city planning

Space invaders

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A few weeks ago we went to an old kodan not far from where we live to inspect an apartment that was on sale. We had never had dealings with this particular real estate company before, and we arrived early to check out the general environment, which was better than it is for most kodan. This one was built in the mid-80s and while the buildings themselves were as dull and utilitarian-looking as any other, the landscaping was impressive: lots of clean, well-maintained mini-parks separating the buildings, which were situated at angles that took advantage of the sunlight. We strolled over to the apartment building where we were to meet the agent and just so happened to run into an agent for a different company setting up a sign outside the same building for an open house. We knew this woman well, having met her numerous times when we inspected other properties in the vicinity. She was open and knowledgeable and knew exactly what we were looking for. It was always a pleasure to talk to her because she didn’t put on the usual salesperson front.

She told us that the apartment she was showing had been badly damaged in a fire. The owners had insurance, which covered the renovations. In fact, they apparently used the opportunity to gut the whole place and completely redo it. It wasn’t clear if the owners had been planning to move beforehand or made the decision after the fire (which is understandable–it might have been difficult for them to face their neighbors after almost burning down the building), but in any case the 70-square meter apartment was being sold for about ¥8 million. We told the agent we’d drop in after we inspected the other place. Read More

Unsafe as houses

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Ever since the March 2011 earthquake, Tokyo has been reassessing its disaster preparedness policies with mixed results. Though the residents of the city have definitely become more knowledgeable about their vulnerability and what needs to be done to save as many lives as possible in the event of a major quake, not much, in fact, has been done, owing mainly to the usual issues involving private property versus public responsibility. Tens of thousands of old wooden houses, packed tightly together in some neighborhoods, are basically kindling for the inevitable conflagrations that will start after an earthquake hits. Since the local government doesn’t feel it can force these people to move or rebuild their houses (which would, in accordance with zoning laws that have gone into effect since they were originally built, force them to construct smaller abodes then they already occupy) their dire prediction falls on deaf ears. Libertarians and individuals with fond feelings about Tokyo’s uniquely quaint neighborhoods condemn any sort of regulatory move that would change the character of those neighborhoods, but it’s clear that these neighborhoods, as well as the people who live in them, won’t survive a big quake. They didn’t survive the 1923 quake, and the situation isn’t really that much different.

The same seems to go for condominiums and apartments, though in a different way. Late last year, the Tokyo government sent out questionnaires to building management companies and condo owner associations to determine the status of quake-proofing for collective housing in the city. Owner-occupied and rental combined, Tokyo has some 132,600 multi-resident buildings, 24,000 of which were built before 1981 when stricter quake-proofing standards went into effect. About 52,000 questionnaires were sent out, and one-tenth were completed and returned. Of these, only 11 percent said that their buildings have been inspected for structural integrity–17 percent for condos and 6 percent for rental apartments. Another 8 percent said they “planned to carry out inspections,” while 9 percent plan to “discuss the matter.” Sixty-three percent responded that they have no plans to do anything. Among the buildings that did carry out inspections, 60 percent were told that they needed “further reinforcements,” but only 4 percent have actually carried out any reinforcement work. Read More

Tall order

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Kimiko Uehara (Tokyo Shimbun)

More than a decade ago, we were following the situation in Kunitachi, Tokyo. A developer, Meiwa Jisho, wanted to build an 18-story condominium in the city and was being opposed by locals. As is often the case with public contretemps that go to court, we lost the thread and our attention fixed on something else. The case was initially interesting because it seemed like a good and rare example of locals standing up to a developer in a concerted, effective fashion. It’s not unusual for residents to protest buildings going up in their midst, but normally such protests are so parochial in impact and fruitless in purpose–involving anything from protection of “right to sunlight” to keeping out “undesirable” elements, like single women working in the so-called water trade–that, by themselves, they offer little that would help us understand the housing situation. The Kunitachi affair was different, and while we were interested in it we thought the residents might actually have a chance to prevail.

The outcome turned out to be more complicated. A recent article in Tokyo Shimbun profiled 63-year-old Kimiko Uehara, the one-time mayor of Kunitachi who was instrumental in bringing the suit against Meiwa. She has been out of politics for years now but is still involved in the Meiwa affair, except that now she is the target of a lawsuit–prosecuted by her fellow Kunitachians. Read More

We’re the top

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What we’re talking about: Palm Springs in Inzai!

Earlier this week the Sankei-affiliated web magazine Zakzak published this year’s results of business journal Toyo Keizai’s annual survey of “urban power,” meaning the most livable cities in Japan. Toyo has been doing the survey since 1993 in conjunction with the publication of a periodical data book that compiles statistics about local economies. The survey uses “14 types of information” released by a number of government organs, including the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, comprising five criteria for satisfactory urban living: safety, convenience, comfort, affluence, and housing standards. The survey covered 787 cities and the 23 wards of Tokyo, and this year the municipality that came out on top was Inzai in Chiba Prefecture, which just happens to be where we live.

