field diary

Reform or Die

Posted on by catforehead

Here’s another chapter from our unpublished book about housing in Japan based on our own experience of buying/building a home. This one is about keeping up properties.

One of the most popular sub-genres of reality TV is the home improvement show. In 2002, Japan’s Fuji TV launched one called “Before/After,” where superannuated, usually cramped properties were magically transformed into marvels of modern design. The producers hit on a fool-proof hook for the show that they exploited successfully week after week, year after year, without seeming redundant. 

People with properties they wanted to fix up would contact the producers, who sift through the candidates, looking for the most broken-down or unusual cases. The best sequences highlight houses that would seem impervious to improvement due to their state of disrepair or local environment. A surefire hit is always the hovel located in one of Tokyo’s warren-like residential areas, usually dating from just after the war, when neighborhoods were constructed on the fly, and which require not just ingenious design skills to improve, but superhuman feats of logistics, since there usually isn’t any room to get heavy machinery to the property owing to narrow alleyways. The architects are lone wolves who waive their design fees and charge only for materials and labor. The recipients of their largesse come up with a ceiling amount they will pay, thus adding another layer of challenge to the architect’s task. The family is then sequestered off-site while the work is done and documented in detail by a film crew. The residents are not allowed to view the property until the “reform” is complete. The climax is dramatic, with the family entering the sparkling new house with tears streaming down their faces and the anodyne voice of the female narrator showing us the stark differences achieved by the architect. 

“Before/After” sparked a boom in home improvement TV shows but not in home improvement–or, at least, not to the extent that it made a difference in the marketability of older homes. One of the main problems with remodeling in Japan is lack of regulation and oversight. The vast majority of homeowners can’t afford the kind of architects featured on “Before/After,” but anyone can start a home improvement company. In the past, the biggest complaint with regard to remodeling was fraud, characterized by operations that over-billed elderly people for poor work. Eventually, the complaints became more general owing to greater demand by homeowners who decided it was cheaper to renovate their present houses than it was to buy new ones, even if that wasn’t necessarily the case. In 2011, the Center for Housing Renovation and Dispute Settlement Support addressed more than 4,500 claims, mainly in Tokyo. In most cases there were no contracts, design plans, or even written estimates. If a particular job costs less than ¥5 million, according to the law, the company that carries it out doesn’t have to be registered as a construction firm, though remodeling companies are supposed to be insured for shoddy work. Also, the work doesn’t need to be inspected by the relevant authorities unless “it affects the integrity of the structure.” Some years ago a Nagoya woman whose condo became virtually unlivable after a reform company replaced her floors and windows couldn’t sue because there was no contract. The National Consumer Affairs Center of Japan handled more than 13,000 reform-related complaints in 2011, or twice as many as in 2010. Since there were no regulations, the center urged homeowners who were going ahead with remodeling to record all conversations. The Japan Bar Association in April 2011 urged the construction ministry to pass new laws to cover the industry, no matter how small the company.

When it comes to home improvement, experts recommend hiring designers who understand the engineering aspects of a remodeling project and can subcontract the various jobs to tradespeople. Such projects, however, can run into the tens of millions of yen, which is why comprehensive discount remodeling companies have sprung up, offering total renovations for much less. Many are associated with major retail home improvement centers, and are thus deemed to be reliable. They cut costs by buying materials in bulk, which usually means limited choices for the consumer. As with anything, you get what you pay for. 

But most homeowners in Japan don’t renovate in any substantial way, because they’re not conditioned to think of their properties as an investment. And until very recently, there were no government incentives to improve properties. The idea that one’s house, as opposed to the land it sits on, accrues or even retains value over time isn’t widespread in Japan, so as long as people can put up with the wear and tear, they let their houses slide. So the question becomes: Do the houses not retain value because people don’t keep them up? Or do they not keep them up because they believe their houses don’t retain their value? In any case, the majority of used houses, especially those built before, say, 1990, are virtually junk. 

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Last Resorts

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Here is another draft chapter from our unpublished book about our house-hunting adventure. This one is about second homes and so-called resort mansions. 

Second-home inspecting in Nikko

One late summer morning in 2012 we were on the Tokaido Shinkansen super express and ran into a friend we hadn’t seen in years. He asked us if we were still living in Tokyo and we said we had moved some time ago because of the earthquake. He then asked what we were doing on the bullet train and we said we were on our way to Atami on the Izu Peninsula to look at some properties we might be interested in buying. He gave us a funny look. “That would seem to be the worst place to live if you’re afraid of earthquakes.”

