What to do now the 21st century is not even a teenager any more

Here is the third part of the Building Culture presentation, and the final video recording of the course.



Being the last video it should probably include a short summary of the main points, but it probably just ends rather abruptly, with more questions asked than answers, and many things left unsaid. A bit like this post.

Building Culture: Differences between Japan and the UK

Different countries have different building cultures, and the differences between Japan and the UK are immediately visible. Just like the buildings themselves, some of these differences are superficial and others are structural, some are easily visible and others are buried and hidden deep underground but have profound influences.

In Japan people like new houses but in the UK people like old houses. I think this comes from the fundamental difference that in the UK houses represent capital wealth, while in Japan the value is in the land, and houses are consumables. Before we decided to build, we spent a few years looking at buying a house, and visited many that were unsatisfactory, in one way or another. A few times we noticed houses for sale moving into the list plots of land for sale, as the building was knocked down. In these cases, the price usually went up, suggesting that an old building on a piece of land is a liability and the land becomes more valuable when it is removed.

In the UK, if people want a different house, they will sell up, buy a new one and move. In Japan they will knock the house down and rebuild. Redecoration and renovation are carried out on a regular basis on UK houses, while in Japan they are more of a recent trend.

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The western sun is strong

There is common wisdom in Japan that the western sun is strong. Of course it is not—the sun delivers just as much radiation in the West as it did in the morning in the East. And it delivers the most when it is highest and due South. In fact, less radiation may get through in the West as the air may be more hazy and dusty in the afternoon than it was in the morning.

Panels on a west-facing roof titled to the South

Some people are retrofitting solar panels onto pyramid roofs that slope four ways, and are encouraged by the wily sellers of panels to add them to the East and West sides as well as the South side. Panels facing due south will generate the most, and you could generate 20% less if the panels point East or West. The installers will charge the same wherever the panels go, and when grants are available they often do not depend on where the panels go. Orienting panels in different directions will give peak generation at different times of day which may be more useful than maximum total generation. Given a choice, people recommend the East side for panels, rather than the West side. If the western sun were stronger, they would be recommending panels on the West side.

One of my favourite local solar installations.
I wish they all had servos and tracked the sun! 

What is happening in both cases is that the temperature in the afternoon is higher, and in the normal state of affairs, the western sun is going to feel a lot hotter as the ambient temperature is already hot. In the morning it is relatively cool.

For the panels, efficiency drops as temperature rises, so the eastern panels will produce more electricity in the cool morning than the geometrically identical ones on the west that have to wait until the hotter afternoon to produce their electricity.

Shelves for an airing cupboard

My telephone sometimes tries to be smart and puts together photos I've taken into cute albums of what I have been doing. Unfortunately, I use my phone more as a note-taking device than a scrap book of life-defining events, so a significant proportion of my photos are of the dimensions and prices of items in hardware shops, as you can see here.

Five years into living in this house we still haven't reached peak shelf. The new airing cupboard presents a particular challenge to storage.

I realise that the concept of an airing cupboard may be confined to the UK, or at least to northern Europe. It's a simple enough idea though. You have a cupboard next to the hot water tank, which stays warm and is a good place to dry clothes. Hot water tanks have been standard in UK houses for a while, and damp weather has been around even longer. These hot water tanks are always inside so that any heat lost from them goes into the house, in contrast to Japan where hot water tanks are become more common but are invariably outside the house, even in areas like mine where it drops ten degrees below freezing.

Airing cupboards are particularly useful in the UK where it is often raining or damp, especially in the winter, and drying outside is not an option. I remember my Australian friend talking about hanging out washing in the summer, and the first bits being dry by the time they finished hanging out the last bits, so airing cupboards are probably not so important there. Years of cheap electricity in the US mean that people dry laundry in machines, and it has been suggested that hanging it anywhere else is a confession of poverty.

Drying outside is possible in Japan for most of the year, although the rainy season can sometimes give you few opportunities. Another problem we have is with allergies and when it is pollination season for all the now mature cedar that were planted after the war, we don't want to hang washing outside.

We have an indoor hot water tank, and I'm not really sure why we didn't make it into an airing cupboard from the start, but I have recently converted the door into it, and there are nice spaces around 30 cm wide on two sides of the tank.The door is diagonal, so you can easily get into these two sides. The one on the right is about 50 cm deep, the other on the left almost a metre. 

I was trying to work out the best way of utilising the space. The shallower gap on the right is about one hanger-width deep, so the best plan is a couple of things sticking out of the wall to hang hangers, one high and one low. There were various options available in shops, but the best things I saw were the shop fittings that their products were hanging off, and I haven't seen them for sale anywhere. As usual Japan seems to have a massive range of products that are all tailored to a very standardised set of architectural constraints. So there are hangers designed to fit on the backs of doors, or on the frames for sliding aluminium windows. Not much is available for screwing into a wall. 

Not the hangers, the thing the hangers are hanging from

I imagined some kind of drawer system to pull out racks to hang socks and things on, that would then push back into the deeper space on the left. Several sketches of ropes and pulleys, levers and pivots, and rails on rails followed, but in the end, simplicity prevailed. I got a foldaway hanger that can be screwed into the wall, but it is a little too narrow. There are also extendable poles that fit on the wall on one side and the boiler on the other. Luckily the boiler is square.

The best solution was simple brackets sticking out of the wall, with some nuts and bolts at intervals along them. Then we can hang hangers off them.

Candid advice for architects

One time when I was hitch hiking I asked the driver what he did, and he said he was a painter. I thought this was interesting, but wasn't sure whether he was an artist, or a workman. So I asked him what he painted. "Houses", he replied. This didn't help me very much. I was still not sure whether he sat with an easel producing two dimensional impressions of houses, or whether he covered their surfaces with paint. I make no value judgement on the two vocations, and whatever the man did I was grateful he was giving me a lift.

I think sometimes there is a similar confusion with architects. The clients usually just want someone who will make a building for them, but the architects often seem interested in creating a work of art. Here is some advice if you are an architect. If an architect is working for you, you may already know this.

1. Save the models for your mum.

You may be really pleased with the one-in-forty model that you've built of your client's house. But your clients are not three centimetres tall and don't want walls, roof and floors in white plastic. If we were your parents, and you had brought it back from elementary school, we would be really proud and impressed. But we're not your mum and you're not at elementary school. 

