a feature than a bug. Home ownership should be less about investment income and more about, well, owning a home.

does not mean that it's normal that your house value goes to zero, no matter how well built it is.

yes, exactly the same as your second biggest purchase, Your car.

I don't know what the "right" thing is but AFAIK, Tokyo is way more affordable than SF, NYC, London. My guess is that's in part because housing is not an investment so they're is less incentive to lobby for policies that kept it going up.

Salaries are way lower in tokyo than sf and london whic explains everything

Does it get any better with age? House or buildings themselves unless very special are depreciating assets and should really be treated as such. Land around might get more demand, but in general house itself won't improve with age.

if its built in stone it wont get worse in 20 years.

So there is no wear and tear of surface materials? No appliances break? No slow corrosion or build up in water pipes? Possible small leaks and humidity causing mould growth?

>but the $300k+

Japanese homes aren't that expensive unless you want a very big space / luxurious place.

>houses in Japan are probably twice as expensive per unit area compared to the US

You might be surprised this goes for most of the world. The US is spoiled in regards to cost per square meter after adjusting for office worker salary (let alone tech salaries). Until you go to the big cities, where the problems are far, far worse than e.g. Tokyo.

>Salaries are low as well

Salaries in most of Japan aren't even that low when compared to the remainder of the West. You can find quite a few anecdotes pointing out the opposite, calling Japan more affordable if anything (truth probably being somewhere in the middle).

Try looking in big cities around most of Europe and even Canada. You'll find similar issues, both in salaries and in housing prices vs housing sizes.

Also, because of zoning regulations having minimum lot sizes, it is hard to find new construction in US cities that has comparable square footage, so you can’t actually take advantage of the lower sq ft cost by keeping the same amount of space.

Canadians and Australians have housing sizes comparable to the states.

Yes, and most of the world (and even most of developed world) are neither Canadian, Australian or American. Europe and Asia tend to have smaller homes & the latter alone accounts for more than half the world's population.

And you can find houses just as big in Japan, and in large parts of Europe. Not the point.

Compare developer salaries with square meter prices. Anyone complaining about Japan being unaffordable clearly doesn't understand the problem is almost universal among developed countries. The only way you're getting past that is having a high income. Of course it's going to seem small for US developers used to being in the upper echelons of the middle class in a country with relatively low prices compared to CoL.

The moment you're not an office worker and/or trying to live close to the city to not have a daily commute over an hour, you're pretty much in the same position as anywhere else in the developed world.

> It is fantastically frustrating, as it makes wealth-building through home ownership impossible

I think this could bring up a debate: should we expect personal home ownership be a wealth-building tool? Is it the most ideal method of building personal wealth? The expectation that our home is an investment on top of being a place to live could perhaps be one of the factors in areas with a housing affordability crisis. It's in the best interest of the current homeowner to discourage development that would reduce costs for other buyers.

> houses in Japan are probably twice as expensive per unit area compared to the US

I don't see this as particularly alarming, as homes built in the US consume and waste a tremendous amount of space. I think about the typical single family suburban home's attached 2 or 3 car garage and how much of the home's sheltered space that feature takes up.

I also think about the American expectation for luxuries like walk-in closets, having more bathrooms than people, and rooms dedicated to "man caves" and other single-use pursuits. To me, the American suburban lifestyle represents a place to store excess goods consumption – the home is a place to store a bunch of stuff that ends up in the landfill.

Tokyo fits the entire population of California in an area the size of LA County, and I personally consider that to be more of a good thing than a bad thing. When we spread out we waste finite resources and emit carbon dioxide with personal vehicle travel and destroy more natural habitat.

> Did I also mention that a "big" housing lot is 1/20 of an acre? Usually no yard, just concrete.

Much of the overall plot of North American homes are consumed by driveways, yards, and dead space between homes that are usually completely unused for most of the day.

Yards and driveways are major contributors to car dependence and poor public transit in North America. Yards usually offer very little utility and sit unused most of the day, offering zero habitat for animals or people. They reduce walkability of neighborhoods by increasing walking distances between homes and in the street grid.

"But where will my kids play?" Probably at a communal playground, park, sports field, and really they're probably not going to be all that excited by an empty field in the front of your house.

https://twitter.com/officialmitchll/status/13827099403521351...

Finally, I'll point out that to someone in a vertical housing unit like a residential tower, ground acreage is entirely irrelevant. I don't think the owner of the penthouse unit of 432 Park Avenue is upset that their home represents almost no acreage once the building's plot is divided by the quantity of residents.

I'll drop a couple of articles that discuss some of the negatives of misusing open space in urban planning:

https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/7/23/the-problem-of...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/the-clamor-for-ope...

"Designing green spaces nobody wants" in the article below:

https://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/jul/28/urba...