True. Just the day before Japan’s Cabinet Office Disaster Council had updated its projections for a major earthquake occurring in the Nankai Trough, the deep indentation in the sea bed off the Pacific coast, and Shizuoka Prefecture, which contains Izu, was deemed the worst location in terms of projected casualties, though, technically, most of those casualties would be in the western part of the prefecture, not Izu. In any case, we weren’t completely serious about buying a place there. Having been frustrated in our search for a home we could afford, we were entertaining the idea of keeping our rental and buying a cheap old fixer-upper in a location with cooler summers. If our income situation worsened and we had to give up renting, then we would at least have a roof over our heads, and if things continued as they had been then we’d have a weekend/summer place. There are plenty of old dumps in the highlands of Tochigi and Nagano, or in the wilds of Chiba that can be had for under ¥7 million, though they’d require another ¥3-5 million to make livable. And during our search we noticed there were quite a few such places in Izu, too, mainly besso (separate homes), which we had avoided so far. Second homes tend to be built in specially designated developments managed by companies that charge yearly fees. Also, besso are usually impractical for year-round living, but since we weren’t necessarily going to be living in one year-round we thought we’d see what was available. And Izu is, as they say, the “Riviera of Japan.” More to the point, it’s cooler in the summer.

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Back to the land (2)

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CIMG1994For a short time we were very interested in a small piece of land in Abiko along the Narita line near Kohoku Station. It was in a tightly packed subdivision called Nakabyo surrounded by older neighborhoods whose winding streets and oddly shaped plots of land indicated it had once been an agricultural community. Nakabyo itself was not as distinctive. It was a typical subdivision of the late 80s, with large houses in varying degrees of disrepair situated on lots that were a little too small for them. The community was laid out on a gentle, long slope that ascended south to north, so that houses positioned on the north sides of the parallel streets had a slight advantage over the ones positioned on the south sides, whose own southern exposures were quite close to their southern neighbors. The land that interested us was at the bottom of the slope and positioned on the south side of a street but its own southern exposure faced a large park. Moreover it was on the corner of an intersection, meaning streets bordered the land to the east and the north, not buildings. Only to the west was there another house.

And it was cheap–¥4.3 million. In fact, the realtor implied that we could probably get it down to an even ¥4 million if we paid cash. Apparently, the owner was desperate to unload it, and we wondered why it was so difficult to do so. Abiko is quite popular owing to the many train lines that run through it and the fact that Ueno is a little more than 30 minutes away by express. This was not in central Abiko, but it was close enough. Moreover, the clear prospect on three sides, including a park to the south, made it one of the few truly attractive lots we’d found in a conventional subdivision. The only reason we could see for its relative unpopularity was its size, slightly less than 100 square meters. Since the occupancy rate was 50 percent and the capacity rate 100, it still meant you could build a two-story house of up to 100 square meters, but because the shape of the land was slightly trapezoidal, the orientation of the house was limited. Read More

Move on up

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CIMG2287Of the three prefectures adjoining Tokyo, Chiba is by far the cheapest in terms of real estate. It tends to rate on the dowdy end of the desirability index. Kanagawa remains the hippest because of places like Kamakura, Shonan, Yokohama; while Saitama, though often derided in popular culture as a suburban backwater (“Dasaitama”), was developed rather quickly owing to its size and convenient proximity to the capital. In fact, property values in northern Chiba along the Noda and Joban lines are comparable to Saitama’s. It’s when you get farther out on the Keisei and Sotobo/Uchibo lines that the suburbs become sparser and less expensive. Chiba is viewed as the sticks, which is just as well for us because it offers more affordable places within striking distance of where we live now.