We can get 3D simulations on computer games, where we can not only walk through virtual realities, but shoot zombies on the way. CD Roms are given out free with interior decoration magazines that let us see what a room, a building or a space will look like. We'd like to see what the spaces are going to look like from inside, ideally walking around them, looking from different angles and even better with different light from different times of day. This is technically possible and clients deserve it. 

2. Leave your opinions at home. 

Clients are interested in your knowledge, your experience, your judgement and your creativity. We are not paying you for your opinions. 

3. Distinguish the process and the product.

Most people working on the house are entirely involved in the process. The clients are predominantly interested in the product. In other words the completed house. As long as they get the house they want, they may really not care who does it, what order it is done in, where they have to come from, what other jobs they are doing at the moment, or what they had for breakfast. 

Although it's not the primary concern, the client may be very interested in the process, and how the building is made. Most people only build a house once and it's a rare opportunity to see concrete being poured, or a wooden frame going up, or a freshly painted room. Some people don't want to miss a thing!

So don't forget that the finished house is the most important thing for your clients, but don't assume they are not interested in how it gets there.

4. Communicate.

Your job is not really to give the clients what they want. They won't get it! You have to make them want what they are going to get. At the beginning of a building project, everything is possible, the human imagination is boundless and sketches on paper are cheap and unlimited by many of the laws of physics. As the project goes on, this level of satisfaction begins to fall. If we imagine there is 100% satisfaction the moment you decide to build your dream house, then the client is lucky to be over 50% satisfied by the end. As dreams turn to reality, there is a steady erosion of satisfaction and things become impossible, scales are reduced, qualities are sacrificed to the bottom line. 

5. Costs are your problem.

The budget is what we can spend on the house. It's not some vague target that will work as a starting point. That is what we think we can afford to pay. You need to keep under it. We don't really care how much things cost. That's your problem.

6. Study marriage guidance counselling.

If you're dealing with a couple, the easiest thing is to work out who is the more powerful of the two, then to start ignoring the other partner. This makes sense as whoever is more powerful is going to be making the decisions anyway. However, it's cynical, disrespectful and may lead to a divorce. I'm not really sure of the best advice, but you need to know. 

7. Draw the pictures, then go and find another customer.

There are two ways that clients can work with architects. One is to draw the pictures and hand them over. The other is to see the whole project through. I found this out much too late, and it was never really an option given by our architect. I can understand that seeing the whole project through leads to more revenue, and also I imagine there are various opportunities to strengthen relationships with a variety of tradesmen, and maintain fingers in a variety of pies. This is probably especially true in Japan where architects are referred to respectfully as Sensei, and can command undeserved and unrequited respect from a whole industry. Also I can appreciate that holding on to a whole project means not having to worry about finding another client for longer. 

Unless you're really good at project management, you should probably concentrate on drawing and designing. If you are good at project management, then you should probably do that and get someone else to concentrate on drawing and designing.

8. If somebody notices how much time and effort went into your design, then you probably didn't put enough time and effort into it.

And I haven't even started on advice about low energy building, but you can read some here from Proud Green Home. I especially like the idea about not allowing incandescent bulbs onto the building site.

A washing line stretching between cultures

I don't imagine houses built in the UK come with fitted washing lines, even though creels may have been standard issue in the past.

A washing line came fitted onto our house, and I'm sure this was one of the things we spent a few hours talking over with the architect. Like many of the decisions it was wrapped up in invisible cultural assumptions.

For a start, washing lines in Japan are actually washing poles, traditionally bamboo hanging down from the eaves of a house. Ours is held up by two brackets bolted onto the pillars holding up our balcony. In our original plan, a terrace ran the whole width of our house along the south. At some point, partially to increase the amount of garden and partially to reduce the cost of construction, this was shortened to two thirds of the width. The terrace remained in front of the kitchen at the East, but was removed at the West. The washing pole remained at the west, so that area remained dedicated to washing, making it difficult to plant much there.

The reason the washing pole stayed there is probably that the pillars on the terrace don't line up. In three places along its width, there are two pillars holding the balcony up, but in the middle of the terrace there is only one. This means that the brackets would stick out at different lengths. Actually this is not such a problem. Whoever designed the washing pole brackets had obviously thought about this possibility, and made oval holes for the poles so they are perfectly equipped to protrude adjacently from bits of building that are not parallel. More recently I moved the washing pole so it is above the terrace, which turned out to be very straightforward, although it interfered with an awning we were using before.

There was a more simple solution: A washing line.

Specifically a retractable washing line, that can be pulled from one end of the terrace to the other, and possibly back again. It could even be pulled to a post elsewhere in the garden. If I could find one. UK online sites have several models to offer, but most of the retractable washing lines in Japan are less than two metres long and designed for hotel bathrooms.
We did find one though, and it seems to work.

Lesson 11, Part II: Cultural Differences

I started off talking about my original goal, which was to build a house that would produce rather than consume energy. This meant a low energy house with some potential for electricity generation. It meant insulation, shading in the summer, and solar gain in the winter.

The fact that I was from the UK also meant that I had to deal with, or come to terms with, difference in building culture. In the UK people like old houses while in Japan they like new houses. So in the UK if they want a new house they sell up and move, while in Japan they knock down and rebuild. This comes down to a fundamental difference: in the UK the value is in the buildings, so houses are capital, while in Japan the value is in the land so the houses are consumable.

"Were you born in a barn?" - untranslatable and now largely obsolete expression

In the UK central heating is pretty much standard, while in Japan it is a recent luxury. Boilers are inside in the UK, where their lost heat will contribute to the house's heating. In Japan they are usually outside where they will take up no floor space. Insulation has recently been used more in Japan, while it is compulsory and often financially supported in the UK. I even heard a story of somewhere they had been giving grants for people to insulate their lofts, but they found some people weren't taking them up because they had so much junk up there that they didn't have time or energy to go up and clear out. So they started paying people to clear up their lofts.

There are other differences in design and construction. Stone and brick are the traditional building materials in the UK while wood is used in Japan. Design seems to start with the whole building in the UK while in Japan it often seems that rooms are being assembled into a house. Building standards are strict in the UK and more lax in Japan, except in the area of earthquakes, which are frequent in Japan, but unusual in the UK.

