The Future Is Supposed To Look Like This

A music video (one cannot really call it a video tour) of the new Zaha Hadid-designed National Stadium. (Link)

I am neither engineer nor architect, which is probably why the dearth of lateral bracing in the roof scares me. In a country where the primary stress is gravity working upon arches, where the load is composed almost entirely of the arches themselves, fine. However, in the Tokyo Metropolitan District, the stress comes from side-to-side motion of varying intensity and wavelength, several times a year. The immense window spaces in between the structural elements, with only a few gargantuan linkages, look like invitations to disharmonic disaster.

Tip of the Hat to Michael Rofe for the link.

Later - Was I saying something about earthquakes? (Link)

After the Storm

A monstrous typhoon has passed through the country. A few unfortunates lost their lives; many more people suffered injuries, several dozen lost their homes. The power went out in many places as wires ripped from their moorings. Most of the country's jets were grounded; most of the express train runs were cancelled. Yet much of the country's transportation and distribution network still functioned, despite the heavy rain and the wind. A staggering percentage of the labor force commuted work. Television crews, sent out to document the projected devastation, had little to capture in the way of storm dramatic storm damage. The slathering of the coastlines and riverways in concrete, the aesthetically asinine replacement of wood frame houses and public buildings with steel-framed, ceramic tile encased strongholds, lamented often enough here, seems to have preserved the populace from suffering catastrophic losses.

As, I suppose, they were designed to do.

Would it not be ironic that in the aftermath of the defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party, whose passionate intertwining with the construction sector led to the birthing of uncounted thousands of public works projects costing uncountable trillions of yen transforming Japan into a fortress against nature, leading to the party's being shackled to reputation of environmental and fiscal nihilism -- that the purportedly wasteful and pointless flood-control and wave-action defenses actually turned out to be crucial to beat back rising seas and supertyphoons?

That Japan, courtesy the LDP, would turn out to be the only country prepared for the consequences of climate change?

Stars in the Clouded Sky

Not in my normal line, but as regards the collapsed schools of Sichuan, a coda.

None of the newscasts I have seen nor any of news reports I have read has paused to note that China, with exceptions, still has a one child per couple rule.

The parents we are seeing grieving on television or in photo images have not lost a child.

They have lost their child--the singular expression of all their hopes and striving.


Later - Jim Yardley of The New York Times gets close.

A modest proposal

When I see images like these from the Noto Peninsula (complete with breathy commentary from cute young things on the scene in their white hardhats) all I can think of is "Why is there no infuriating and expensive kaken commensurate with the onerous shaken?

Courtesy: AP
Courtesy: AP

A requirement to have one's home inspected every three years for the first 30 years after it is built--then every two years afterward for the lifetime of the building--would do Japan a world of good by forcing encouraging folks to either reinforce or junk substandard and dangerous digs. I also cannot think of a better way of giving a jolt to private consumption other than pressing folks to invest in some better housing.

A project for the Canadian lumber industry council? Or the depopulating mountain villages with their hideous monoculture Legoland plantations of pollen-spewing hinoki and sugi?

...that and the heavy ceramic roofing tile industry admitting to its customers that while attractive and fireproof, its main product line is a killer.