Not Walls!

Well, all sorts of things could be used as a barrier to ingress or egress, though it's hard to image quite what - animals? vehicles? - would be stopped by the construction on the left, even if they couldn't walk round the ends. Most of the time, though, the preoccupation seems to be with territorial marking. Build a house, and even if the plot barely leaves room to walk around the perimeter, the first thing to do is to build an ugly concrete block wall as a "skirt".

Or as on the right, the main purpose of the wall is to hold up the letterbox.

Anyway, the general principle is that the outline of a plot of land should be shown by a concrete wall foundation, and since there's always the possibility of putting a block wall on top, steel reinforcing rods are required, sticking up. Since this is obviously a bit dangerous, the usual procedure is to add soft drink or beer cans, or slightly less usually, PET bottles as below.

And as was I supposed bound to happen eventually, sometime in the summer of 2001, the boundary to the west of our house got done. (March 2002: They are now building a tiny apartment block next door.)

We had our house built on one plot of a block of four; inevitably, visitors park on the adjacent empty space, and approach our house from the side. It seemed a bit much to expect one's guests to negotiate the row of "Georgia" coffee cans, and since architectural eclecticism is the norm around here, I thought a taste of Venice wouldn't go amiss. And the poles (actually plastic drainpipe) are a lot less likely to cause injury.

(Click for full images)

Home - Search - Site map - Japanese

© Brian Chandler 2002
This page is copylefted
Feedback: Guestbook - Email - Snailmail - Linking