Interestingly, one of the most expensive housing developments in Japan is in a relatively remote corner of Chiba. The Azumigaoka New Town is part of Chiba City’s Midori Ward, but the nearest train station is Toke on JR’s Sotobo Line, which means it’s practically in Ichihara. The exclusivity of portions of the new town development, coupled with the unusually large plots of land contained therein, have earned at least two subdivisions in the area–Prestige and One Hundred Hills–the nickname Chibaley Hills, a takeoff on Beverley Hills. We’ve never seen this neighborhood with our own eyes since, as with the real Beverley Hills, the residents discourage tourists and gawkers by restricting access. When it first opened the development got a lot of media attention, which in turn attracted motorcycle gangs, so now they have a patrol that politely keeps out pedestrians who have no business there. Nevertheless, you can find properties in the area on sale at almost any real estate portal site, and they remain pretty expensive, though certainly not as high as they were when they were first built during the bubble era. What’s considered a super luxury in Japan would be more or less upper middle class in the U.S., essentially backyards big enough to provide privacy, two or more bathrooms, and lots of windows and open floor plans. We even saw one property at a realtor’s site with a swimming pool. Read More

Field diary: Izu

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Last week we were on the Tokaido Shinkansen early in the morning and ran into a friend we hadn’t seen in years. He asked us if we were still living in Tokyo and we said we weren’t, that we had moved a little over a year ago mainly due to the earthquake. He then asked us what we were doing on the bullet train and we said we were on our way to Atami on the Izu Peninsula to look at some properties we might be interested in buying. He gave us a funny look. “That would seem to be the worst place to live if you’re afraid of earthquakes.” True. Just the day before the Cabinet Office Disaster Council updated its projections for a major earthquake in the Nankai Trough, and Shizuoka Prefecture was deemed the worst in terms of possible casualties, though, technically, most of those casualties would be in the western part of the prefecture, not Izu. In any case, we weren’t completely serious about buying a place on the peninsula. Having been frustrated in our search so far for a home-sweet-home we could afford, we were entertaining the idea of keeping our rental and buying a very cheap old fixer-upper in a place with cooler summers. If our income situation worsened and we had to give up renting, then we would at least have a roof over our heads, and if things continued as they have been (notice we don’t actually think they’ll get better) then we’d have a weekend/summer place. There are plenty of old dumps in the highlands of Tochigi and Nagano, or in the wilds of Chiba, that can be had for under ¥7 million, though they’d require another ¥3-5 million to make them livable. And during our search we noticed there were quite a few such places in Izu, too, mainly besso (second homes), which we had avoided so far. Second homes tend to be built in specially designated besso developments managed by companies that charge yearly fees, some of which are pretty high. Also, besso tend to be impractical for year-round living, but since we weren’t necessarily going to be living in one year-round we thought we’d see what was available. And Izu is, as they say, the “Riviera of Japan.” Read More

Field diary: Onjuku 2

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The entrance to Green Town. Note non-indigenous palm trees.

The last time we inspected some homes in Onjuku, a coastal town in southeastern Chiba famous for its surfing, we went fairly deep into the interior and were disappointed with the quality of the product, which was uniformly cheap, in all definitions of the word. This time we inspected three houses in a large housing development unimaginatively called Green Town. It sits on a hill west of the main train station and overlooks the ocean, which means it has a clear advantage over the rest of the town in this post-311 world: no fear of being swamped by a tsunami. The most popular portion of Onjuku is adjacent to the crescent of beach, which, for what it’s worth, is much cleaner and prettier than any part of Shonan I’ve seen. “Downtown” Onjuku is filled with funky little eateries, surf shops that double as outdoor bars, and lots of tall resort condos that have aged quickly–and badly–thanks to the salt-laden sea breezes. It’s a very attractive place, but it’s also very low and a tidal wave even half the size of the ones that flattened Tohoku would reduce it to sodden rubble rather easily. The reason we kept coming back to Onjuku is the climate. In the summer, it’s on average about 5 degrees cooler than Tokyo. We don’t like air conditioning and one of our priorities is a place where we don’t need it.

Green Town is also at least partially a weekend or summer community, though it’s laid out as a typical cramped Japanese housing development, albeit with more attention paid to the “green” component it promises. The developer is Seibu, and there are altogether about 1,500 lots, one thousand of which have houses on them. Half of these are owned by year-round residents, and thus the normal sterile atmosphere of modern Japanese housing developments is checked by a certain ramshackle quality. Some of the buildings are quite fine–and large–while others are modest and makeshift-looking. But while the stylistic tone is pleasingly varied, the overall feel is almost ominous. The day we visited was a weekday and summer vacation hadn’t begun in earnest yet, but the neighborhoods we visited were quite deserted. The only human activity was workers cutting grass or delivering LPG cannisters (despite the upscale appearance of the area, they don’t have gas lines). The real estate agent who guided us said most of the population was older, not because young people were moving out, but because only older people were moving in. (It’s not a town for commuters–Tokyo is an hour and 30 minutes away by super express) Apparently, older people don’t like to leave their homes in the daytime. Read More

