I’m not sure what to take from this. In all my 8 years of living in Japan I have yet to see any prefabricated homes being built (and I’ve probably seen hundreds of houses under construction).
Even the most budget builder, say your prefecture's Co-op builder, will use pre cut framing. Our builder, Hinokiya, used factory built frame pieces.
The article's photos of prebuilts is misleading. The majority of prebuilding in Japan is about factory built framing, precut beams, and unit baths. You'll not notice these homes, because they look the same as everything else.
More over: most homes have something prebuilt. Near every bath in every home is a unit bath.
This depends greatly on the crew. Some are more willing to work long hours than others.
European accommodations of similar price category have much worse & more dirty bath facilities in comparison.
I’ve stayed in a lot of fancy hotel rooms, and my single biggest frustration is that my house has a better bath than literally all of them.
Oh well I guess we should be hape we have at least lever control now and not two separate knobs like before.
AFAIK that is not the norm in Japanese houses. A house would like have a toilet in one room, sink in separate room, bath in a 3rd room, and that bath is is about the size of 2 American bathtubs. One area of the tub, and one for watching (a wet floor).
AFAIK that's the norm in a Japanese "house" as well as most modern 2 bedroom or larger apartments. Smaller and/or older places have a "unit bath" (I lived with one for 6 years but my current place has everything separate)
Talking about prefab, it's supposed to go faster (and that's normally the case), and time is money (more or less so, depending on where you live), but in Japan I once saw a two-story eight-apartment building being raised and completed in less than 7 weeks. Not prefab, not completely anyway - they obviously used modules where the could. But you could still see walls etc. being built the "normal" way.
It was built on what used to be a field, I walked past it every morning when walking the dog. First they put up the (now mandatory I believe) steel framing, then they continued building it piece-by-piece. Floors, wall, roof, solar panels on the roof, doors, windows, plumbing, air conditioners/heating, painted tarmac parking area outside (with two allotted spaces for each apartment), a little roofed area to park bicycles, garbage bin area (again roofed), and cleanup. Less than seven weeks. It's the most astonishing thing I've ever seen when it comes to building not being fully prefab (the exception was the baths - they were installed as units). During the same period a slightly larger apartment building was set up in my home country, near my home there, it took nearly two years and when they were finished it still looked shabby and unfinished outside - no tarmac, no grass, leftover stuff everywhere. Took forever to get that cleaned up.
So, why did it go so extremely fast in Japan? Logistics. Everything arrived on site exactly when it should. Nothing stopped. When stuff for the roof arrived there was already a conveyor belt set up to transport it up to where it was needed. Nobody had to wait for someone else to finish what they were doing. Nothing stopped. They worked Saturdays too, but they didn't work evenings. It was just all incredibly efficient. The someone who worked out the logistics for that project.. I've never seen anything like it.
The video is showing a metal "lego" form of prefab. These are limited to the premium home builders. Habel, Sekisui, Sumitomo etc. These homes are metal centric, and thus more expensive than wood centric homes.
There are plenty of wooden pre-fab homes, but those center upon pre-cut timbers or other factory manufacturering. Only metal can do the rooms-as-lego-pieces style.
There's also just like... the shower room itself, even in nicer appartments, that ends up just being a block (see video of installation). Seems like a pretty good way of reducing issues like leaks or weird plumbing issues.
These are the best! One of my favorite parts of Japanese apartments. They make so much more sense than standing in a narrow bathtub, next to a toilet, in a room where you can't splash water everywhere.
With that being said, I'll take the insulation and central heating/cooling from western housing.
Though some Japanese people really want/need a bathtub, so I guess it's just cultural.
It's fine for single person who don't take a bath but just a shower, but it seems to not majority.
Most Japanese hates shower/bathtub + toilet style because it seems to completely nonsense, small space is relatively not a problem. While bathing, why should we see toilet and sniff toilet smell? Also toilet paper and cloths wets by bath. It's more problem for a family because Japanese house very rarely has multiple shower rooms.
I am talking mainly as a single person renting. And of course it's my opinion coming from a different culture.
"While bathing, why should we see toilet" I prefer to see an ample room while doing anything, than to have a wall right in front of me. It's not about the contents of the room, but about having walls less than 1 feet on each side of my face (for the toilet). "Toilet smell" should not be a problem normally with decent ventilation, specially with the industrial fans that Japanese homes seem to have in the bathrooms.
My issue is with overall distribution, where Japanese houses (at least for single person/room) seem to take 30~40% of the floorplan space in what in other countries would be a single room taking 15~20%.
Wait, first shower, then sit in a tub? What is the reason behind this? One or the other by itself should be enough to get clean right?
So the real question would be: Why bathing rather than just showering? It's cultural and it is considered to relaxing and healthy activity.
The long hot bath every evening is vital.. Japanese houses are cold in the winter. No insulation, no bedroom heating, barely above freezing. If I don't take a bath at night I'll be so cold that I'll have trouble sleeping. But after a long bath I'm fine. Not feeling the cold at all and this lasts all night. Seems to help with my health too. No pains, colds are rare. Very much unlike like now, when I'm in my home country waiting for travels to open again.
Something like this
https://i0.wp.com/easylifejapan.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/...
That's tub is the same length and wider than any of the 25 places I've lived in the USA and the shower would just be an attachment in the tub and I wouldn't have the wash area next to the tub.