The climate is quite different with hot humid summers and cold dry winters in Japan, but cooler drier summers in the UK and milder damper winters. Of course, in both places the humidity remains between 0% and 100%, and the same laws of science apply. Also similar in the two countries is the floor area per person—around 35 square metres—in spite of Japan's reputation for rabbit hutches and the image of UK stately homes. The heating load over the year is similar, at least between Matsumoto and Manchester. Okinawa is much warmer than anywhere in the UK and Hokkaido much colder, and London needs more heating than Tokyo so the climate at the median population is warmer in Japan.

I think in both countries people want as much floor space as possible for as little budget. They want to be warm in winter and cool in summer. Nobody wants any condensation, ever. Everyone wants low running costs and a long building life. I suspect in both countries people get exasperated by architects and the biggest culture difference is probably between those who build houses and those who pay for them and then live in them.

I went through my list of alarming expressions.

風通しはいい kaze tohshi wa ii

translation: The wind goes through it nicely.

This phrase is beloved of building marketers, and rolls off the tongues of architects as if it is the redeeming feature of any respectable house. But getting a good through draft is not going to do much good if it's 35 degrees outside. Or if it's minus 10. Or if it's not windy. And I may not want the wind blowing in during hay fever season when the air is filled with pollen from the thousands of trees covering the mountains near by. At some times of year, a through draft may be nice, but those are the times of year when living in a tent is pleasant, and you don't really need a house.

季節感が有る kisetsu kan ga aru

translation: You get a good sense of the seasons.

This sounds to me like an excuse for it being hot in the house when it's hot outside, or cold when it's cold outside. Like you need your house to remind you of this. In fact I think the job of a house is precisely the opposite, and the environment inside should be within that rather narrow range of comfort that the our tropical origins defined for us. What are you going to do next, make a house that leaks water on our heads when it's raining? If I want to know what season it is, I'll look out of the window, thank you very much.

我慢してください gaman shite kudasai
translation: Just put up with it. 

This is the twenty first century. We've had permanent research bases in Antartica since 1903, and the international space station has been manned since 1998. It shouldn't be so difficult to make a house here that will put up with me. 

日本は… nihon wa
translation: Japan is... or Japan has... or Japan does...

Whatever Japan is, has or does, this usually sounds like either racism or jingoism, thinly veiled and often subconscious. It is often some "tradition" that was in fact a temporary measure brought out during some war, or imposed under occupation afterwards. 

There's a quote from Billy Connolly, "there's no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes."

I have a modification: there's no such thing as a bad climate, just the wrong building.

In the midst of this battle of ideals I came across the Passivhaus standard, and it made my goal possible.

See part III.

Built to last or built to lose

There have been articles about this on treehugger.com and in the Guardian recently, so here is a re-post from August 2011, embellished by a graph from a paper they cite.

It is sometimes hard for me to come to terms with the disposable nature of house building in Japan. Apparently the average life time of a house in Japan is 17 years. In the UK, it would take 1700 years to replace the entire building stock. Although those two numbers are not equivalent, it gives some idea of the difference. I come from a country where houses are built to last. I grew up in a house that was a couple of hundred years old, which was not particularly unusual. The house we rent here now is about a hundred years old, and it's a constant surprise that it is still here.

(This shows the value of buildings dropping to zero after 15 years, from this paper by Richard Koo and Masaya Sasaki.)

It is easy to write this off as bad workmanship or see it in terms of a nation that loves new things and is obsessed with the disposal of the old. It has been suggested that Japan must have a large construction industry as there are periodic needs for mass rebuilding after natural disasters. It seems that the construction industry is a powerful lobby and they can veto any suggestions to improve building standards. There is also, no doubt, something left over from the post-war rebuilding of Japan where fast, cheap building was the only option. I think there is no simple reason.

But there is a vicious circle, as I found when I was asking the bank about loans. As far as they are concerned, and as far as the taxman is concerned too, a house is worth nothing after twenty-five years. The biggest drop in value is the moment you move in. In most cases, the house is worth less than you paid for it as soon as you turn the key and walk over the threshold.

The people at the bank weren't particularly interested in the building specs when they were valuing the property, instead they look at the houses in the neighbourhood and take an average per floor area. In fact as far as collateral, they don't really take the house into consideration but just look at the value of the land. So unless you're building with cash, and have lots of it, you're at the mercy of a bank that is going to encourage you to reduce the spec. There is little incentive to build something that will last more than 25 years, although one glimmer of hope is a recent standard for a hundred-year house that can open the door to lower mortgage rates.

Houses in the UK, and probably the rest of Europe, the US and Australia, steadily increase in value. From when they are built, they start to get more valuable. After a while, when they hit an unfashionable or unserviceable age they stop getting more valuable, but even then they will hold their value. A little later they start to go up again. There are certainly stories of people with negative equity and people who lose out, but that's usually short term and a combination of local conditions and some measure of extra bad luck for the house owners, forcing them to buy and sell at the wrong times.

As we were looking around Matsumoto for houses and land, we often saw old houses for sale that were very reasonable. If they weren't sold after a year or two, they were knocked down, and the price of the land, without a house, would go up. There is a common wisdom here that renovating old houses is more expensive than building new ones, and I think it may be true if you're comparing a low-cost new-build with restoring a ruin to its ancient form. I think it's more likely to be propaganda by the building trade, a symptom of few people or businesses that renovate, and the prevailing trend of not looking after houses, but letting them wear out until they are knocked down, which is all part of the vicious cycle.

Having said that, if I look at the house we are in now and if we were to bring it up to a comfortable level to live in, we'd have to replace the roof, replace the windows that make up the north and south walls, and pull up the floors and do some work on what's underneath. By the time we'd taken all the bits off that need changing, we'd be left with a wooden frame, and that probably would have to be made earthquake proof as their are no diagonal supports and the whole thing is a mechanism. Also, I'd want to raise all the horizontal beams so the doorways are at least twenty or thirty centimetres above my head rather than two or three centimetres below, just where there is a permanent bruise on my forehead.

One way of looking at this difference is in terms of agriculture. The UK traditionally has pastoral farming, so buildings have been essential to provide shelter for people and animals, so that animals can feed off the surrounding land. Buildings have intrinsic value in this sense. Japanese agriculture is arable, so that land itself is valuable for intensive planting of crops. Any building is going to reduce this value by stopping the production of crops.

Another consequence is in the notion of "home". For the British, a home is a solid thing. An Englishman's home is his castle. For Japanese people, any building seems arbitrary and the sense of belonging is to a community of people.

