300-Year-Old House Transported Piecemeal Japan to California, Then Reconstructed | Hacker News Reader

300-Year-Old House Transported Piecemeal Japan to California, Then Reconstructed

wsj.com

63 pointsbookofjoe37 comments

This made me think of two similarish things in the UK:

1)In Kew gardens there is a Japanese "Minka" house that was donated to Kew by the Japanese government. It was lived in by a Japanese family in Nagasaki after their home was bombed in 1945, and some time later was transported to Kew piece by piece and rebuilt using traditional methods.[1] The house itself is a beautiful and simple wooden house and sits in a lovely bamboo garden inside Kew (which is of course also very lovely) and seems to me based on its history a sort of quiet protest against nuclear war.

2) "Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View" is an extraordinary artwork by Cornelia Parker at the Tate Modern. The artist took her garden shed with all of its contents and blew it up with explosives and made this artwork comprising two parts. The first is a video of the explosion on a loop so you see the shed exploding and coming back into a single piece over and over again. The second is the installation, which is a sort of "real life freeze frame" of an instant in the explosion in which all the fragments are suspended from the ceiling in the positions they were in at that moment and lit by a single source so it casts very dramatic shadows.[2]

[1] https://www.kew.org/kew-gardens/whats-in-the-gardens/bamboo-...

[2] https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/parker-cold-dark-matter...

One of my favourite art pieces is the successful attempt to relocate a hoarding Australian master painter’s entire Sydney flat 1,000km north to northern NSW

Over 20,000 objects had to have been catalogued and replaced, exactly where they were at the time of her death

This includes cigarette butts, half eaten food and dead flies etc

I was lucky enough to get to stand in the room (usually 100% off-limits no exceptions) it was bizarre that it smelt exactly like it wasn’t relocated and installed in a sterile art gallery

Worth a visit if you’re in South East Queensland or North NSW

https://gallery.tweed.nsw.gov.au/visit/margaret-olley-art-ce...

> Over 20,000 objects had to have been catalogued and replaced, exactly where they were at the time of her death

There's actually a whole industry specializing in this process, mostly centered around Hollywood. Whenever they film at someone's house, these companies come in and remove all of their personal belongings for shooting, then restore them exactly like they were afterwards.

HNers in the Boston area can see a similar feat at the Peabody Essex Museum, where they have reconstructed in detail the house of a merchant from the Qing Dynasty.

https://www.pem.org/yin-yu-tang-a-chinese-home

From the Boston(ish) area, the Smithsonian has a 200 year old house they reconstructed from Ipswich. Really cool exhibit detailing all the different people that went through it and the renovations it underwent.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/explore/exhibitions/within-th...

I second the vote to go see this. The museum is really quite incredible. They also have a number of period American homes in their collection, all right nearby. Because the museum is located in Salem[0], visiting in October is highly discouraged.

https://www.pem.org/historic-houses/historic-houses-gardens

If you're visiting the Boston area to see the PEM, you may as well take another day and head on up to Manchester, NH. The Currier Museum has two Frank Lloyd Wright houses in its collection.

https://currier.org/frank-lloyd-wright/

[0] of the infamous witch trials

> visiting in October is highly discouraged

Why?

Salem has a tourist industry around the witch trials. October is busy season because Halloween.

“Busy” does not begin to describe it. The city’s population of 45,000 is swamped by over a million visitors in the month of October.

People love spooky stuff.

I've been to the place this was removed from, Huangcun, a small village half an hour from Tunxi in Anhui. Fantastic place - as in, like a fantasy setting. Covered in subtropical rainforest. Barely connected with reliable roads when I went - several landslides during the monsoon. Nearly every flat surface is a managed cascade of rice terraces filling in the 50-100m wide valleys between straight 30-60 degree slopes, climbing the hollows into the hills; It has apparently been in this configuration for literally thousands of years. The village is a densely packed cluster of old masonry buildings and new modern houses. The masonry ancestral temple survived the Cultural Revolution partially intact. Visitor accommodations are in a side building constructed much like Yin Yu Tan at around the same time period.

They were trying to use the Peabody Essex money to start a tourist industry there without it being as obscenely overdeveloped as the nearby World Heritage Site at Hongcun.

