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Taiga Uranaka

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JAPAN

Jan 16, 2000

Man and his dog conquer disabilities to continue aid crusade

YOKOSUKA, Kanagawa Pref. -- "Love me, love my dog," say many pet owners. But for Satoshi Kabaya, it's the other way around.

JAPAN

Dec 31, 1999

Hotels, stores cashing in on Y2K scare

Staff writers Y2K wise men say, only fools rush out on New Year's Eve. Yet, as many stayed home for the definitive moment, tens of thousands of private company officials left their homes Friday to stand guard at their offices for possible Y2K problems, unwittingly providing a millennium windfall to the hotel industry. In response to the Y2K threat, a number of companies increased their regular number of on-duty employees. While Tokyo Gas Co. upped its count from 270 to 1,000, Tokyo Electric Power Co. added 3,500 to its crew, and NTT Corp. and its affiliates increased staff 10-fold. Officials at utilities worried that public reactions triggered by Y2K, rather than the millennium computer bug itself, would hamper their regular service, including the jamming of lines caused by those checking that their phones were operating normally after midnight. Tokyo-based Nomura Research Institute Co. Ltd. mobilized a significantly larger-than-normal 2,000 employees nationwide during the holiday period. In Tokyo alone, the institute put several hundred officials on duty. While Nomura's Tokyo operation has its own accommodation facilities for employees, it also had to reserve 20 to 30 hotel rooms in the capital for them, an institute official said. Indeed, many companies sought shelter for employees mobilized for the occasion. Many medium-priced "business hotels" in Shinjuku Ward, a major business center in Tokyo, were at full capacity New Year's Eve, traditionally a time when bookings are sometimes halved. Hotel officials said the increase was mostly attributable to companies' corresponding increase in staffers, especially in computer- and banking-related industries. Reservations for Dec. 31 at Shinagawa Prince Hotel in Minato Ward started to flood in from around April, and the 3,008-room hotel had to limit Y2K-related lodgers to its 500 single rooms in order to make way for yearend revelers, a hotel official said. "In a regular year, we get no reservations for New Year's Eve in April and May," the official said. Meanwhile, hotels had been preparing their own Y2K strategies by increasing the number of employees Friday and preparing larger-than-normal stockpiles of food and mineral water. Shinagawa Prince Hotel set up a special headquarters and placed employees at "strategic points" of the building. The hotel's usual two-day stock of food and water for 4,853 people, the hotel's capacity, was increased to five days' worth this year. "We are fully prepared. To maintain a feeling of security is what a hotel's business is all about," the official said. Yet an official of a hotel in Shinjuku said the increased profits brought about by the occasion gave him mixed feelings due to the unexpected side effects of Y2K. Also looking pretty on New Year's Eve were the metropolis's convenience store chains, many of which had sent notices around affiliated stores advising them to up stocks for the occasion.Forever mindful of a business opportunity, some convenience store chains were providing special "bento" boxed lunch services for the glut of employees who had been mobilized Jan. 31. Family Mart official Kiyoshi Baba said affiliated stores in hotel districts had been advised to increase their regular stocks. Additionally, special orders for boxed lunches, which average about 200 per weekday nationwide, jumped to 8,000 for Friday, according to the chain. Yukihiro Hishiyama, manager of a Lawson branch in Tokyo's Minato Ward, where a number of computer-related companies are located, said he had received some 20 orders for bento from nearby businesses -- a total of some 150 lunch boxes. Hishiyama also said that supplies of regular lunch boxes and "onigiri" rice balls for Dec. 31 would be 150 percent higher than a regular New Year's Eve. "We're expecting quite a number of people to be reporting for work in the area, so we have advised stores to increase stocks for their benefit," said Hiroyasu Satoh, an official at Lawson's head office. The managers of over 20 stores in Shinjuku run by the likes of am/pm, Lawson, Just Spot and Seven-Eleven were somewhat blase about advice from above. One am/pm store located in a major Shinjuku business area said his own store had no intention of increasing stocks. "We're never busy on weekends because there's nobody around," he said, adding that the normal 50 percent weekend reduction of stocks would apply. Although he insisted that other am/pm branches would be increasing stocks, one manager of an am/pm outlet nearby said he had no intention of doing so. Another declared that his store was closed Friday. A nearby Ministop branch manager, however, was much more upbeat. "Without a doubt, weekend sales are much lower than weekdays, but I expect many people will report to work this year, so compared with a regular weekend, I intend to increase stocks slightly," said Shuichi Morita, manager of a Shinjuku outlet.