Our reaction was pleasant surprise mixed with doubt, and as we read the Zakzak article it became clear what Toyo Keizai’s priorities are with regard to a satisfactory living situation. Inzai ranked #3 in the nation in the convenience category because of its retail accessibility. There are lots of discount stores that are easy to reach and with plenty of free parking. People of a certain aesthetic disposition will, of course, find this aspect of Inzai life somewhat off-putting. The retail outlets in question line route 464, which runs parallel to the Hokuso train line through three stations. Many of these outlets are gathered into rather sterile shopping malls. The article also quotes a 35-year-old resident as praising the “large choice of restaurants” along the main road, though such effusiveness should be qualified by the information that almost all these restaurants belong to national chains. For sure, if there’s one thing that characterizes Inzai’s abundance of commercial choice it’s the almost total lack of distinction. There’s nothing here that’s any different from other suburban commercial districts in Japan except maybe more of it; or less, since you’d be hard pressed to find anything that could be described as “typically Japanese.” If anything, the retail tone is strikingly American. Read More

Home Truths, June

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Here is this month’s Home Truths column in the Japan Times. Almost everything we discuss in the article we’ve already discussed in more detail somewhere on this blog, but this is a fairly concise overview of the whole cramped housing development issue. Since this is a situation that almost anyone who buys a house must contend with, we’d be grateful to hear comments from readers, especially those who have direct experience with the problem–if, in fact, it is a problem. We’ve sort of come to the conclusion it’s something you have to live with.

Field diary: Yukarigaoka

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Monorail at rest

Centrally planned communities have been around in Japan since the 60s with the advent of the “new town” movement, based on the similarly named British social housing policy. The idea is that housing and commerce are engineered to work together. Theoreticians of the Jane Jacobs school of organic urban environments may look down on the concept because of its artificiality: everything is supposed to work because it’s been programmed carefully beforehand. The new towns we’ve looked at in Japan are predictably old-fashioned, like snapshots of the 60s and 70s but ones that evoke no feelings of warm nostalgia except for so-called kodan otaku (public housing freaks). They just look old, mainly because most of the people living in them are old, but also because they are simply superannuated. Though the term “public housing” needs to be qualified in the case of new towns, for the most part the architecture and design of the communities were carried out by public or semi-public entities, and today the buildings and neighborhoods still have a utilitarian quality that many people find quaint at best, ugly at worst. It all depends on what’s been done with the residences in the meantime.

Yukarigaoka, a community in the north-central Chiba city of Sakura, isn’t stricly speaking a “new town,” but it was extensively planned. The difference is that the planning was done by a private company, Yamaman, which started out as a fabric wholesaler in Osaka in 1951. They moved their headquarters to Tokyo in 1965 and for the next ten years became a full-scale real estate developer for residential communities. Their first large-scale project was in Yokosuka, a project that was historically notable for being the first Japanese address written in katakana. They started the Yukarigaoka project in 1971, and even after the initial development phase was completed, have stayed on for the expansion, which continues today. The first sale of single-family homes was in 1979, the first condominium in 1982, the same year they opened a monorail that circled the project and connected to the Keisei Honsen train line. In fact, they convinced Keisei to build a new station just for the community called Yukarigaoka. Naturally, the company had to work closely with the Sakura municipal government in order to purchase land for development, but they also built the area as a community with a future. According to one of the company’s real estate agents, Yukarigaoka is the only similarly sized project in Japan completely overseen by a private company. Because it’s built on a hilly plateau with lots of farmland, the usual expanses of cramped housing developments are broken up by huge swaths of green forests and fields. (Though public parks are relatively scarce.) It has its own “downtown” with a major city hotel and department store complex. There’s even a university with one of the most attractive campuses we’ve ever seen. Read More

Home Truths, April ’12

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Minami Senju

Here’s this month’s Home Truths column, which is about cramped urban neighborhoods that could turn into death traps in the event of a major earthquake. Though much is made in the column about the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s measures to address this problem, we don’t really think it will make much of a difference. Anyone who has read Edward Seidensticker’s fascinating, peculiar, and often frustrating history of the city will understand one thing, that Tokyo defies any notion of city planning with an almost rabid resolution. The “low city” that is Seidensticker’s main subject is portrayed as an organic entity, one that resists any foreign (i.e., governmental) claim to its control as if it were a virus. Most of these neighborhoods sprang up almost overnight after disasters devastated other portions of shitamachi. Working class people moved on to farmland in the outer portions of the city because the place they used to live was destroyed by an earthquake, a fire, or American bombs. Economies of necessity superseded any authoritative prerogatives and communities were born. Those communities are still there. Romantic types love these neighborhoods because they represent what it is they appreciate most about Tokyo, its makeshift conviviality and resistance to conventional ideas of city order. And because those neighborhoods did develop organically, they really do characterize the urban experience in its purest form. But part of the appeal has to do with that hoariest of Japanese cliches, the beauty of transience. These neighborhoods were created by disaster and they will disappear by disaster again. The authorities’ means of addressing this situation may seem flat-footed and ill-advised, but the reasoning is unassailable. In their present state, these neighborhoods will go under, and they will take their inhabitants with them. Maybe there’s nothing anyone can do about that, but it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least think about it.

