Earthquake Proof Housing-For Poor People

Since most of the world is poor people, this National Geographic piece is filled with useful information. This is actually what I majored in in college and would still like to be doing. Anyway. I think this is how we should be thinking about architecture and urban planning going forwards, as we all get Third Worlded.

Train in Vain

I think this is only 100% correct. I couldn't get George Will's absurd piece about trains being unAmerican, but then again I am so confused on what exactly is unAmerican and what isn't anymore. To me, trains are not only a part of my everyday life, but are much more democratic than flying. Flying to me, feels like being contained in a giant, terrifying pre-school. It seems the exact opposite of freedom.

JR just built a new Shinkansen line direct from Kagoshima to Kansai. It opens next week. My wife's grandfather, a lifelong JR employee, has a ticket on the first run. It is a strangely emotional thing. Think about how wonderful this is though; when I go to Kagoshima for summer break, all I have to do is walk down the street for ten minutes. Get on the subway for Kyoto Station. Ride that for about ten minutes. Buy a $150 ticket for the next train available. Walk on, sit down, read a book, drink a beer, watch the world go by and walk off a few hours later on another island at the bottom of the country. No IDs. No metal detectors. No tiny seat. No terror. No delays (probably.) What is this conservative hang-up about trains? It seems arbitrary, like the whole vindictive styrofoam thing. It probably has bigger meaning though.

Trains. Make them. Build them. Ride them. Please. Florida, I am looking at you here.

I-10 in NOLA

Here are some articles on the plan that David brought up. I will have to do some more reading on it. Having not lived there it is hard for me to really weigh in, but I am generally in favor of this kind of thing. When I lived in the Jackson Ward in Richmond a lot of older residents, and younger residents in the know, talked about the way the neighborhood was before they ran the interstate through the middle of it and put an on ramp like a stake in its heart. Around the period of time that interstates were going up, the thinking about planning was rather obtuse.

Update: I just found this Facebook group related to the issue. Maybe they will be the place to get updates. However, their latest status is just an add for working stay at home moms, so....

Tokyo!!

If you know me, and there is a small chance you might, you know that I uphold the grand tradition of Kanto/Kansai static. And not without a basis, I have seldom had a good experience in Tokyo. No CHUDs have ever approached me, but I am quick, elusive, and crafty. This time however, the benefits of marriage came to fruition and I had a bit of a better experience with my native tour guide.



People ask about the fights when you are married. We don't fight much, but a recurring one goes something like this, "I don't care where we eat, I just don't want to keep walking around talking about it in this 100 degree heat." So that is how two Kansai residents found themselves in an all you can eat okonomiyaki place in Harajuku.



It was a good call.





This is Harajuku





Gwen Stefani nowhere to be found.



The Tokyo subway map in all of its glory.



Tokyo tower versus the moon from Roppongi Hills.



It is Japan after all.



Usually the crowd attracts itself and you just have to move somewhere that they forgot.



I think this sentiment is both accurate and says a lot. This approach will get you far in life in Japan.

The National Art Museum

I had to run up to Tokyo earlier this week. The up side was that I had some free time and got to go to The National Art Center. I had been told that it was an Ando Tadao creation. It was only after I had gotten home that I found out it was designed by the late Kurokawa Kisho, whose books had propelled me through my college architecture classes. One of Kurokawa's quotes that always stuck with me was his saying that when he sits down to conceive of a building he draws out the door handles at the same time he plans the overall layout. That attention to detail shows in all of his buildings including this one.







This fairly normal apartment building is directly next to the museum complex. It looks like it was probably there since before construction began. Can you imagine your good fortune to have this be the view off the back of your balcony?



The museum is part of a larger complex which features a policy school.



The majority of the building has this curved texture that has the natural feel that Kurokawa went for.





Fortunately they were having a Man Ray exhibit as well.





This are actually transitions well into the Roppongi Hills complex. My main concerns when writing papers for my urban planning degree dealt with what is an area when it wasn't built for consumers, and how can it be approached. Strangely, this section of Tokyo does a good job of addressing that question. Roppongi Hills is essentially a shopping mall with a tuxedo on it. But it works. It is an interesting place and can be experienced without being a consumer. It also lends itself to the neighborhood as a whole.



I believe that all of the chairs in the museum where designed by several prominent Scandinavian designers. They sit nice.

Kurokawa, you are dead, but lots of dead people built less good buildings than you.

Florida Panthers

Yes, I am here to talk hockey. Wait. No. Check this out. Florida panthers are living in an abandoned reclaimed Everglades subdivision. What really interest me about this is the notion of shutting down failed subdivisions and turning them back into actual pieces of the world. That is another huge benefit to lowering population growth that America refuses to think about, and Japan gets entirely wrong. Due to Kyoto's declining population lots of unused elementary schools are turned into public theaters and museums. Very nice.

