Kyoto Insights ⎈

2021-03-12 14:43:21 An amazingly Russian-looking house in Hakodate. Brick and plaster facades are a rare sight in Japan due to frequent earthquakes and summer humidity (Hokkaido is better than the main island but still the cracks here illustrate the problem pretty well). Open / Comment

2021-03-05 13:32:22 Local trains + night + snow + 5 Centimeters per Second soundtrack is a heart-wrecking combination. 10/10 would recommend. Open / Comment

2021-02-25 11:17:19 Japan is often portrayed as a country where ancient temples and ladies in kimono elegantly coexist with cutting-edge technologies, crazy robots, and cyberpunk-inspiring cityscapes. But the technologies are mostly “hard-ware”: you may indeed find all those neon billboards on Shibuya crossing, decorative robots in hotel lobbies, and iPads instead of menus in restaurants, but many shops and most transportation services still don’t accept credit cards (forget the contactless payments!), any kind of medical or governmental service requires a pile of filled out paper forms, taxi or food delivery apps didn’t get popular yet, and Google Maps oftentimes lead you to the most unoptimized path possible. Convenience stores are still the main venues where you can pay your bills, book event tickets, and buy food instantly — functions that are now largely being shifted online in Europe. Oshamambe town's convenience store also seems to be the only place where it's possible to socialize and get warm in winter. Open / Comment

2021-02-10 18:27:58 This ocean/snow gradient was totally worth a 4-hour transfer in a god-forsaken town. Open / Comment

2021-02-09 18:08:47 In four hours I spent in Oshamambe waiting for my next train I only saw two or three elderly people on the streets outside of the station. The town was completely silent: most window shutters were down, shops closed, no taxis. Few cars passing through the central square made less sound than fresh snow crunching under my feet. Nobody cares to clean the snow off the roads; it just piles up indefinitely until some locals start digging out entrances to their houses with shovels. Dragging around suitcases [like I did] is not recommended. Open / Comment

2021-02-06 18:26:47 For those who want to understand Japanese domestic life on a deeper level I really recommend this book by Inge Daniels, a brilliant anthropologist from Oxford University who conducted fieldwork in 30 Japanese families and studied their houses. If you're not sure about buying the book, she also wrote a great article about space and intimacy in Japanese homes that explains the concept of "body-directed-heating" that I mentioned in my previous post. Open / Comment

2021-02-04 18:40:49 Just a little post about a 1970s house in Niseko I was lucky to stay at. It's common to have double-glazed windows in Hokkaido unlike the rest of Japan, so one would expect a higher level of insulation, but well, the walls are still made of wood and cardboard so it doesn't really help, it's extremely cold. No matter how many square meters you have at your disposal, the functional space will always shrink into a small life-saving volume around your gas heater or a burning stove. In Japan the concept of getting warm is revolving not around the house, but the body itself. Instead of wasting energy on central heating, people take baths, sit around kotatsu, near the stove, air-conditioner or even use chemical hand warmers. European-style heating systems are not welcomed for several environmental reasons (earthquakes are one of them), but maybe there's a cultural concern, too: when it's warm in just one tiny area, you get closer together with the others and it's just cosier that way? Open / Comment

2021-02-03 19:15:59 It’s hard finding things to say after a long vacation filled with non-stop visual beauty and emotional events. I am not an impulsive writer so I had to wait for my daily routine to pull my head back to earth and fingers to the keyboard. But now it seems everything is set for this to happen: a big academic publisher gave me a contract to write a book about my danchi research, my abstract was accepted for a mass housing conference in Lisbon, and there’s yet another paper to be published soon that needs lots of editing. Steady daily writing awaits me, and you’ll definitely see more texts here from now on, so let me know if you have any particular topics you wanna read about! Open / Comment

2021-01-21 15:29:44 Love hotels — another common sight in Susukino. It's very easy to tell them apart from regular hotels by blind windows, wacky facades, unusual colors and hourly rates on display. There is one more interesting pattern though: you almost never see the entrance door from the street. Often there is a wall right in front of the main entrance, so that couples who exit the building can safely say goodbye behind it and go their separate ways without being seen together. Open / Comment

2021-01-20 16:23:13 As I said before, the entrance facades in red-light districts are of great importance: they represent the "vibe" of the establishment and give you all kinds of hints about the type of services you're going to get inside. But what happens to the other sides of the building? Well. Nobody. Cares. At all. In Western Europe they have laws to prevent this dystopian wall nightmare from happening; I can vividly imagine my Italian architecture professors writhing in despair when they'll see the pictures. In Japan, on the other hand, the buildings are but a temporary venture. Why should you think about the impression they might make with their side view? It will disappear in 15-30 years and nobody needs nice windows and balconies in a shady hostclub anyway. Open / Comment