Field diary: Tomisato

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Tomisato is out in the direction of Narita Airport. In fact, according to the real estate agent we talked to when we went there recently, a good portion of the residents of the city make their living off the airport in one way or another, which may explain the density of motor traffic. The nearest train stations are actually in Narita City, which means everyone drives to wherever they have to go, including their workplaces. It would appear there are almost no Tokyo commuters in this stretch of Chiba Prefecture, which is understandable. At some point, you have to reach a distance where people don’t go to Tokyo to work, but the lack of public transportation is notable. Read More

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

Field diary: Nishi Shiroi

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At ¥17.8 million it wasn’t a house we could afford, but we’d been to the city of Shiroi in Chiba Prefecture a number of times–it’s only a few stations from our own–and found its surburban ambience more appealing than most; and the photographs posted on the realtor’s website made it look attractive, at least from the outside: lots of green and the property adjoined a wide promenade on its eastern side. The fact that there were no photos of the interior of the house should have told us something.

We got lost on the way and called the agent by phone. He picked us up not far from the property and seemed genuinely shocked that we would actually walk the 17 minutes from the station. The shock was compounded when we told him we didn’t own a car. Even more garrulous than the usual salesmen he was open to our questions, even as they became bitter after we discovered just what a dump the place was. Built in the early 90s, the house looked as if it had never been taken care of at all. The laminate floors were dull and scuffed, the wallpaper brown with mildew. The layout wasn’t bad. All the rooms opened up on one another in a way that was well-thought out and provided a lot of light; or, at least, as much light as could be expected given that there was little space between neighboring houses to the south and the north. The kitchen was the best part. It was large and featured a corner counter with an accompanying corner window. Unfortunately, the view from the window was dominated by the neighbor’s ugly makeshift backyard shed, one of the most common blights of suburban living in Japan. The promenade that made an impression in the photos wasn’t quite as wide as we thought, but at least it afforded space to the east. Nevertheless, the kitchen would need to be completely redone. There was also a “workshop” in back of the kitchen that was filled with garbage. Read More

Field diary: Nikko

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For a while now we have been looking at properties up near Nikko, though we couldn’t tell you exactly why the area appealed to us. Subconsciously, we may have thought of it as being the poor man’s Kamakura, which is where we would like to live but can’t really afford. Since the quake it’s also been more appealing since it’s obviously very far from the ocean and though it gets quakes itself it seems to be on relatively solid ground. But mainly because we always thought it was a nice town with good people and pleasant scenery. However, any time we’d been there to check out properties it was usually outside Nikko proper, and the houses were the usual suburban-style prefab junk.

This time we went to Nikko proper. In fact, the first place we looked at was a ten-minute walk from Nikko Station. The fact that is was only ¥5 million will give you an idea of the condition it was in, but from the photos on the realtor’s website it looked salvageable. Obviously, at that price we were essentially buying the land. The house was built in the early 70s, though the second floor was a later addition.

We met the agent about a block from the property. He had taken the train up from Tokyo and rented a car, since he would be showing us another property a little further out of town. The house was located next to a makeshift parking lot to the west. To the north there was plenty of space between the house and its neighbor and the garden was located to the east; beyond it was nothing. So on three sides there was a lot more room than you might expect from this part of town, which was residential in a pleasantly diverse way. Unfortunately, as with almost all Japanese buildings, the house “faced” south, and there was barely three meters between it and its neighbor. This is unfortunate because all the windows looked out on the wall of the house next door. Since the kitchen and bathroom are always located in the north portion of a Japanese house there were no windows on that side and for some reason there were no windows to the east either. The genkan was located on the west side. So that meant the only light would come from the south, and it didn’t look like much was going to make it into the house itself.

It was in even worse shape than we thought. The agent told us the owners had only left less than six months ago, but it was difficult to believe anyone could live in such a decrepit building: moldy tatami, peeling laminate floors and paneling, buckled cabinets in the kitchen. The second floor add-on consisted of two rooms that smelled as if someone had died in them. Any renovations would cost upwards of ten million, though the place really needed to be torn down. That would cost about a million, and then a new house would run another 15 probably. The location was good, but that was too much work. Read More