Building, Building

at left: The construction site.
The roof in the right foreground belongs to the old house mentioned in the last paragraph.

After a break in the weather, the drills and cranes are at it again up the hill. Site preparation is underway for a new block of flats within sight and sound of my study. There doesn’t appear to be much bedrock under the ochre topsoil of our part of Ozasa, so the construction dwarfs are sinking great poles of concrete into the ground. This development is rising – or, at the moment, sinking – where three old blocks used to be: former company housing for what was the national railway. When we moved in, there were still a few families hanging on in these buildings. The last ones to go lived in a top corner flat in the block nearest us: at night, their lone lights gave a haunted castle aspect to the view. Two months ago, scaffolding went up around all three buildings after a year of quiet and unattended decay. I was hopeful then that renovation and refitting might preserve what had been well-made structures; but, of course, the scaffolding was little more than an interesting preparation for their demolition. Handbills in the newspaper promise another pile of owner-occupied flats, set in a row along the slope of the hill, like a stack of massive dominoes dropped from the clouds. Those at the top of the pile will have nice views to the south, and I will look out on light brown tile cladding instead of crumbling painted concrete. In time, the weeds and bamboo will reclaim us all.

Without giving much outward sign of it, Ozasa is now in the throes of a housing boom. Down along our local high street, the development has been primarily one-room flats intended for young commuters; these pop up beside bus routes within a reasonable commuting distance of the city centre. These are not just buildings for young people: Japanese companies have a habit of transferring career-track employees every few years, so these buildings attract office workers living apart from their families. These men – they are almost always men – often rent or buy a flat in their ‘working’ city and travel back to their ‘home’ city when they get a chance. The pile outside my study will be for two different categories of homeowners: first, moderately well-off young families seeking a good environment – and a good address – in which to raise children; second, older people whose children have left home, and who are looking for an easy home to maintain in their retirement. The handbills in the newspaper effuse accordingly: pictures of siteless greenery meant to evoke the Botanical Gardens; rhapsodies about convenience, comfort, and proximity to schools and amenities. Everything is ‘barrier free’; everything can accommodate a balcony garden. Similar handbills refer to similar piles gracing slopes and hilltops in all parts of Ozasa not covered by the commuter crowd. Neighbourhood services reflect the trend: our local elementary school will soon be among the biggest in the city, with nearly a thousand students; and we have specialist clinics to treat every form of physical degeneration and pain.

There are still plenty of houses, big and small, in and among the blocks of flats; although the smallest of them tend to evaporate to make way for parking lots when they get past thirty. Flats and houses both are usually built to order from kits, prefabs, or standard plans. As a result, Ozasa is slowly taking on the appearance of a cut-rate builder’s open-air catalogue. There are exceptions, but far too many houses and all the blocks of flats are built in descending order of expense from framing to finishing. Cupboards and closets are fitted with material that one could poke through with a screwdriver. We will be lucky if the exteriors survive five or six rainy seasons before they look like the inside of an unwashed aquarium. The twin goals are bigness and newness, with a sideline in parking spots.

Japan’s ‘bigness’ index differs from the absurdities of European country manors and the more well heeled American suburbs; but big still means that a house is too large in context. Some large homes deserve their size: our parents live in a sprawling pile that manages to accommodate a meeting hall, offices, an archive, two families, and a painter’s studio. Most of the new flats around here are designed to accommodate home electronics and deep couches. This would not be objectionable in itself, were the proportions of the rooms more appealing; but these blocks are designed by machines to house machines – and this ought to be unacceptable. Why do we need so much space in our homes? It seems to be just an invitation to fill them with unnecessary things. Now we must design rooms around huge television sets, complete with elaborate speaker systems, where people could have put a piano.

I should not stand too firm in my opposition to the desire to build bigger homes. Until recently, Japanese home life was cramped, dark, and generally uncomfortable; it would be foolish to ask people to be nostalgic for an age when most neighbourhoods resembled – or in fact were – bombed-out slums. Our current problem is the extent to which home design has swung in the opposite direction: contemporary homes are over-large, over-lit, and little better than boxes made to store the appliances of comfort. We also suffer a cultural dislike of old things, and an enthusiasm for rebuilding and gadgets. There are plenty of critics to proclaim that Japan no longer looks like Japan; but that is not what I have in mind: our country looks like a lot of different things, and most of them are native or adapted to suit native conditions. Architectural and design problems in this country are the same as they are in any country where the people are too rich to care if what they buy falls apart in ten years.

Standing between my window and the building site is the second-oldest house in my part of Ozasa – I am sitting in the oldest, but only a few months separate the two buildings. It dates back to the middle 1960s, and it has been vacant since before the last family moved from the haunted castle on the hill. Now the owner is using it to store the kind of garbage that one has to pay to have hauled away, perhaps in the hope that it can all be carted off to a land reclamation project in a few years together with the house itself. It is a small house, but it would be perfectly adequate – even ample – for a young couple with an infant child, or for a small home business. Despite any number of rainy seasons, the paint on the walls is still recognizable as paint; the windows are solid enough in their frames, and the roof is holding on. At present, the house is undergoing its annual envelopment by a creeping vine with purple flowers. Looking out at what still manages to be a cheerful looking house, I am glad that some Ozasa landowners choose to maintain and rent out places like that. I am particularly glad that I happen to live in one myself. It supports my hope that some kind of hard-earned or accidental proportion will hang on between the booms and busts.

2002/06/29

Date posted: 2003-09-01