At least it's possible for a budget-conscious person to rent a simple apartment within a 10 minute commute of central Tokyo for ~$500. Try doing that in San Francisco. Different expectations

This is a bit myth. Though taxable value would become near zero and it can't be priced much (except land), usually houses won't be rebuilt at 20 years. Original residents continue to live there. No market value != no value.

Does that mean it's possible to buy a 20-30 year old house for just the price of land? That sounds fantastic.

For those wondering about the cost...

I found it elsewhere: "The most recent rebuilding required 14,000 cypress timbers, 25,000 sheaves of reeds, took 9 years to complete, and cost over $500 million."

"Obtaining large enough timber posts, for instance, requires trees 300 to 500 years old"

I seriously hope they can give it a rest for a while.

There are 300+ yr old timber frame barns etc in Europe, so it seems to be plausibly a net zero impact.

Hrm, I figured Japanese is doing this in a sustainable way, but I can't help but wonder about the half a billion dollar price tag. It's a massive public works project since it's partly tax funded that benefits particular sectors.

Since they've been doing it for 1400 years, superstitiously inclined people will be adamantly against making changes to the interval.

From the Long Now post:

> As we walked from arch to arch, Maholo explained that the forest here had historically been used exclusively to harvest timbers for all the shrines, but over the last millennia they had been harvested too heavily for various war efforts, or lost in fire. Since the beginning of this century the shrines’ caretakers have been bringing these forests back, and expect them to be self-sustaining again within the next two or three rebuilding periods — 40 to 60 years from now.

Part of this is also a preservation of skills. It ensures that the artisans who work on it have a consistent demand for their skills.

Forestry in Japan is a disaster nowadays. Both driven by the lack of wood on the market and by the bad habit of "accounting fraud" in Japan -- the count of cut trees is systematically under-reported by the timber corporations.

This was revealed in particular after the huge landslides of 2021, as a forest holding together the soil had been silently harvested much more than what was reported.

Is that for all 80000 shrines? That’s 6k per unit.

I’m sure the USA builds more backyard sheds than that, at a higher price tag, every year.

On the other hand, most backyard sheds don't use materials that take 300-500 years to produce. Well, except the petro-plastics...

As the article notes, but for the war the surrounding forest is tended and maintained just for that purpose.

no, it's just that particular shrine... Ise Shrine.

https://theprepared.org/features-feed/ise-jingu-and-the-pyra....

80,000 is number of shrine in the entire region.

The cost is minuscule compared to the ROI.

Religion in Japan is big business, just like your home country. Rest assured that when you visit a shrine in Japan, the first thing to greet you will be an offering box.

Oh yeah tell me about it. Every single shrine I hit in Kyoto... it was 500-600 yen.. and this was when exchange rate was 90 yen per dollar!

You're confusing temples with shrines.

shrines can be happy with an offering as little as 5 yen. https://guidable.co/culture/japanese-shrines-how-much-donati...

https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/busting-o...

Offering is optional. Entrance fee is not. Most major temples have mandatory entrance fee

> The cost is minuscule compared to the ROI. Religion in Japan is big business, just like your home country.

That's a very western way of looking at things.

Alternatively, it can be viewed as a community crowdsourcing and preserving culture.

No, it's a sceptical way of looking at it.

Most western people also view donating to religious institutions is a way of supporting their communities and culture. Collectivism isn't a monopoly of the east.

> Collectivism isn't a monopoly of the east.

Is that why people in the West refuse to wear mask?

Ah you're right, I've never seen anyone wear a mask ever in the past 3 years.

The current religion in Japan was mostly consciously invented in the Meiji period so Westerners couldn’t say they were religion-less savages who needed colonizing.

(Same goes for most modern forms of Buddhism.)

> consciously invented in the Meiji period

So the Meiji government traveled back in time a thousand years and erected Shinto shrines all over Japan?

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

Then you should know imperial shrines are obviously different.

I’ve been to 47 prefectures of Japan and thousands of shrines. I’m well aware imperial shrines exist.

Just because American politicians utilize the word God does not mean they invented Christianity.

By “the current religion” I mean the practices of lay people, not the buildings. Like not literally believing that kami exist, but doing hatsumode + Buddhist funerals.

The Christian-like wedding ceremonies are more recent than that I guess.

This makes it sound like that $500 million is just the cost of reconstruction of one shrine.

> Every 20 years exact copies of Naiku, Geku, and 14 other shrines are built on empty sites next to the existing structures

> the rebuilding also includes creating exact copies of thousands of ceremonial treasures and artifacts

But the real value in this whole deal is that the entire reconstruction happens using traditional techniques, passing them on to the next generation.

$500 million feels like a steal for preserving your cultural heritage like that.

