Japanese Private Homes

The setting for these fascinating small jewel-boxes of homes (some are no bigger than 60 sq.m. distributed between two or three stories) is the extraordinary mixture of factors that shaped Japan’s urban reality. Clearly, urban areas on the island are very densely populated. Around the world this usually automatically leads to high-rise solution-seeking. In Japan however, natural disasters like up-scale earthquakes have struck one too many times and have predetermined the very careful regard of high-rise in building codes. Due to high-density again, real estate in Japanese cities is also proverbially expensive. Another curious peculiarity shaping those cities’ built topography that follows from all of the above is the fact inheritance tax is so high that – on inheriting a piece of real estate - people are often forced to split their property and sell half of it in order to be able to pay for the other half. All of the above conditions have shaped a reality in which residential architecture is at the same time limited to the tiny boxes bounded by the tight regulations’ frame and yet bears a notable “empathy for the human condition", as pronounced on another occasion by New York Timesarchitecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff.