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Pre-fabricated basement

It seems that houses in Japan just don’t have basements.* Luckily, there is a company out there that is selling pre-fabricated mini basements. All you need to do is bury it under your house (or in your yard, if you have one):

A company has taken techniques originally used to make underground storage tanks at gas stations and used it to create “Depot Angel” underground storage rooms. They offer a variety of pre-fabricated tank rooms for between about 200,000 yen ($21,000) and 10 million yen ($107,000).

We can see two examples near the end of the clip: one that is being used for rice/vegetable storage and another that has been turned into a wine cellar.

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*Note: Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons briefly mentions that there is some sort of regulation that prohibits the construction of basements for houses in Japan.
japanese basements

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27 comments - What do you think? Posted by James - January 4, 2010 at 6:35 am

Categories: Odd / Strange, Technology Tags:

Aaron

Has anyone here read the _Dogs and Demons_ book referenced in the post? The book description at Amazon sounds interesting, but I’m suspicious of any book written by a foreigner that “reveals” truths about that foreign country. There are gems in the field, but sometimes the very trope itself over-runs any usefulness to the analysis.

http://nihongojira.blogspot.com Dan R

It’s a well researched book and certainly will open your eyes to a few horrors, but sometimes it is so unrelentingly grim it can really bring you down.

Richard

I couldn’t understand the end part. Was that wine cellar dude aging his Beaujolais nouveau?
hl

I thought maybe they didn’t have basements because of earthquakes.
Slim

None of the houses in the southern US or Mexico have basements. I lived in upstate NY for 6 years and every house up there had one. Basements are very rare the world over. Only in the Northwest Americas are they an ‘everyhouse’ thing.

In Texas I’ve only found one house with any sort of basement and it was a 5 foot deep mud basement beneath a house built in 1892.

hl

In the American midwest we like our basements–a good place to hide from tornadoes or play ping-pong.
inuZ

not really, in Germany its also an ‘everyhouse thing’, dunno bout other countries but i’d guess in europe its pretty common to have one
Ajapa

Depending on the climate and the environment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basement#Design_and_structural_considerations

… In places with oddly stratified soil substrata or high water tables, such as most of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and areas within 50 miles of the Gulf of Mexico, basements are usually not financially feasible unless the building is a large apartment or commercial structure. In many earthquake-prone areas, such as Southern California, basements are not common because of the possibility of collapse during an earthquake.

The drainage problem is also an important factor.

Slim

North Americas … only in the West, not the northwest. Sorriii

lol

every house in Newengland has a basement.

yoga boy

My concern would be the humidity in these tanks. Basements in North America are humid as it is…here in Japan I imagine this problem would be far greater. You’d have to keep a dehumidifier running 24/7.

Aaron

When I lived in Wisconsin as a kid, we kept did keep our big dehumidifier (maybe even 2 of them) running 24/7 throughout all of the summer months in our basement.

And I also have to concur with hl–our basement got used for about 4 things:
1) Our ping-pong table
2) Tornado alerts
3) My dad’s workshop, which did not get used all that often
4) A place for kids to play when we didn’t want to go outdoors (I admit, I practiced breakdancing down there…it was the 80′s, I don’t know that I had a choice)

James Watt

I don’t know that Kerr’s book is valid anymore. All the DIY home building books I’ve read recommend building a basement in order to get around the floor-area/land-area requirements.

LB

I’ve never been convinced Kerr’s books were all that valid even on the day they were written. He seems to suffer from having an “image of a pristine and unchanging Japan” that does not reflect reality, and being endlessly upset that actual Japanese people do not share his view of how things out to be. At times his writings read like he thinks Japan should be a museum piece, preserved for posterity to gawk at.

Ajapa

According to Ben,

The basics of Japanese traditional housing is said to be preparation for the hot and humid summer, typically raising the floor at the knee height to get good ventilation. In addition to this, the existence of the rainy season and usage of wood as basic components might have make it difficult to think about basements. In a rice growing area, the floods of irrigation canals is perhaps still not so unusual. Possibly, to speak for residental homes, having a basement might not be natural idea to many people in 50 years ago.

To summarize shortly, it must be a cospiracy of the Rothschilds!

leitmotiv

Plus, an amazing number of dwellings in Japan are sweltering hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter. Why would builders who apparently do not utilize basics of insulation have any chance of adding a design subtlety such as a basement?

Ajapa

Why do you make such an irrelevant reply without understanding the point?

LB

Because… it is all he knows how to do.

7-10split

I don’t think the humidity would be much of an issue with these tanks: it’s a sealed fibreglass tank – the only opening is the lid and once the lid is on the top and it would be easy to make it an airtight lid, it will be “everything-tight”

Any residual humidity in the air could be taken care of with those humidity moisture absorbing pot things.

LB

Condensation would be a problem, I think. Those moisture-absorbing pots would doubtless help, but since the tank is buried in the ground, the walls will stay cool to the touch (the surrounding soil will keep them cool), and the humidity will condense there. And since it looks like we are talking about a fairly thin-walled fiberglass tank, insulating properties of the wall will be darn near zero.

I wouldn’t set anything directly on the floor, and I sue wouldn’t want to keep books or anything like that down in there.

matt

Did anybody look at the product website?
They claim that it’s insulated, and that there are also 2 vents to help control temperature and humidity.

The woman storing rice and vegetables in the video also talked about the temperature being constant all year round; I’m guessing that there really aren’t as many problems as one might expect.

LB

OK, I stand corrected, I missed the insulation part. It is insulated, which I suppose would be useful if one had a heater inside it to raise the temperature. Other than that, insulation really won’t do much as an underground room is already surrounded by meters and meters of natural insulation – dirt. Except on the top, of course, where the dirt covering would be thinner, but even then cold air sinks, hot air rises. As does humid air, as it is heavier. Vents in the top will not lower humidity inside the room. They will raise it if the outside humidity rises and the vents are open as the cool, moist air sinks into the room through the vents. And if the outside temperature rises, that cool, moist air will remain down in the underground room. Trust me on this – I grew up in a house with an uninsulated and easily ventilated basement in a climate that went from the 90s (F) in the summer to -40 in the winters. Our basement was always cool and damp, and while the temperature in it did swing through the year it never got above 60 (F) in the summer or below freezing in the winter, and no, it was not being significantly heated. Both the furnace and hot water heater were well insulated to specifically prevent them from wasting energy by heating the cellar.

For some uses, such as a vegetable cellar or storage of canned/bottled goods where humidity is not such an issue, I think this underground room would be fine. But I still would not set anything directly on the floor and I wouldn’t store books or documents down there without installing a dehumidifier.

Mark

It better have good ventilation and a constant temperature, or else having a wine cellar there would be a very bad idea.

Peter Sutcliffe

Paedophiles will be buying these to keep abducted children in.

LB

Then the maker better open up branches in California and Austria…

http://www.zdwonline.de Haf

At least in Austria houses already have basements, so I don’t think that would be a good business idea.

Mark

This is good news for Basement Cat

Pre-fabricated basement

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