So while I see what I am doing as an investment, and put myself on a mission to make a small change to the way houses are built and treated here, I'm probably just pouring cash into a hole in the ground, and the main interest of most of the people involved is to catch some of that cash as it falls. I'm sure the house could be built to a similar specification for less cost, and hopefully everyone involved will learn something on the way, so if another idiot comes along asking for a house that doesn't consume, it'll be easier for everyone concerned.

Original post: Built to last or built to lose
Thank you PJ for sending the treehugger article.

Differences in building culture

Different countries have different building cultures, and the differences between Japan and the UK are immediately visible. Just like the buildings themselves, some of these differences are superficial and others are structural, some are easily visible and others are buried and hidden deep underground but have profound influences.
 
In Japan people like new houses but in in the UK people like old houses. I think this comes from the fundamental difference that in the UK houses represent capital wealth, while in Japan the value is in the land, and houses are consumables. Before we decided to build, we spent a few years looking at buying a house, and visited many that were unsatisfactory, in one way or another. A few times we noticed houses for sale moving into the list plots of land for sale, as the building was knocked down. In these cases, the price usually went up, suggesting that an old building on a piece of land is a liability and the land becomes more valuable when it is removed. 
 
In the UK, if people want a different house, they will sell up, buy a new one and move. In Japan they will knock the house down and rebuild. Redecoration and renovation are carried out on a regular basis on UK houses, while in Japan they are more of a recent trend. 
 
Here's a barn conversion. Not an uncommon sight in the English countryside, but it would be difficult to find a building in Japan that had been converted from keeping animals and their feed to human use.

 
Perhaps also as a consequence of the low value placed on buildings, building standards seem to be much stricter in substance and enforcement in the UK than in Japan, where the main criterion seems to be that your house won't burn down and fall onto the neighbour's.
 
In the UK, central heating is standard, while in Japan it is is a luxury. The term mudanbo jutaku (literally no-heating house) is sometimes used in Japan to describe buildings meeting the Passive house standard. This comes from the trend in Europe towards higher levels of insulation so that central heating systems can be scaled down or removed altogether. Meanwhile in Japan adding central heating is a sign of a progressive house.

In a UK house, the boiler is inside. Why waste the heat? Traditional Japanese houses don't have a boiler but recently many have an ecocute atmospheric air pump with a large tank of hot water, which is invariably put outside. Why waste space?

Insulation has not been used very much in Japan, although it has been increasing recently. In the UK it is in the building regulations, and there is financial support for adding it to existing building stock. In fact I heard that the authorities will even pay people to clear your loft. One of the barriers to people claiming their free loft insulation was that they couldn't be bothered to clear decades of crap from the loft, which makes installation impossible.

Traditional UK building materials are stone and brick while in Japan the material is wood. Occasionally you see brick houses in Japan, but they are more likely to be a wooden frame with brick-imitation cladding. Meanwhile in the UK people in brick houses sometimes get them stone-clad. 

The design process in the UK starts with the whole building, into which rooms are fitted. In Japan the design seems to start with rooms that are assembled together into a building. 

The market surrounding the building industry in Japan, including DIY home-improvement, seems to focus on products. If you can plug it in, switch it on, fill it with batteries, it'll have a place on a shelf. In the UK, there seem to be more parts and materials.

Of course there are differences in what mother nature offers the two countries. Earthquakes are unusual in the UK, but frequent in Japan and buildings must be built to withstand them. Traditionally summers are humid and winters are dry in Japan. My grandmother used to say that Britain doesn't really have a climate—just weather. But inasmuch as it does, the summers are dry and the winters damp. 
 
In spite of all these differences, there are some significant similarities between the two countries. Both have high self-ownership: Japan 60%, UK 69%. There is variation up and down both countries, but the annual heating demand in Matsumoto and London is similar, between 2 and 3,000 degree days per year. People have an impression of Japanese people living in rabbit hutches, but in fact the average new build in the UK is significantly smaller than in Japan, 76m² compared to 95m², but this may relate more to the number of occupants, and the number and location of houses being built. In surveys, the floor area that people think they need is very close, with people in Japan wanting 35m² per person compared to 33m² in the UK. See shrinkthatfootprint.com for more details. 
 
There are also much bigger differences between the culture of the building industry and normal people, whose desires are very similar.

• Everyone wants a lower budget. Given a choice we would all rather pay less.
• Everyone wants a larger house. Obviously there are limits to the size of plot, and many people would rather not live in the Palace of Versaille on account of the cleaning and maintenance and all those tourists traipsing through your bedroom. Some even advocate smaller living spaces. But given a choice of a 10m² or 15m² living room most people would probably choose the bigger one, other things being equal.
• Everyone wants a house that is warm in winter and cool in summer.
• Nobody wants condensation, whether it's rising damp, weeping mist on the inside of windows, or damp causing mold on clothes.
• Everyone wants low running costs.
• Everyone wants a long building life. Nobody wants to see a house they have built knocked down. We'd rather die first.
• Everyone needs lots of storage space. People may not think of this, and any time you visit a model house or look through glossy magazines of ideal homes, be aware of the lack of the kind of stuff that we share our living spaces with.
• Everyone wants a house that is easy to keep clean. People often forget this one too. Especially the architects who tend to be male and probably don't keep clean their own houses! 

Bog standard

Until relatively recently a lot of the houses in this city would have had dry lavatories, not connected to the town sewage. The one in our old house seemed to have moved three times, most recently from the North East to the South East corner. Where they had running water, they were squatters and I imagine for the first half of the twentieth century, sit-down toilets were about as common as thrones, and no doubt considered with the same admiration. In fact around a hundred years ago a sit-down toilet was installed in a nearby town in anticipation of a visit by the Meiji Emperor.

From the second half of the twentieth century there has been a dramatic movement from squatters to sitters, and the toilet seat has burst into Japanese culture. Japanese toilet seat design lacks the wondrous assortment of colours, materials and patterns available in the UK market, but makes up for it with the availability of gadgets. Many houses may not have running hot water, but their toilet seats do. They are on display and available in electric shops, since toilet seats seem to be more electrical devices than plumbing. 

