Living machines

Day 14 Monday 23rd August 2010

Typical subdivision..ugly.

Painting. Moving furniture. Putting stuff into boxes.

I can’t believe the amount of stuff that is in this rather small house. It’s like they used it as a giant storage closet for crap. Shizuka’s parent’s house is the same. You would think that people who are used to living in small houses would know that clutter is the enemy. Having too much stuff seriously cuts into your living space and makes the place impossible to keep clean. It really highlights the difference in attitude between westerners and Japanese when it comes to houses and property in general. For us, your house is a big part of your lifestyle and is used for relaxing and entertaining guests as well as providing shelter. Houses have to look good. It says something of who you are and most people will upgrade their houses as and when they can afford it. For Japanese however a house is just a machine for living. It’s a place where you go to eat and sleep and it provides a handy place to store your clothes and other crap you don’t quite know what to do with. Houses have a shelf life of about 25 years at which point they believe they are worth nothing and should be torn down. Consequently they do zero maintenance on them. This leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy…. the house falls apart after 25 years due to the lack of maintenance. Most houses in established subdivisions look pretty run down. There may be a new Mercedes Benz in the driveway but paint will be falling off the walls and all the metal fittings will be rusty.

Japanese houses are designed from the inside out. That’s why they look odd with windows all at different levels and machinery like air conditioners and water heaters stuck at random on to the outside walls. It might make sense to have a window at the top of the stairs but it does nothing for the aesthetics of the house. It’s like they’ve never heard of symmetry. Most houses are built by developers to standard floor plans with the same cheap materials and fittings. A bit like cars or any other mass produced goods. Toyota even has a house building company as does Panasonic. Then they stick a huge jumble of electric and phone wires to the side of it and put bars over the windows. Generally speaking, Modern Japanese houses are exceedingly ugly, formulaic and of low build quality. I’m guessing that when they build these things they don’t step back and think to themselves, “yeah! That looks great”. It’s amazing that a culture renowned for its appreciation of beauty and grace can build such godawful buildings. Where the two cultures converge is in the ridiculous amount of your life you will have to sacrifice in order to own a new one. At least in the Western countries, real estate usually appreciates in value, taking some of the sting out of that 25 year mortgage. In Japan, after 25 years of paying for it, it’s worth nothing and will probably be falling apart.