I think getting rid of (or renovating) old structures is a good thing. 100 year old houses are not generally fun to live in, unless they have been very very well maintained to the point that it would have been cheaper to rebuild.

I've been in 200+ year old structures in the Netherlands that are nicer than the majority of houses I've been to in NA.

How high-end and affordable were these buildings when they got constructed? I remodeled a ~300 year olds house in rural Germany. The building used to house at least two families till the first half of the 20th century. We had to in essence redo everything except for maybe 70% of the oak beams, totally change the layout, dig up and lower the floors to accommodate anyone but tiny people and build out the attic to make the building attractive at all. This building was at the equivalent of the village square when it was constructed. Had the village grown and turned into Al even a town, I'd hoped it would have been replaced a long time ago. I'm proud I got to take part in this work and will in all likelihood own it myself some day. If it wasn't a under heritage protection we'd likely not have preserved it though because it makes little economic sense.

What sort of structures? And how are you deciding "nice" ?

I do believe you, its just when I think of a nice structure to live in, good HVAC is a must and lots of place in Europe simply don't have AC... can't speak as to why that's the case but its one of those things you take for granted lol

Europeans do not consider AC a must. I live in an attic conversion on a very well to do street in Germany, and there is not a single AC unit in sight. It's not common at all, we do not care about it. We would rather get extremely hot and sweaty for a few days a year than make the investment for AC

Haha nice, respectable, you're crazy for that though!

Perhaps its the climate too though. There's a cottage I stay at sometimes and it's so old, has no AC and practically suicidal when there's humidity.

Not crazy, we just aren’t so bothered by the heat. Restaurants in countries with AC are also insanely cold.

Actually here in Europe we think Americans are crazy for wanting to be so cold all the time lol

That must be why the software industry isn’t developed there, there’s nothing to cool down your brains from all the thinking.

Japanese houses tend to have not good enough wall-mounted AC but the commercial buildings have it on freezing.

What makes you say that the software industry isn't developed in Europe?

Lack of ways for startups to grow outside selling to Americans (Booking, Skype, etc) and low quality of video games outside German farming simulators and British funny animal platformers.

Fair. I think it just comes down to preference. Not sure if you can say one is better than the other. I had always just assumed everywhere had AC. Oddly enough, seemed like lots of buildings had it while the houses/apartments didn't. Maybe due to the body heat of so many ppl, it becomes necessary.

The US is a lot farther south than most people think. People talk about Minneapolis as a cold northern place, but it is south of Paris which nobody thinks of as particularly cold. I don't know where in Germany you were but odds are it was north by enough to not get the extreme heat that "southern" cities like Minneapolis get in summer.

Most of western Europe is blessed with a mild winter climate. Some heat is needed, but not nearly as much as parts of the US that are much farther south. (If you get to Eastern Europe things are very different)

That depends on how building standards have shifted in your location in the last 100 years - and the durability of construction methods used.

Here in the UK most homes are built from brick, and in many regards standards of housebuilding have dropped a lot since the 1920s. A 100-year-old house will have its downsides (standards of insulation weren't high 100 years ago) but will often be more desirable than a new-build property.

Some older near-the-city-center suburbs of US cities have the same phenomenon. There are sometimes quirks like entire neighborhoods where all the houses have a different stained-glass window because there was a stained-glass guy nearby when they were built. That usually comes with the obligatory comment from every contractor or insurance person, "Yeah, wow, you couldn't get (x feature) made that way today for any price."

In the US the postwar heyday of modernism resulted in a generation where the skills of artisan craftsmanship in construction were unneeded, so the remaining workers never trained anybody.

Quality standards have usually gone up, but space standards are the ones that tend to go down, whether that’s de facto because of the market/demand, or actual standards.

The first step to improving this would be to vote out all the MPs who legislate in the interest of landlords- because most MPs are landlords. Reducing overall immigration would probably help too. A removal of housing benefit, which actually benefits businesses and not those receiving the “benefit”, by subsidising wages and inflating housing prices for desirable areas, instead of allowing prices to fall or for businesses to pay what’s needed, should be considered too.

Quality standards have not gone up in the UK. Have you seen the quality of new builds? They are extremely poor

The UK has no by-right development at all afaik, so you’re getting what they can afford to build after making it through planning.

This is a big reason San Francisco never builds anything anymore; absolutely everyone gets to have their aesthetic opinions in design review and will band together to sue you over them if you don’t bribe them.

What makes you think quality standards have gone down?

From what I have seen, there's two reasons people think this. One is that modern houses are extremely well insulated. Which means that if you drill into a wall or just tap it with your hand, it sounds hollow, because it is rammed with cavities full of insulation. People have a "perception" that somehow brick and mortar is magically of higher quality and solid sounds better - even though functionally it is worse, especially with the way heating bills are going.