The first attraction for the consumer is perhaps warmth. Most houses are not centrally heated, and buildings are often assembled in a modular way, rather than rooms being fit into the thermal envelope of a house. The lavatory itself has not completely been accepted as a room in the house anyway, as evidenced by the toilet slipper. This humble piece of footwear will surprise the visitor to Japan and often embarrass him as he walks back into the rest of the house with "toilet" written on each foot. I believe the toilet slippers are there because the toilet remains conceptually "outside" in the complex world of uchi to soto (inside and outside) that informs a lot of Japanese culture but very little of its thermal efficacy. When it is freezing outside, it is freezing in many lavatories.

The result is that the seats can get pretty cold. With a squatter this is not an issue, since there is no seat and no contact, and not so much heat is lost through convection or radiation, but electrical heating elements can soften the thermal shock of conducting heat away from the fleshy behind. Since these heating elements are electrical, these devices must also be very attractive for electricity companies, as they put several hundred yen on each month's electricity bill for each house. Now they are advertising low-energy seats, but they still use substantially more than a seat with no plug on it.

The hi-tech toilet seat that we have has a low-energy function, which makes a light come on saying "low energy". It has a "super low energy" function too. This makes the light flash. 

There are also elaborate washing and bidet functions with hot and cold running water, elevating the humble toilet seat further and further above a hole in the floor. These are not considered particularly luxurious and you can find such toilets in shops and restaurants and even some public conveniences.

Of course the seat heater in our house is switched off, but if we ever need it I suspect it would do a good job heating the whole room.

No more left over water left over

When you have a house, you know that sooner or later you are going to find a large pool of water somewhere. It may be dripping through the ceiling, trickling down the wall, or being sucked up by some cardboard boxes on a linoleum floor. Ours came rushing out of the washing machine, onto the tiled floor of the utility room, and then into the storeroom next to it, which has been cleverly placed a step lower down.

Washing machines are not supposed to let you open the door when they have water in them, and are not supposed to have water in them when they let you open the door, so we called the washing machine man in. Luckily the washing machine is still under guarantee, although we have had it a few years and brought it from our old house. The washing machine man came and declared that it was the fault of the plumbing. He demonstrated this by taking one of the pipes out of the top of the washing machine, and showing that water was dripping from this when the tap was switched off.

As in many cases, Japanese plumbing demonstrates both extravagance and frugality, making up this country's confused position as a home of both energy efficiency and resource squandering. Japanese baths, sweeping generalisation notwithstanding, are very large, using a lot of water and heat. On the other hand, they are not filled every day: the washing takes place outside the tub, so just a little topping up and reheating is necessary. Also, it is normal practice for the water from the tub to be used in the early cycles by the washing machine, recycling both the heat and water. Traditionally, I suppose, a bucket was used, then electric pumps and washing machines with built-in pumps.

In the old house, we had to put a hose into the bath tub, which would suck water into the washing machine when needed. As is customary, the washing machine was in the room next to the bathroom. This is very sensible architecturally, thermodynamically and ergonomically, but not ideal in our case as the room next to the bathroom was the kitchen.

The new house has a further development, taking the water from the bath directly from the plumbing to a tap in the wall next to the washing machine. This is much easier than a hose to be put into the bath. In our new house, the bath and washing machine are still relatively close to each other, only vertically rather than horizontally: the bathroom, as is customary in England, is upstairs. This still meets the criteria above, keeping all the water pipes in the same part of the house, shortening hot water pipes. We have a laundry shoot so clothes can be sent down from the bathroom to the utility room.

Many people here suggested, or assumed, that it was impossible for the building to take the weight of an upstairs bathroom, but we reminded them that there are plenty of aparment blocks with upstairs bathrooms.

Anyway, we have been having trouble using the bathwater for washing. The flood on the floor when we opened the door was the worst case, but when we did try to use the bath water, the washing machine was using up the entire content of the bath--over 100 litres--in one wash.

In the end, after the plumber coming to fix the tap, which he admitted was a new and untried model, and the washing machine man coming back again, we have heard, once again, that there is nothing they can do. The pump is designed to get bathwater from the same level, not to work as a tap. Because of the height difference and water pressure, once it gets the water going from the bath, the syphon effect will take over and it doesn't stop until all the water has gone. 

The washing machine man shook his head. Nothing can be done. All washing machines are the same. They're not made for upstairs baths. It's impossible to change the pump to one that actually stops water when it's off.

It seems that it would at least be possible to have an electric tap on the wall, activated via a relay when the washing machine switches its pump on, but he didn't seem terrible interested in solving the problem, content to tell us that it couldn't be done. 

Getting into hot water

The heating system was fixed a couple of weeks after we moved in, and we have a panel on the wall under the stairs to adjust it. For all that we're trying to build a house that doesn't need a heating system in a country where houses traditionally don't have them, we seem to have done just that.

I think this is the first house in Japan I've lived in that has plumbed hot water and it's certainly the first house with any kind of central heating system. It's very European in the sense that it effectively has a boiler with a supply of hot water for washing and also for heating. For a day or two our boiler was running out of hot water, but this was because the heat was all being sent under through the pipes under the floor.

Hot water running out is something that anyone who has lived in a boiler culture will be aware of. My wife has never forgotten getting in trouble for using all the hot water when we were staying in a bed and breakfast before my brother's wedding. 

The concept of hot water running out is perhaps alien to Japan. Japanese has a separate word for hot water "o-yu" rather than "mizu", which it is tempting to argue is due to the abundant natural availability of hot water in the country. In many places it simply flows out of the ground. Hot spas spring up in the middle of cities, and clusters of hotels burst out around them in the countryside, in the mountains or by the sea.

Although this is the first house I've lived in with plumbed hot water, every house I've lived in has had running hot water, and copious amounts of hot water available in the bath. The first house I lived in had no running water in the bathroom, but you could fill the bath with water, and then heat and reaheat that. You could heat the bath a little, then you'd get some hot water at the top which you could scoop out for a shower. When she was a kid, my wife used to have to build a wood fire under the bath at her house. So there was a very visible body of water there. 

All the kitchens where I've lived have had a gas geyser that will produce hot water into the sink on demand. Instant hot water that only runs out if the gas is not connected, or if the battery goes in the geyser and the sparks stop working. 

Meanwhile, at around the same time my wife was loading wood to fire her bath a quarter of a century ago in the mid 1980s, I remember on my first stay in Tokyo seeing somebody going to a pay phone and dialling in some numbers without saying anything. He was setting his bath to come on so that it would be ready when he got home. His bath was electronically controlled to supply and heat the water, and the controller was connected to his answer phone, which could take remote instructions.

