Purpose-built wooden emergency homes constructed using a traditional nail-less building technique and used by people displaced by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis have been relocated to Soja, Okayama Prefecture, which was recently hit by torrential rains.
In early August, carpenters in Soja began putting together the temporary housing using a method called Itakura, in which thick boards of solid cedar are fastened together without nails to create roofs, walls and floors.
The 70-year-old head of Japan Itakura House Association, architect Kunihiro Ando, who oversaw the relocation of the homes from Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, said the method allows people to dismantle the buildings easily and keeps the temperature and humidity stable inside, while enhancing the buildings' resistance to fire and rot and making them able to last 100 years.