Pair that with this piece that I put up on Facebook (pointed out by Alana) last week. Think of how much better Florida would be if people's beach front vacation homes were rendered back into nothing. Not to mention all of the go-kart tracks, t-shirt shops and strip malls that accompany them. I could go on about this article forever but I don't feel like sorting out all of my issues with the issue. I would have to say that, given that it is a barrier island, nothing should be done to save any home built on Holiday isle. Buying there is stupid. Building there is stupid. Telling people not to use the beach is stupid. Having buildings south of 98 is stupid, conceptually. Any further building in Destin is stupid and has been for a long time. While part of me saying this is out of gross sentimentality it also comes from more disciplined places. I think Destin, seeing cheap money is only putting itself in a downward spiral that will only be arrested by global climate change and the natural course of nature. How do I rectify this with my view that people shouldn't have trespassed on my grandmother's beach? Good question. I am sure I have an answer.

(Update: Here are some good links on the topic.)

I am trying to find a study on specifically what I was talking about but I am having trouble. "Aspenization" is mentioned heavily and is slightly different but also applicable. Aspenization is when an area becomes suddenly popular and wealthy people move in to build lavish second homes and land prices and property taxes shoot up forcing the middle class out to surrounding cities, commuting in by car while other people move in to take low-paying service jobs and live in cheap rentals, thus destroying the middle class base of a city.

Greeny

This was also kind of cool and made me miss my major. I think we have a great poverty of ideas and initiative right now. Drug store lighting sucks out my soul through my eyeballs.

Commutation

There is some really good information in this article. I am a big fan of the weighting mistake. Wait, that came out wrong. I am a big fan of people being aware of the weighting mistake. I am wondering where this research leaves me. I commute almost 2 hours, each way, to work. That is awful. But it is on a very nice train. That is good. I can read. I can study. I listen to the radio. I look out the window. I drink tea. On the whole though, it is terrible. I, however, didn't fall prey to the weighting mistake. I made a choice about where I wanted to live and have been slowly transferred away from it. That being said, I live in probably the most livable neighborhood in one of the most livable cities in the world. I think my happiness index is a file cabinet in reverse alphabetical order.

To further comment on the article, I like where I lve because:

My apartment is small but not tiny. It doesn't have a great view and the windows could be larger. That being said, it is very open and next to a long covered market that sells fresh produce and seafood. Beyond that market is the river and the greenbelt that stretches north/south the length of Kyoto. Right now it is covered in cherry blossoms. The rivers merge in a park directly down the street from my house. From the bridge you can see Daimonji-yama, the mountain that hovers above the city. Two minutes in the opposite direction of the river is the old Imperial castle grounds, which are now a giant park and also covered in cherry blossoms. All of things where taken into account when I decided on this house. Studying economics and psychology can pay off for you. If only in little fleeting bits. I had a planning book in college that supposed that American notions of grand living came from images of Greek temples, raised and solitary. Japan can be cramped and squalid but the public green-space available in Kyoto is remarkable. This is all what I was going to be being paid to study right now, by the way. Good thing they gave money to somebody else.

I wonder if that happiness study factored in people who commute a long way because they really love their jobs? Hmmm.

Another Grievance If I May

It would appear that I am continuously grieved. Not so. Yesterday I enjoyed both soccer and cricket in the park. In the morning I watched the fights and I watched yet more fights in the evening. The day before I was taken to Nara by the principal of my school, whom I like very much, and was treated to a wonderful lunch. I will start my story there, and, lest there be any confusion, I think the principal is an upstanding guy and have no issue with him. The story is merely representative of a larger mindset and problem that I have been trying to expound on for a while here.

Nara, for those who don't know is the ancient capital of Japan. The Nara period(710-784) which shares its name with the city saw an influx of Buddhism and Chinese culture into Japan. I was fortunate enough to be a city planning major near this ancient metropolis when I was an exchange student in Osaka. I was able to partake in several field trips with a severely capable teacher who could identifies the names of the artisans scrawled into the stones used to build the base of a wooden gate. Due to my familiarity with Nara we tried to find some places to go that I wasn't familiar with so that the principal could "show me around."