There is also an Egyptian tomb in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_Perneb?wprov=sfti1

The Ishtar gate of Babylon is in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishtar_Gate

The Huntington website and blog has an article and video/interview about the reconstruction:

https://huntington.org/verso/reconstructing-japanese-heritag...

https://huntington.org/japanese-garden/shoya-house

Henry Ford did something similar with a beautiful English cottage from the early 1600s.

> In 1929, Henry purchased the property for $5,000 and immediately hired a team of local builders to restore the structures to more accurately reflect the era in which they were built. Upon completion, the workers dismantled them stone by stone, numbering each one individually and packing them in gravel sacks that were transported to the United States via train and boat.

https://victoriamag.com/touch-england-cotswold-cottage/

This article is about the history and cultural significance of the house - nothing of the transportation or reconstruction.

Semi related: For a riveting graphical story about the fictional deconstruction of the Empire State building, see David Macauly's "Unbuilding". It's one of my favorite books ever.

>it was dismantled by Japanese carpenters who then reconstructed it here on two acres

>the Shōya house was reconstructed using the methods of traditional Japanese carpentry: Aside from complying with contemporary building codes, no nails or metal braces were used.

The Open Air Museum in Denmark is a museum of old buildings from all over the region

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frilandsmuseet

> The museum features more than 100 buildings from rural environments and dating from 1650-1950. All buildings are original and have been moved piece by piece

https://www.wsj.com/style/design/japanese-heritage-shoya-hou...

Seems like a wildly different weather/climate than this house would have normally been in. I wonder whether that impacts the longevity of these constructions.

> I wonder whether that impacts the longevity of these constructions.

Probably positively--Shikoku Island is quite a bit more tropical/humid than LA. I'd imagine a timber-framed house that has already endured centuries in a more humid climate would do just fine in a milder/drier climate.

https://archive.md/20240720151944/https://www.wsj.com/style/...

The Huntington Estate is definitely worth a day (and an excellent place to take the family) if you want to avoid the usual tourist traps in Southern California. Gardens, art, great food, not too crowded even.

Hard to be crowded when the place is just so absolutely massive.

You'll want to reserve ahead on a weekend! They have strict capacity limits, which is why it never feels too crowded.

I'm amazed at how many of us in Los Angeles live here for years and skip this place. It's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been.

The Cultural Exchange building at Hakone Gardens on Saratoga CA (near San Jose) was constructed in a similar manner - the building was designed and built in Japan, disassembled, shipped over and then reassembled on-site. Done in 1990 though, so not a historical building.

https://www.hakone.com/history

There’s a similar one in São Paulo, Brazil. It’s modeled after the emperor’s residence in Kyoto, and was also transported by ship and assembled in place.

http://photo.rique.pro/photos/2023-03-30-pavilhao-japones.ht...

Didn't Larry Ellison do this with an entire Japanese village? Except its private and part of the grounds on his estate?

I prefer to track Larry's personal projects by the companies he gutted to fund them. Which one would this have been?

Maybe Cerner will be the one that he uses to build the sacrifice altar on the volcano on his Hawaiian island.

Larry vs the Volcano?

Will he fare better than Joe?

I like to imagine Larry holds semi-regular events where he tosses a virgin into the volcano to increase shareholder value.

When I saw the headline, I half expected it to be Ellison, and was rather surprised to find it wasn't, given his obsession with Japan.

Would be cool if they laser scanned each of the pieces to share openly so that others could attempt to recreate.

Genuinely curious, as the article is paywalled, but I wonder what necessitated the house having to come across the ocean? Could it not have been preserved or relocated somewhere within Japan?

I imagine there are innumerable 300 year old houses being preserved in Japan and that crossing the ocean wasn't needed to preserve this particular one. But this will be able to be appreciated by people in Los Angeles without traveling so far. It seems similar to how Japanese art is already shown in Californian museums and how Californian art is shown in Japanese ones. "Genuinely curious" people like to be exposed to culture from other places.

I posted this unpaywalled link:

https://www.wsj.com/style/design/japanese-heritage-shoya-hou...

30 seconds after posting the article.

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