JAPAN

Dec 30, 1999

Complaints of shoddy new homes on rise

Staff writers Despite the colorful sofa and classy light fixtures, it's the long crack running along the ceiling and down the west wall of the living room that catches the eye. Sodden floorboards in the hallway further dampen the fresh feel that usually accompanies a newly built home. That's what one couple, who declined to be named, has endured for several months. Within a year of moving in, their dream home had become something they would sooner close the door on. Had an aging structure or the nation's notorious seismic activity been at the root of their problem, the couple would have less reason to feel bitter. But the faults in their home result from human error: Like many others in Japan in recent years, the two are victims of defective housing. A wide variety of defects have been reported in recent times, ranging from leaking roofs and subsiding foundations to builders' footprints in the veranda concrete. The cause of such defects is the alleged corner-cutting and shoddy practices of builders. In one Kanagawa Prefecture condominium, the volume of concrete used was far below the industry standard, meaning parts of the iron framework encased in the concrete were exposed like the bones of a dead fish. One of the condominium's residents, a businessman in his 30s, explained that having to return every day to a substandard property for which he had forked out over 40 million yen had caused a family rift. "The problem put a strain on relations within the family, and my wife became highly critical of my ill-fated decision," he said, adding that the defects had devalued his apartment by over 50 percent. The recent increase of help-lines for victims and businesses to identify the cause of these household horrors are testimony to the seriousness of the current situation, as is the escalating number of callers. In 1998 alone, consumer protection centers nationwide received 4,100 complaints about defective housing -- five times the number reported a decade ago. Japan's first hotline was set up in 1996 by the Japan Federation of Bar Associations in the aftermath of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which dealt a heavy blow to the safety myth of Japan's modern architecture. An employee at a major contractor who visited Kobe right after the disaster as a volunteer said he witnessed many examples of shoddy workmanship in damaged buildings, including undersized concrete buttresses. "I saw newly built houses reduced to debris while some older ones nearby stood almost intact," he said. Since then, the number of calls during JFBA's annual four-day service has increased dramatically. The 702 calls fielded in 1996 grew to 1,153 in 1998. The figure declined for the first time this year, a fact that JFBA officials attribute to the recent emergence of other similar help-lines and consultancy engines. According to JFBA statistics, owners of single-family houses have drawn the short straw -- more than 75 percent of the 902 complaints recorded this year were from owners of houses, while apartment and condominium owners accounted for about 15 percent. However, the latter figure may be misleading because one caller from a 15-floor con dominium may be voicing the troubles of several hundred people living in the same building, JFBA said. As was the case in the previous year's statistics, leaky roofs and walls were the most-reported defects, followed by cracks in walls and tilting structures. According to Ryuichi Inagaki, a Tokyo lawyer involved in the JFBA project, the issue of defective housing has been a concern in Japan since the mid-1960s, when a serious shortage of quality builders caused by rapid urban growth and mass production of houses opened the way for "amateurs" and, subsequently, substandard practices. Prior to the burst of the bubble economy in the late 1980s, this was not a major concern for owners who considered their homes to be disposable products, said Kazuyuki Goseki, a house planner in Tokyo's Edogawa Ward. "(The prevailing feeling of homeowners then was,) 'What the hell -- we're going to get a new one in 10 to 15 years any way,'" Goseki said. With the end of the bubble economy, however, land prices tumbled and the importance of the house as an asset suddenly increased. Consequently, homeowners have become less tolerant of defects, Goseki added. Industry insiders agree that mounting pressure on the building industry to cut costs amid the recession has tempted builders to cut corners. Faced with a meager profit margin per house built, subcontractors are forced to increase their output, even if it means constructing several houses at the same time, said Jun Takahashi, a Tokyo construction designer and inspector who also provides free advice to victims of defective housing. As a result, builders are pressured into meeting tight schedules that don't allow them to put the necessary care into the process, much less to rectify any errors that may occur. "There are cases when materials do not arrive in time and workers make do with any other materials that are close at hand," Takahashi said. In other cases, he said, builders "start putting down the base of the house before the concrete of the foundations has even dried." Tan Hirose, a housing planner and head of the legislative division of a Tokyo builders' association, attributes these problems to poor site management, which can lead to miscommunication between the 30-plus contractors involved in the construction of a regular single-family home. It is not uncommon for subcontractors to begin a stage of construction before the previous stage has been completed, Hirose said. Other instances of defective housing start at an even lower level. When a number of relatively new dwellings started to subside in Saitama Prefecture earlier this year, it was discovered that the structures had been built on land that used to be rice paddies. Hirose said there are instances where basic land tests prior to construction and building tests during construction are skipped to cut costs. "(Contractors) are trying to increase profits by cutting corners that customers cannot see," he said. In this respect, consumers are not entirely blameless, Takahashi said. Prospective homeowners have become increasingly picky about the appearance of their homes, insisting on expensive materials that ultimately push up costs and lead builders to cut back on such "invisible areas." "There is a feeling emerging that it's OK (to do this) if (the owners) won't notice," Takahashi said. Responding to mounting public pressure, the Diet enacted the Law to Promote the Securing of Quality Standards for Housing earlier this The law, which is slated to go into effect next June, is intended to tackle such areas as the lack of a clear definition as to what constitutes a "defect," and demands builders provide a 10-year guarantee for houses they build. Experts, however, are doubtful of the law's effectiveness, saying the closed-shop mentality of the housing industry here is likely to prevent any immediate change. Still others believe that customer-builder trust, badly damaged by the increasing frequency of defective housing, will need more than a new law to rebuild. "Professionals should do professional jobs. Consumers place absolute trust in (builders) when they contract the work," said one owner of a defective house, adding that even if you can fix a building, you can never repair a shattered dream.

JAPAN

Dec 1, 1999

Beethoven concert to fete students' wartime sendoff

JAPAN

Nov 4, 1999

At-home nursing care: a benefit or disincentive?

JAPAN

Oct 20, 1999

Eatery gives elderly more than good food

JAPAN

Sep 29, 1999

Computer grandmas enter digital age at jijibaba.com

JAPAN

Sep 20, 1999

Fashion followers scoff at danger of super-high soles

JAPAN

Aug 18, 1999

Prof gives shtick a shot to loosen up academia stodge

JAPAN

Jul 1, 1999

Palau proposes capital city ties

JAPAN

Apr 29, 1999

Translation school moving onto the Net

JAPAN

Apr 28, 1999

Digital coding tech pioneer to receive Japan Prize

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.

[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

When trying to trace your lineage in Japan, the "koseki" is the most important form of document you'll encounter.

Climbing the branches of a Japanese family tree

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Vol. 35: Travel in time — and stay there

Vol. 35: Travel in time — and stay there

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