0.28 = 0.54, 0.26 = 0.38... Confused!

After another two-month wait, I got the results of the airtightness tests in a letter. I sent the insulation people a reminder by email on Friday and the letter came on Monday, with an apology that they had already sent the information to the architect and assumed he had sent it on to me.

The results, from a Passive House perspective, look very good. The standard we were aiming for was air leaking at a rate of 0.6 times the total volume of the house per hour, with a pressure difference of 50 Pascalls between inside and outside. The lower the figure, the less air is leaking and the better the airtightness.
The result back in August was 0.54. Unfortunately we didn't realise at the time that the result was this good. The result in December, after filling the hole under the front door, adding caulking around the windows and getting the big window to shut, was 0.38. This is 35% better. In the Passive House software, this reduces the performance of the house from 13.5 to 12.6 kWh/m2a (kWh of heating energy per square meter of floor space per year). That's a 7% saving on the house's heating requirement. Obviously airtightness affects thermal losses as leaking air will carry heat in or out of the house.
The Japanese measurement of airtightness, C, the number of square centimetres of gaps per square metre, was 0.28 in August, and 0.26 in December. An improvement of only 6%. Clearly the two figures don't have a linear relationship. We were apparently aiming for a C value of 0.2, although 0.3 seems to have been a closer target.

The C value seems to be based on on the air leakage at a pressure difference of 9.8 Pascals, and then goes through some exponential arithmetic. In reality, the pressure difference between inside and outside is surely going to be a lot less than 50 Pa, and probably even less than 9.8.

According to the results sheets (graphs for August above and December below, pressure on the y-axis, leakage rate along the x-axis), it looks like the leakage was measured at roughly 10 Pa intervals, from 10 to 50, and a line drawn on double logarithmic graph, deducing some exponential relationship between the pressure difference and rate of leakage. The Japanese and European standards are at different ends of the range of measurements, so neither estimate will be completely accurate.  This way of testing should give a very good estimate for the leakage at 30 Pa difference. 
I'm really interested to know how the C value is calculated, and the rationale for this. And how does the Passive House software calculate the effect from the figure for 50 Pa?

Alps talking back

As well as the ideas in the planned talk on Boxing Day, there were several digressions and questions. Beyond my rambling notes, it seems a very good idea to address what actually happened, and especially the feedback from the audience, who I hope will have been changed in some little way by the effort that went into the house, and into my talk about it. 

At some point I told them the joke about the luckiest man in the world and the unluckiest man in the world. First, one man says, "I'm the luckiest man in the world: I've got an English house, an American salary, a Chinese cook and a Japanese wife." Next, the other guy says: "I'm the unluckiest man in the world: I've got a Japanese house, a Chinese salary, an English cook, and an American wife."

I'm not at all sure whether English houses are the best in the world, although there's no smoke without fire. Increasingly, of course, there are no fires without smokeless fuel, and a lot of fireplaces that used to sit at the heart of the English house have been boarded up and electrified, or turned to gas, as in the Dursley's house in Privet Drive. The English house was constructed around the burning of fossil fuels, and as such is part of an old paradigm. There is something very solid and reassuring about an English house though, which you don't get with a typical Japanese house. 

However, trying to get back to the talk, a lot of Japanese people seem to think that Japanese houses are the best in the world. The billions of yen put into advertising in the building trade is obviously paying off!

One member of the audience asked me about the cost of imported windows, which I replied was a lot more than domestic windows, if you just look at the initial price. If you consider the cost of all the heat that is going to leak out them over their lifetime, compared to the net inflow of heat from high performance windows, then the imported windows probably end up a lot cheaper.

The question that got me most, that I have heard several times before and has always got me, and probably always will, was "but Japan has four seasons". This seems to have been implanted deep into the Japanese psyche, so that the first reaction is not one of rationality, science or even morality, but whether it is foreign or not. 

I tried to explain that while Japan does have high humidity in summer and low humidity in winter, humidity itself always stays between 0% and 100%. When it tries to go over 100% it's called rain. And while there may be a lot of rain in Japan, Tokyo having twice the precipitation of London, the rain is still made up of molecules of di-hydrogen oxide, which obey the same laws of physics whatever language is being spoken around them, or whatever flag is being waved above them, as atoms have no nationality. And while the temperature may change a lot between summer and winter, and even between night and day, in the grand scheme of things these temperatures are not wildly different, compared for example to those a space craft may experience, or even those in Antarctica. 

Billy Connolly once said there's no such thing as bad weather--just the wrong clothes. With apologies to Billy, I think that there is no such thing as a tough climate--just the wrong buildings.

We've got to move

The removal man came around yesterday for an estimate. As we're close we'll try and do some of it ourselves, with a little help from our friends, but it's going to be much easier to leave the big stuff to the professionals. Like many things in Japan there is a well-developed system for moving that will run smoothly and painlessly. The man was young and polite, wearing a suit and tie and holding a clipboard and calculator. He went around the house looking at what we've got and then totted it up on his check sheet. He gave us a 40-page A4 brochure that is both a showcase of their service, with reassuring pictures of their smiling, uniformed staff, shoes off and socks clean, and a manual for the mover. On the back it says "We care you", but I don't want to point out their omission. Prepositions have nothing to do with moving house. 

When he left he gave us fifty boxes. Small ones for heavy things and big ones for light things. They have special boxes for wardrobes with hangers in, but we'll do the clothes ourselves and don't need any of those. Each box has a label where you can write the contents, and circle where the box is coming from in the old house and where it is going to in the new house, not just the floor and the room, but which part of the room. There is red tape to put on boxes of fragile things, and yellow tape for others. In the booklet there is a page of numbered and coloured stickers to put on the video and stereo cables and sockets, and presumably they will put everything in place and plug it in for you if you ask nicely. 

After a few minutes going through the checksheet with his calculator, we came to the negotiation. He said we'd get away with a short two-ton truck for just taking the essential big things--the fridge, washing machine, desks, table and chairs. If we wanted to get everything in one truck we'd need a four tonner. We decided on a three-ton truck, and will start first thing in the morning moving stuff ourselves, and may well have some left over until the following day.

