Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "How the Japanese survive cold winter" video.
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Great tour and info! Beautiful Machiya too...
Complimentary information for the curious.
Old Japanese houses are generally poorly insulated because of construction methods and general philosophy on building homes.
Two major factors contributes to this - real estate in Japan has a far more complex set of rules and regulations, it tends not to value much overtime, and is far less of an object of the speculative market (by comparison to western nations I mean). In a manner that fixer uppers is not a huge thing in Japan yet. It's being done more and more, but not at the volumes you usually see in western countries.
So there is much less money put into renovations and bringing stuff up to modern code to resell. It can get so expensive that it's just not worth it. This is also a bit why there are cheap abandoned homes in the countryside - it gets so expensive to put those up to code, and then the resell value is so low, that it's often not worth the hassle. In major cities what you'll often see are places getting torn down to be rebuilt from scratch. Real estate get sold by the terrain value alone, which then makes more sense for new owners to just scrap everything and start from scratch rather than trying to fix everything on a major reform. Unless you are someone like Tokyo Llama I guess... xD
Second - earthquakes. People tend to think only about the major ones, but Japan has constant earthquakes of lower magnitude. It ends up not being a great idea to invest too much in insulation, central heating, and other types of more comprehensive integrated heating systems when a small earthquake can not only cause major damage to integrated solutions, but also cause further damage to the property, or have weakening effects on the main structure.
So there is a tendency to build cheap, light and with a degree of flexibility. You don't want to do overly complex and exact stuff just for it to be ruined by an earthquake and subsequently be super expensive to fix, or be super expensive to tear down and rebuilt later on.
Of course, if you look in the current market, you are bound to find newer homes and apartments that are better insulated, with something closer to central heating, more integrated solutions and whatnot - particularly in the colder regions of Japan. But this all comes with extra costs and extra risk. xD
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