We ended up visiting the home of turn of the century novelist Shiga Naoya, which was impressive. As usual in historic buildings one puts their shoes into a vinyl bag and carries them as they travel through the structure. In a small tea room with a nijiri guchi that opened onto a garden with a path of stones leading to the larger garden, a Japanese women sat down, put on her shoes and walked on the stones disappearing around a corner. Her cellphone had fallen out of her pocket and was laying in the doorway. Being fairly familiar with Japanese teahouses and other historic structures I could see that this wasn't the normal tour route. I could also see that it wasn't forbidden either. I decided to put on my shoes and take the woman her phone rather than yell "someone dropped their phone!" through the quiet, afternoon tea-garden. The principal sees me with shoes on standing in the garden and yells, laughing "Come back! That is the tour route!" I like the principal very much. He is gregarious and good hearted. He confirmed with the lady behind the desk that it wasn't the tour route and then said jokingly "Ha ha, he is American. How could he know? Ha ha." I actually felt compelled to answer this time, "No. It wasn't a matter of nationality. I was following the Japanese person who went in front of me." The lady behind the desk agreed.

I don't think there was anything malicious in the Principal's statement. I think most of it was harmless joshing. However, how many actual government policies and personal prejudices are based off of this viewpoint. How many foreigners are denied housing because they won't know how to sort the garbage while Japanese mistakes are chuckled about.

Let me continue. In Shiga's salon, once used for receiving notables writers, we were lucky enough to meet an older gentleman who volunteered giving lectures at the house. He was discussing how the building had recently been renovated to its original state. The crux of his story was about how, during the occupation, the house was the residence of an officer of the American military. His lecture was very informative and well put. The strange thing about it was the understanding built into his explanation for a Japanese audience. Of course the changes that were made wasn't because the American officer was a bad person. He did his best to take care of the house. However, owing to his nature as an American, he wasn't able to appreciate the Japaneseness of the house and widened doorways and refurbished the kitchen and bath. As a brief appendix to this long explanation, our gentlemanly volunteer added that after the occupation the house was sued as the local general welfare office for the next 30 years, and to facilitate the lines, the parlor had been ripped out and made into a big waiting room. Everyone nodded that off quickly and went on to the next room. Now, you might be wondering what the problem with that story is. The volunteer included the relevant information. None of it was a lie. No. But the tone and how the story was received, both of which are somewhat nebulous in the retelling, struck me as significant. The story of the American officer was slightly pitiable. He soiled the house not knowing any better, as I had earlier attempted to do. No mention was made of other houses in the area with Japanese occupants who surely updated their kitchens and baths from 1930's technology to that of the 1950's. Of course no mention was made of the Japanese bubble period when vast tracts of traditional housing was leveled so that cheap apartments could be made with a bad mixture of concrete with salty, beach sand. No mention was made that a good number of volunteers working to maintain traditional Japanese houses are not Japanese while the absolute, overwhelming majority of the forces working to replace these houses with cheap rental properties are Japanese. Just as Japanese as the construction companies that place tetrapods on 90% of the coastline. Just as Japanese as the people who decided to make the Shiga home into a government office with a waiting room instead of a salon. But of course we know what would be made of anyone not Japanese who tried to preserve things that are traditional in Japan. They would be "strange foreigners." And if they didn't work to preserve anything? They would be just foreigners, which is far more pleasing like the poor, misguided, American officer.

I only tell you this story to try to explain a small part of the framework that non-Japanese in Japan live with everyday. It may seem trivial, but it is persistent. I work in a school were I am not legally allowed to be in a room alone with students. Where I can't have a stable salary and job security. Where I am encouraged by foreigners higher up within my own company that my job is as an "entertainer."

People who aren't ethnically Japanese have a role to play as citizens and taxpayers in the Japan of the future. But fulfilling that role require discarding a silly and counterproductive mindset.

I thought Arudou Debito put things well in his rough draft of his upcoming speech to the UN rep.

Homi Don't Play That

Somehow I had missed out on this and just came across it today. For so long the thought of firebombing an Uyoku asshole truck was a quiet dream. To know that it was actually done is somehow relieving. I think this article is right when it says that this danchi problem might be the future of Japan. At some point Japan will either import foreign labor or become a 3rd world country. Things will get complicated. This also shows nationality for what it is, nationality. Brazilian Japanese are Japanese by DNA, but the doesn't cover culture. Good on them for fighting back.

A Street Car Named Sprawl

This is a map of the Seattle trolley system in 1933. Why?

A: In case you go back in time, or are messing around on the holodeck and need it.

B: To remind everyone that we used to have a public transit infrastructure that was subverted, destroyed and then forgotten. This is applicable now. Look at how our cities (don't) work. We are told or not told or left to think that it all happened that way and that to change it would be, at best difficult and at worst against the American spirit. Not to be confused with American Spirit. Apparently the American spirit was conceived in the back of a Lincoln Town Car in a mall parking lot. We can do supertrain and baby supertrain because we did do supertrain re-remember the lessons of our past.

Thank You

These are two Haitians digging on the Hotel Montana. Thank you guys, whoever you are. You are real human beings who will never get a $400 million contract.