It's not that any of us are particularly acquisitive, but we've accumulated a fair amount of crap over the past eleven years living in this house. Now's the chance to look through and get rid of what we don't need, but also we're not very good at throwing things out. Maybe that's part of not being acquisitive. With clothes I partly blame it on being a second child with a close older brother, and only ever getting hand-me-downs. The only time I can remember getting new clothes is when we were all dressed up in the same outfits. Perhaps it's the other way round, and the cause is my own sartorial ambivalence, but I'm not interested in clothes and don't like to wear new things, and feel obliged to keep everything. 

This may also be inherited from parents who were brought up during the war and rationing, when everything was precious and valuable and needed looking after. In these times of profligate consumerism, mountains of garbage and energy crises, it's difficult to argue with respecting anything for the intrinsic value of its resources and the time and energy that have gone into making it and bringing into your home.

And perhaps my Yorkshire roots have something to do with this. I'll not say that people from Yorkshire are mean, but they have a word, "thoil", that means to be able to financially afford something but not able to justify spending money on it. So it's going to be a busy week as I can neither thoil getting all our stuff moved by the professionals, nor throwing out anything that there's even a slim chance we'll use some time.  

Skirting boards and tiles

The floors are all in now, except the genkan and the bit outside the front door. Not sure when they're doing that.

Downstairs is all tiled, which looks great. 

A while ago we noticed, quite by chance, that they were going to use tiles at the bottom of the walls rather than wooden skirting boards. Tiles going up the walls is a good idea in a bathroom or outside, where water is being used, but it's not really necessary or aesthetically pleasing for a living room, where wooden skirting boards seem to me obvious. We managed to fix that.

Also we realised, in time, that they had been planning to put the kitchen units in first, then tile around them, as if they were laying a carpet. We managed to fix this problem too, so the whole floor is tiled, except under the pieces of furniture that look like pieces of furniture on the west wall, and under the back of the tatami room. At least if we, or whoever, wants to move the kitchen around in a few years time, they won't need to re-tile the whole floor. 

We also noticed that the skirting boards went on first, and the tiles went down after them. It seemed to me more logical to put the tiles down first, then use the skirting boards to cover up the gap and any unevenness along the edge between tile and wall, but apparently they don't do that here. To me, and perhaps also practitioners of western building, that is the function of the skirting board. The site foreman told me that the problem with doing that is that the skirting boards shrink, so if you put them on top of the tiles, a gap will form underneath them. The skirting board, apparently, is to protect the wall from being damaged when you're using the vacuum cleaner. 

Of course if we hadn't noticed that they were going to use tiles until later, and we had been able to stop them in time, we may have ended up with wooden skirting boards going on later.

 

I don't wish to say that one view is right and the other is wrong, but it's interesting to see these different perspectives, and a good idea to be aware of these issues when building between cultures.

Security

It always seems to be a very safe country. Bicycle locks here would not last five minutes in the UK, but this is ridiculous. Not only does this guy seem to be using an extension lead for a bicycle lock, he isn't even using it!

Or maybe it's an electric bicycle with the motor built into the bottom bracket and batteries within the frames, and the extension is used to charge it.

I'm not sure to what extent the safety of Japan is a myth and a cliche, but we frequently leave the door of our old house unlocked, and even if it were locked, anyone who wanted to could very easily get in. In over ten years I don't think anyone ever has. The new house, with continental European technology on doors and windows is, by comparison, a fortress. We noticed a wire sticking out of the frame of the front door, and knowing it had something to do with remote unlocking were wondering whether we could hook it up to the door bell. It took us a long time to work out that this was not actually affecting the lock at all; just undoing the plate on the wall so the door could open when it's on the latch. European front doors generally open inwards, and usually have no handle on the outide, just a keyhole. Our door opens outwards, and has a handle, so triggering the plate on the wall to open is not going to help us a great deal, unless we have a visitor who doesn't know how a door handle works.

Early house guests

I started writing this message on July 28th, the day after a visit to
the house by a delegation viewing plus-energy houses.

I didn't take any pictures of them, but here is a list of the people
who visited the house to see the insulation and airtightness work. I
may have some of the names wrong. Sorry!

Hiroshi Ishiguro from Kyoei House in Chitose city, Hokkaido, the
northernmost island of Japan.
株式会社　協栄ハウス　北海道千歳市　石黒浩史
http://www.kyoueihouse.jp/

Takahiro Suzuki and Shigeichi Saruta from Suzukiyo in Noshiro city,
Akita ken up north.
株式会社　鈴喜代　能代市秋田県　鈴木隆宏　猿田茂一
http://www.suzukiyo.com/

Mr. Mikame and Mr. Kabashima of Tokyu Homes in Shibuya ward, Tokyo.
株式会社　東急ホームズ　東京都渋谷区　三瓶　樺島
http://www.tokyu-homes.co.jp/corporate/profile.html

Hideo Tomita from Hideo Tomita studio in Nerima ward, Tokyo.
富田秀雄建築アトリエ　東京都練馬区　富田秀雄

Hideyuki Motobashi from Altas Ever in Yokohama city, Kanagawa, South
west of Tokyo.
アトラスエヴァ株式会社　神奈川県横浜市　本橋秀之

Kei Kato from Atelier Kei in Kamakura city, Kanagawa.
アトリエけい　神奈川県鎌倉市　加藤景

Two Kusakaris and a Mr Yoshida from Macklife in Yokohama city, Kanagawa.
株式会社　マックライフ　神奈川県横浜市　草刈　ｘ　２　吉田
http://www.macklife.co.jp/

Mr. Sekine of Channel Original, Wooden siding manufacturers in Yokohama.
チャンルオリジナル株式会社　神奈川県横浜市　関根
http://www.channel-o.co.jp/

Messrs. Ishizaka, Oyama, Higashino, Odanaka from Gadelius in Minato ward, Tokyo.
ガデリウス　東京都港区 石坂　尾山　東野　小田中
http://www.gadelius.com/

Mr. Sasaki from Nagano P.S. in Nagano city.
長野ピーエス　長野市　佐々木
http://www.dcn.ne.jp/~ren/text/menu.html

and of course Messrs. Egawa and Kobayashi from Shinetsu BIB in Nagano.
信越BIB　江川、小林

It felt nice to have so many visitors, and a few of them said thank
you, that they had learnt something and that it had been interesting.
Some of them just scowled. None of them introduced themselves.

To give some context, apparently the purpose of this visit was to
persuade a skeptical group of the merits and techniques of glass wool
insulation, so their scowling may have been towards the host of their
tour and his apocryphal techniques, and not just a sign of rude guests
in my house.

