Japan is famous for its radical residential architecture. But as Tokyo architect Alastair Townsend explains, its penchant for avant garde housing may be driven by the country’s bizarre real estate economics, as much as its designers’ creativity.
Here on ArchDaily, we see a steady stream of radical Japanese houses. These homes, mostly designed by young architects, often elicit readers’ bewilderment. It can seem that in Japan, anything is permissible: stairs and balconies without handrails, rooms flagrantly cast open to their surroundings, or homes with no windows at all.
These whimsical, ironic, or otherwise extreme living propositions arrest readers’ attention, baiting us to ask: WTF Japan? The photos travel the blogosphere and social networks under their own momentum, garnering global exposure and international validation for Japan’s outwardly shy, yet media-savvy architects. Afterall, in Japan – the country with the most registered architects per capita – standing out from the crowd is the key to getting ahead for young designers. But what motivates their clients, who opt for such eccentric expressions of lifestyle?
An unconventional home requires an unconventional client, one who’s willing to take-on, or can afford to ignore, one or more types of risk: privacy, comfort, efficiency, aesthetics, etc. But Japan’s experimental commissions aren’t necessarily luxury villas for a wealthy cultural elite. Many are small middle-class homes, not a typology where we expect to find bold avant garde design. So, what is it about Japan that encourages such everyday risk taking?
In the West, deviation from societal norms can jeopardize a home’s value, since it may prove impractical or distasteful to future buyers. Bold design decisions can present investment risk, so clients usually temper their personal tastes and eccentricities accordingly.
At least that’s enshrined Western logic. Safe as houses,right? Travel to Japan and this home truth is turned on its head, largely because the Japanese can not expect to sell their homes.
Houses in Japan rapidly depreciate like consumer durable goods – cars, fridges, golf clubs, etc. After 15 years, a home typically loses all value and is demolished on average just 30 years after being built. According to a paper by the Nomura Research Institute, this is a major ‘obstacle to affluence’ for Japanese families. Collectively, the write-off equates to an annual loss of 4% of Japan’s total GDP, not to mention mountains of construction waste.
And so, despite a shrinking population, house building remains steady. 87% of Japan’s home sales are new homes (compared with only 11-34% in Western countries). This puts the total number of new houses built in Japan on par with the US, despite having only a third of the population. This begs the question: why don’t the Japanese value their old homes?
Here, without wishing to resort to clichés, a little cultural background offers some insight…
Firstly, Japan fetishizes newness. The frequent severity of earthquakes has taught its people not to take buildings for granted. And impermanence is an enshrined cultural and religious value (nowhere more so than at Ise’s Grand Shinto Shrine, which is rebuilt every 20 years). These oft-repeated truisms nonetheless fail to offer a sufficient economic rationale for Japan’s ingrained real estate depreciation. Its disposable attitude to housing seems to fly in the face of Western financial sense.
In the country’s rush to industrialize and rebuild cities decimated after WWII, housebuilders rapidly spawned many cheap, low quality wooden frame houses – shoddily built without insulation or proper seismic reinforcement. Older homes from this period are assumed to be substandard, or even toxic, and investing in their maintenance or improvement is considered futile. So, rather than maintain or upgrade them, most are simply torn down.
Depreciation is also a holdover from the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble in the late 1980’s. Then, the ballooning price of land shot up so rapidly, buildings were considered temporary installations. This perception persists today, propped-up, in part, by policies that artificially sustain land prices, despite years of economic stagnancy and population decline.
The quality of today’s typical homes – most of which are robotically prefabricated – has greatly improved, but the earlier mindset remains entrenched as market logic. Depreciation is the mantra of housing appraisers. Yet, there’s no material reason why, if properly maintained or improved, these homes couldn’t provide shelter in perpetuity, like in the West, where reselling and moving homes several times throughout one’s lifetime is commonplace.
Japan’s army of loyal salarymen enjoy secure jobs for life, and rarely move to relocate to a new job. Although this is starting to change, a stable salaried job is still a prerequisite for a mortgage, which borrowers slowly repay in full over the course of their careers. Selling up – much less profiting from the resale – is out of the question, since no one wants to buy a pre-owned home. As the salaryman dutifully slaves away to pay off the mortgage, his or her property’s value is all the while depreciating, eventually leaving only the value of the land (minus the cost of demolishing the house). In other words, negative equity is the norm. Grinding economic and, consequently, geographic immobility is an entrenched reality for most Japanese homeowners.
So, how do Japan’s bizarre real estate economics influence its architecture? Clients need not contemplate what a potential buyer will think 8-10 years into the future. This gives them and their architects greater personal freedom.
Without property values to safeguard, Japan, generally lacks planning scrutiny or incentives to protect and preserve local character. Neighbors are largely powerless to object on aesthetic grounds to what gets built next door. This is a boon to architects’ creative license, but it also reduces the collective incentive to maintain and beautify communities by, say, nurturing greenery or burying overhead power lines.