Infrastructure

I agree with this pretty much exactly. I have only been advovating a new CCC for more than the last decade. People want to participate in their country and a lot of them don't find getting rich to be thier priority. If you give people a wage and insurance they will work to make the country better. Unfortunately, our way of defining economies and growth doesn't count these kind of things.

Urban Harvest

This, is also rad.

I like the idea of diversified food production that is close to home. Even if it isn't an overarching solution it is a small contribution. I also like the idea that people know where food comes from and understand the difference between what grows in a real garden and what is chemically enhanced and food colored and dumped on you.

The People Who Died

A haven't kept a commentary on the recent rash of important deaths. Partly because I was in America and now I have no internet, partly because I risk turning into the Crypt Keeper, turning over cyber graves like compost and revelling in the pity. I passed on Steve McNair joining the Len Bias Fan Club; on the wall their with Spider Savidge and Steve Olin. I passed on Les Paul because it was too large and graceful a thing to treat with any kind of appropriateness in a hurried fashion. I passed on Cronkite because it was historic and expected. That brings us, incompletely, to today, which brings passings that might not be so noticed but seem and, in fact are, important.

First up is Norman Borlaug. I would wager that the majority of people out there have no idea who that is. I am not saying that as a snob, I am saying that because you probably have no idea who the Club of Rome, Barry Commoner, Ken Venturi or Samuel Mockbee are either. Their names ring out in very specific circles. If you aren't into agronomics or urban planning or environmental theory then these people and their viewpoints don't have much to do with your lives. Except that Norman Borlaug did. He had a lot to do with millions of peoples lives. And when you effect millions of peoples lives on this planet you effect everyone. But, Borlaug is a difficult case for me, and a lot of other people. He was a compassionate agricultural genius who set out to save the world, did, and yet people still argue vehemently against his actions. I am one of those people.

How is that possible? What could be wrong with making plants resistant to disease and not as susceptible to draught. What is wrong with making sure that millions get fed? I can't make a reasonable argument in the ten minutes I have to write this, but I can point you in the right direction. It is an argument straight out of Star Trek (The Next Generation of course.) Or maybe Back to the Future. Borlaug changed the world. He permitted millions to live. Millions to live an reproduce who produced millions more. Millions more to be fed by Green Revolution crops. Millions more to sustain a population bubble with the end transforming from slope to cliff to overhang right before our eyes. The problem in the world is that when you save millions of people you have to keep saving millions more people and you are never in the wrong saving people. As the Japanese t-shirt reads: It Is Problem.

As you can see the argument is complicated and I firmly believe that Borlaug was a super genius out for good. I understand that I could just as easily be wrong but I largely see the Green Revolution as an unsustainable aberration, although I hope more super geniuses can prove me wrong.

Next up: Jim Carroll. Patty Smith says he was the best poet of his generation. I doubt that. All I really have to say is that when Jim Carroll kicks it and you can't say he died particularly young, some kind of age is over. Something great is done. I wish I had some hair to cut off or an earring to take out. I spent a few years there doing you proud Jim. I hope it was enough.

Small House

A lot is being written lately about the small house movement. Or should I say The Small House Movement. I feel that, as a resident of Japan, I have been at the forefront of this movement. Maybe as the son of a boat captain, I have always been out there, riding the bow wave as it were. No that, is pushing the house as boat metaphor too far. In any case, I saw this photo gallery the other day and really liked a lot about it.

ナツキ　：　このリンクを見て！

Fat and Poor?

This is very important to understanding the poverty trap.

Ridiculous Kyoto Loveliness

This week of spring and sakura in Kyoto, especialy Kiyamachi between Shijo and Gojo, is so ridiculously beautiful that I want to photograph all of it, but I know it wouldn't translate.

Right now Kyoto makes the most anorexic girl's piddling knees plump and comforting. The swarm of bugs pestering your eyes and mouth are just the foreground; loveliness is thick. The breaks on old ladies bicycles sound like Van Morrison laying it down. It is a well staged opera.

Old Houses

Pretty much this. Yes. Exactly.

Miyazaki Time

I have been in Miyazaki since Friday. While the weekend was fun, I have been in a rotten mood the last two days. Write part of it up to rain. Part of it to trying to get a rad house in Kyoto while being two islands south. Part up to being off schedule. However, I think a good deal of it has to do with having grown used to living in a big city and all of a sudden being confronted with a car. I hate it. I hate that I have to get in a car and drive 20 minutes to park somewhere and maybe find something I want to do. It just makes me angry, and I love driving. If I was driving out to the gym or to the movies, maybe it would be okay, but I　don't feel motivated to go out my front door and see what happens. This shit be bringin me down. On the upside I have been practicing the ukulele. Good stuff.