One guy brought some cakes as a gift. I wish I knew who, so I could
say thank you.

Perhaps I should have been a bit more assertive, although it seemed
like a good opportunity to talk to the electrician and site foreman,
and actually get some practical decisions made, so I stayed out of the
house when they were all inside. Also, I felt there was a danger of me
breaking into some kind of argument either with the architect or the
insulation guy, so it seemed safer to avoid the conflict and loiter
under the scaffolding.

As it was, my architect was evidently standing there holding court
about why and how he'd made all the decisions on his house, when in
fact for most of the time he has been misunderstanding or sneering at
them.

Meanwhile under the scaffolding some important solidarity was built up
with the site foreman and electrician, who are doing a lot of the real
work to build the house, rather than drawing pictures that aren't even
particularly pretty.

Science East and West

While we were trying to work out the window problem, there was a moment of cultural mismatch where the Europeans sat down, having solved the problem and thinking about the solution while the Japanese were trying to see the problem.

It reminded me of Tanizaki  complaining about western science, and how much more suited it would have been to Japanese sensibilities and the Japanese temperament if science had been invented in the east.

The Fenstermeister said that science worked the same in Japan as in Germany. I understood exactly what he was talking about, and could see the cause of the problem. We share the same physics, although what I may attribute to Newton, they would claim for Leibniz. 

And perhaps it goes back to Leibniz and his contemporaries Descartes in France and Spinoza in Holland who turned the world upside down by putting rational thought at the foundation, and building a world in our heads where our observations fall in place to support abstract theories.

Or maybe it was a language barrier and I failed to translate what they were talking about into Japanese.

Or perhaps the Europeans were wrong and their explanation of a sagging rail was not the reason for the problem. Having laid the probable blame on installation in this post, I also wonder whether design was a factor. 

There are only two hinges and a slider on a rail holding three window panes of 80 kg. That's a total of 240kg. Each hinge will take a maximum weight of 130kg, so if the weight is all being held by the hinges, there is not much margin for error. When the window is closed there should be no problem, but when the window is open or moving, the load is not static but is dynamic as 80 kg panes are twisting, turning, accelerating and decelerating. 

I suggested it may be sensible to have three hinges on this kind of door, and asked how many triple-leafed, triple-glazed windows they have produced of this size, and I'm still waiting for an answer.

Built to last or built to lose

It is sometimes hard for me to come to terms with the disposable nature of house building in Japan. Apparently the average life time of a house in Japan is 17 years. In the UK, it would take 1700 years to replace the entire building stock. Although those two numbers are not equivalent, it gives some idea of the difference. I come from a country where houses are built to last. I grew up in a house that was a couple of hundred years old, which was not particularly unusual. The house we rent here now is about a hundred years old, and it's a constant surprise that it is still here.

It is easy to write this off as bad workmanship or see it in terms of a nation that loves new things and is obsessed with the disposal of the old. It has been suggested that Japan needs a large construction industry as there are periodic needs for mass rebuilding after natural disasters. It seems that the construction industry is a powerful lobby and they can veto any suggestions to improve building standards. There is also no doubt something left over from the post-war rebuilding of Japan where fast, cheap building was the only option. I think there is no simple reason.

There is a vicious circle, as I found when I was asking the bank about loans. As far as they are concerned, and as far as the taxman is concerned too, a house is worth nothing after twenty-five years. The biggest drop in value is the moment you move in. In most cases, the house is worth less than you paid for it as soon as you turn the key and walk over the threshold.

The people at the bank weren't particularly interested in the building specs when they were valuingthe property, instead they look at the houses in the neighbourhood andtake an average per floor area. In fact as far as collateral, they don't really take the house into consideration and just look at the value of the land. So unless you're building with cash, and have lots of it, you're at the mercy of a bank that is not going to encourage you to increase the spec. There is little incentive to build something that will last more than 25 years, although a standard for a hundred-year house has recently been introduced, that can open the door to lower mortgage rates.

Houses in the UK, and probably the rest of Europe, the US and Australia, steadily increase in value. From when they are built, they start to get more valuable. After a while, when they hit an unfashionable or unserviceable age they stop getting more valuable, but even then they will hold their value. A little later they start to go up again. There are certainly stories of people with negative equity and people who lose out, but that's usually short term and a combination of local conditions and some measure of extra bad luck for the house owners, forcing them to sell at the wrong time.

As we were looking around Matsumoto for houses and land, we often saw old houses for sale that were very reasonable. If they weren't sold after a year or two, they were knocked down, and the price of the land, without a house, would go up. There is a common wisdom here that renovating old houses is more expensive than building new ones, and I think it may be true if you're comparing a low-cost new-build with restoring a ruin to its ancient form. I think it's more likely to be propaganda by the building trade, a symptom of few people or businesses that renovate, and the prevailing trend of not looking after houses, but letting them wear out until they are knocked down, which is all part of the vicious cycle.

Having said that, if I look at the house we are in now and if we were to bring it up to a comfortable level to live in, we'd have to replace the roof, replace the windows that make up the north and south walls, and pull up the floors and do some work on what's underneath. By the time we'd taken all the bits off that need changing, we'd be left with a wooden frame, and that probably would have to be made earthquake proof as their are no diagonal supports and the whole thing is a mechanism (see here). Also, I'd want to raise all the horizontal beams so the doorways are at least twenty or thirty centimetres above my head rather than two or three centimetres below, just where there is a permanent bruise on my forehead.

One way of looking at this difference is in terms of agriculture. The UK traditionally has pastoral farming, so buildings have been essential to provide shelter for people and animals, so that animals can feed off the surrounding land. Buildings have intrinsic value in this sense. Japanese agriculture is arable, so that land itself is valuable for intensive planting of crops. Any building is going to reduce this value by stopping the production of crops.

Another consequence is in the notion of "home". For the British, a home is a solid thing. An Englishman's home is his castle. For Japanese people, any building seems arbitrary and the sense of belonging is to a community of people.

So while I see what I am doing as an investment, and put myself on a mission to make a small change to the way houses are built and treated here, I'm probably just pouring cash into a hole in the ground, and the main interest of most of the people involved is to catch some of that cash as it falls. I'm sure the house could be built to a similar specification for less cost, and hopefully everyone involved will learn something onthe way, so if another idiot comes along asking for a house that doesn't consume, it'll be easier for everyone concerned.