The freedom to build homes that are a highly personal expression of lifestyle, taste, and aspiration, makes Japan a fertile environment for architects and their clients to test the limits of residential design.
For architects, it also helps that civil lawsuits are rare. Unlike their litigation-wary European and American counterparts, Japanese architects rarely fear claims of negligence, emboldening them to take greater risks.
It may seem sad that Japanese families slave, scrimp, and save to build a home, only to see their investment rapidly vanish over the ensuing 15 years. In this light, some of the avant garde houses seem like fatalistic last hurrahs – follies to the futility of home ownership in Japan. Resigned to their predicament, but needing somewhere to live and raise a family, it’s little wonder that Japanese clients reclaim control and quietly rebel in the best way they can – through design.
Besides… they’ll eventually tear it all down anyway.
falling prices are normal for a shrinking population. Look at Detroit.
Mouse can even find a falling price in a most dense the populate city wards on a planet,
like a Yamanote circle in a Tokyo.
And it can use same the narrative,
for a explain mouse love of mouse house mythology,
in a Australia or a NZ.Catweasel say expand its skull,
with a Ban the Shigeru!
“Architects create monuments to their egos or to help developers,” he went on. “That’s part of what we do, and what I do — make monuments. But they need to work more in the service of society. That’s also the responsibility of the architect. I think we’re responsible at all stages of the process.”
Sunday, 1 Dec 2013 | 6:24 PM ET Ansuya Harjani | Writer, CNBC Asia
As Abenomics gives Japan's sluggish housing market a new lease on life, there's one group of investors looking to cash in on the market's resurgence: the wealthy Chinese.
"Chinese individual investors now appear to be dipping their toes in the water and considering Japan as the next destination, a wave that could be reinforced as capital controls in China are lifted," Freya Beamish, economist at Lombard Street Research wrote in a report titled 'Japan's House Party'.
Unlike Hong Kong and Singapore, hot spots for Chinese property investors in recent years amid government housing curbs at home, Japan's housing market has seen little demand from mainlanders, Beamish said.
Donald Han, Managing Director at real estate consulting firm Chesterton Singapore thinks the AEON Reit listing should do well and explains how resilient Japan's retail property market is.
"Japan is now benefiting from second round effects of Asia's overheated property sector," she said.
The average price of new condominium prices in the Tokyo Metropolitan area, for example, soared 12.2 percent in July on-year, according to the latest data from the Land Institute of Japan. That may reflect growing momentum in the country's housing market on the back of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's economic policies, dubbed Abenomics, which have instilled confidence among residents.
While Tokyo is the world's third most expensive city to live in, according to Mercer, ultra high-end property in the Japanese city still looks like a bargain compared with the Hong Kong – which ranks sixth.
For example, a three-bedroom apartment in one of Tokyo's highest-priced luxury condominiums, The "Parkhouse Gran Chidorigafuch", costs $22,000 per square foot, according to Jones Lang La Salle. In Hong Kong, an apartment of the same caliber, such as "Argenta", costs almost $30,000 per square foot.
The interest in Japanese property comes at a time when tensions have escalated between Beijing and Tokyo over disputed islands in the East China Sea, where both countries have laid claim. The tensions led to violent protests across China last year, and led to Chinese consumers boycotting Japanese goods.
The developments don't seem to be putting off Chinese property hunters.
Overseas buyers made up a small portion of property sales in Tokyo at just 10 percent in 2012, much lower than other major markets such as New York and London at 31 percent and 63 percent, respectively, data from Jones Lang La Salle showed.
Donald Han, managing director at real estate consulting firm Chesterton Singapore, says China's high-net-worth individuals are particularly keen on Tokyo's residential property, which hasn't seen much interest from foreigners for a while.
"This is in light of the current upswing in the economy, and the fact that it [Tokyo] has been awarded the 2020 Olympics," Han told CNBC. "Chinese investors are looking into hotels as well, with their primary targets being first tier cities such as Tokyo, Osaka, and Yokohama."
The Olympic effect is expected to drive a rise in Tokyo's residential property prices in the next few years, given the large-scale redevelopment of the Tokyo Bay area and expansion of the transportation system connecting the city and its surrounding areas, say market watchers.
Mei Wong, regional director and head of international residential properties for Jones Lang LaSalle Hong Kong, said inquiries regarding Japan properties have risen around 15 percent over the past three months, driven by the "promising returns on real estate investment amid a thriving property market benefitting from the Olympics effect and prospects of Japan's resurgent economy."
Wow. $22,000/square foot. That's about $22M for a 100sqm apartment.
Beijing and Sydney still look pretty cheap compared to that.
If you like living in an irradiated hell-zone (although you cannot taste, smell or see the isotopes), in a country where the guv-er-ment isn't 1. properly recognising the problem and 2. isn't fixing it. then Japan is your country.
They haven't fixed those reactors. Even if they do fix them, would you trust their word on it?
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