Whose view?

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Most place names in Japan are derived from geographical or topographical traits, and one of the most common names in the Kanto area is Fujimi, which indicates that the place has a view of Mount Fuji. The Japanese place a lot of spiritual stock in mountains. Traditionally they were the objects of worship, and Fuji, of course, is practically a religion unto itself. It’s probably no coincidence that “fuji” itself is a homonym for a word that means “live forever.”

Nowadays, any address with the name Fujimi attached is highly valued–if, in fact, it still affords a view of the sacred mountain. Tokyo, in particular, is so built up that, according to Tokyo Shimbun, there are only three locations left in the city named Fujimi from which Mt. Fuji can still be seen from the ground. The most famous of these is in Nishi Nippori, a place called Fujimi-zaka, or Fujimi Slope. In early November and late January, photographers and tourists converge at the top of the slope to wonder at the Fuji Diamond, when the sun happens to set behind the mountain’s summit. This year, rubberneckers almost lost their chance, since the weather was cloudy for two of the three days when the diamond view is possible. As it happens, it may be the last time.

That’s because Sumitomo is building three tower condominiums that will forever block the view of Mt. Fuji from the vantage point of Fujimi-zaka. This almost happened before. Back in 1999, another developer announced a plan to build a tall condo within the neighborhood that threatened the view, and local residents formed a committee to protest construction. Naturally, the developer paid no attention, but as it turned out, the building only blocked a small portion of the foot of the mountain. The new Sumitomo project will definitely block the whole thing, so the committee has asked the mayor of Arakawa Ward to lodge a formal complaint with the developer, which reportedly was quite “annoyed” by the request owing to the fact that the buildings under construction happen to be in Okubo, all the way on the other side of the Yamanote Line. Sumitomo bought the land five years ago and says it has complied with all relevant prefectural and ward regulations in planning the housing project, and the ward in question isn’t Arakawa, it’s Shinjuku.

Where there’s smoke

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Last Sunday morning at about 7 o’clock, a fire broke out at the Rose House Higashi apartment building in the Okubo section of Shinjuku, Tokyo. More than half of the two-story structure was destroyed. Four residents died and two remain in critical condition. Of the 26 units in the building, 22 were occupied by 23 residents. That means one unit had two people, which is sort of remarkable since each apartment is only 4.5 tatami mats in size, or about 8 square meters.

Rose House is fifty years old. Each room has a cold water faucet and a gas burner. The toilets are communal. There is no bath, which is characteristic of these kind of wooden apartment buildings. Rents were between ¥51,000 and ¥53,000 a month, which is cheap for Shinjuku but quite expensive for this kind of residence. For ¥10,000 more you can probably find a six-mat apartment not far away with its own private bathroom, but as media have reported 17 of Rose House’s residents were on welfare, and most of them were “very old.” The Shinjuku welfare office told reporters that they did not “recommend” Rose House to any of the people they administer, but it’s common for welfare recipients to “live in the same building.” That’s because their incomes are extremely limited and most landlords will not rent to welfare recipients. As it happens, welfare recipients in Tokyo tend to receive a higher housing allowance than people in other cities in Japan, the maximum being ¥53,000. Rose House apparently catered to welfare cases, which makes sense. Landlords usually can’t demand that much money for such old, cramped apartments, even in Shinjuku, and public housing is usually off-limits to single people; but since welfare recipients don’t have a lot of choices the Rose House landlord could ask them to pay that much. Also, Rose House didn’t demand a guarantor. Even at less than full capacity the place makes more than a million yen a month.

So far the police have not isolated the cause of the fire. Some media initially suspected it had something to do with “old wiring,” since there was a small electrical fire in one of the apartments several months ago, but the Asahi Shimbun has reported that theory has been discounted. Though the building was situated on the edge of a parking lot, Rose House is what is called a saikenchikufuka, a structure that “can’t be rebuilt” because it was erected in the middle of block, thus making it very difficult for firemen to gain access. Nobody will be moving back in, which means the surviving residents now have to find some other hovel to accept them.

Taking shopping arcades seriously

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Shotengai in Sanya, Tokyo

Shotengai, or shopping arcades, have been moving toward extinction for several decades now, the victim of increased motorization, new laws favoring large chain retailers, and the economic slump in general. Composed of small, family-run stores that invariably coalesced into merchant associations, shotengai were the social and commercial hearts of communities in both rural towns and huge cities. The death of the shotengai in the countryside has given rise to a new phenomenon called shopping refugees (kaimono nanmin): residents, most of them elderly, who are effectively cut off from retail areas because local family merchants have closed down and they have no easy access (i.e., driver’s licenses, vehicles) to shopping malls. Some local governments and chain retailers are addressing this problem by helping the refugees reach retailers, but there are also communities that refuse to let their shopping arcades fade into memory. Read More