The other is just timber framed construction. This is an objection particularly in England - in Scotland timber framed buildings have been common since the 60s, in England it is realtively recent practice. Add to that, modern builders understand exactly what size of wood to use to bear loads calculated for a once in 200 year storm event per regulations, and don't just whack in huge beams because they have no clue anymore - it means there's a perception again that older is higher quality (no matchstick wood in them!), especially in areas with a weird prejudice towards masonry or brick.

But having experience living in 18th, 19th and mid 20th century houses in the UK - I'd take a new build any day. At least it generally won't have damp, a leaky roof, tiles blowing off every time there's a storm, lead paint/pipes and a colleciton of horrific DIY mistakes inherited from previous owners. Or incredibly cold and draughty rooms - some houses I just shut the door on the cavernous living room from Seoptember till May, it was too cold and too expensive to heat.

> getting rid of (or renovating) old structures is a good thing.

It's worse than that in Japan. They build everything cheaply and plan to destroy them in 50-60 years down the line, making investing in property a really bad plan as whatever you buy sees its value go to actual zero. This causes a massive economic strain on Japan.

It seems like less of an economic strain than having housing becoming an investment that must go up at all costs, pricing everyone out.

I'd be happy with the value of housing being more or less stable. In Japan they aggressively deprecate it to zero. That's what's destructive, like some kind of time-bomb on anything you buy.

I thought it was more like 30 years?

That’s not how businesses or people plan. Discounted cash flow over 60 years means that a cost that’s 60 years away does not matter. Also, Japan went from bombed out wreck to one of the richest countries in the world with this attitude to property so if it hurts at all it’s a minor cost.

> Japan went from bombed out wreck to one of the richest countries in the world wit

japan has been in stagnation if not recession since 1997. you may want to update that statement especially with the demographic timebomb ahead

True but completely irrelevant to the point about home values and economic growth.

It‘s not necessarily that it‘s cheap, but also constant updating of building regulations when more powerful earthquakes hit. In 1990 if you were buying a house older than ten years it might be the difference between life and death.

The latest (‘80s) regulation buildings have held up even through the 2011 quake, so this is the first generation of 50 year old buildings that also meet the safety standards of their day.

this is bullshit. most buildings built in the 70s and 80s did not collapse during the kobe earthquake of 1995 which was one of the biggest ever.

According to the Japanese Ministry of Land, Industry, Transportation and Tourism, 29% of kyu-taishin buildings suffered major damage in the 1995 Great Hanshin earthquake, with 14% totally collapsing.

For post-1981 shin-taishin buildings, the rates were 8% and 3% respectively. Reducing your chances of damage by two thirds, or of collapse by nearly four fifths, is pretty substantial. https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/are-you-prepared-f...

> For post-1981 shin-taishin buildings, the rates were 8% and 3% respectively. Reducing your chances of damage by two thirds, or of collapse by nearly four fifths, is pretty substantial. https://resources.realestate.co.jp/living/are-you-prepared-f...

Yeah, any you can't improve much on these rates anyway from now on. Diminutive returns - no reason for the value of such properties built after 81 to go to zero if they are well built.

Yes, that‘s the second paragraph of my original statement.

Japan is absolutely full of developed property and in many cases way overdeveloped (there’s nothing they won’t cover in concrete, even creek beds), so it seems to work. I think their theory is it keeps the construction industry working, whereas in California we might end up forgetting how to build houses if we keep using the ones from 1969.

The terrible quality and strange choices of many Japanese buildings is notable though. A lot of residential buildings are covered in what I can only describe as bathroom tiles. And they have no insulation and extremely cheap windows.

> And they have no insulation and extremely cheap windows.

correct, insulation is very poor, and walls are very, very thin.

Also buildings were used differently from back then. Now we expect indoor toilets, bathrooms and so on. In even relatively recent past these really weren't standard. And they place entirely new restrictions and needs for structures that really weren't experienced to work so. Specially with moisture causing mold.

(2019), though details in the article seem to indicate this trip took place in 2013.

Reminds me of "Raze, rebuild, repeat: why Japan knocks down its houses after 30 years": https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...

Discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736734

Five-digit year notation seems more like a gimmick instead of something useful given that four-digit notation (2022) will suffice for at least 5000 more years.

Future generations will probably come-up with something more clever than a Five-digit year notation.

(02019)

Honestly I like the +10k (12019) better.

The article buries the lead. What’s the other structure?

> The article buries the lead. What’s the other structure?

lede.

And it's towards the end of the article - Hōryū-ji at Nara.

"Lead" is perfectly legitimate, arguably more so than "lede" which had almost vanished from use before it got revived as an affectation.

What do they do with the old wood? Do they recycle it? Can someone buy it?

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