TTANCM.COM » Construction in Japan

So as a followup to my last post, another reason why I am so tired/stressed out lately is that the house next door has been torn down and they are currently building 2 houses in the lot where it used to be. Now, construction close to your house is annoying pretty much anywhere in the world, but in my situation there are a couple of things which make it worse. One is that I work at home, so not only does the noise, vibration, etc. annoy me in general, it also makes it a hell of a lot hard to concentrate on translating crap that I was fairly uninterested in to begin with.

The other thing is that I am in Japan. When I say next door here, I mean like literally about a foot away from the outside wall of my home, which in turn is much less than a foot away from the inside wall of my home. And they aren’t nice and careful with the demolition, doing it by hand because of the obscene proximity to my house and the neighbors on the other side, now, they use a back hoe to just tear it the hell down. So in addition to the general noise and vibration I get to enjoy my entire house shaking when a particularly large section of the place comes down, or when the backhoe gets stuck on something and ends up lifting itself in the air instead of what it intended to lift, only to SLAM back down once the driver realizes what is happening, shaking my entire house, knocking things over, etc. Mind you, we have earthquakes here, so it’s not like I just leave stuff lying around loose on high shelves. This construction has been able to knock over or dislodge things in my home that some of the vibrations caused by earthquakes couldn’t.

Anyway, I thought it would be funny for you to see some pictures and quick video. The demolition is actually over now, and they are working on building the new houses (which are tiny), so instead of the demolition noises I get nail guns and dropped piles of wood etc. Oh and the best part is, the house is right outside our bathroom window, and since the house being built is 3 floors, and ours is 2, that means we get to have people standing right outside our bathroom window looking down into our bathroom. The bathroom window is frosted glass, but it’s still a little disconcerting (especially when you are having one of those “noisy” moments).

For those not in the know, the house I live in is a 40 year old apartment which is built above a warehouse. So from the outside it looks like absolute shit (see pictures below), but it’s not too bad inside except for the occasional rats that manage to get up inside our roof from somewhere in the warehouse, but that’s a story for another time entirely. Onto the pictures and a video of the demolition work. The video if taken from my bathroom window.

and here’s some pictures of the situation, including the view from my bathroom as they were tearing the house down, and some views from the outside once it was mostly down.