Narrow Houses in Japan

I recently passed by a restaurant I’d not been near for a while, and found myself doing a double take: over the past few months someone had taken half the restaurant parking lot and built a tiny two-story house on it. Because of the oddly shaped plot of land, the narrow house was about a car length in depth, and living inside it would be like living in long hallway. Yes, the fact that Japan has about half the population of the U.S. crammed into an area the size of Germany does make people do things a little differently here, like businesses built with homes above them, like the rural liquor shop my wife’s parents operate, which is attached to our home. While you or I might cringe at the idea of living in a tiny, oddly shaped home, there’s a whole category of architecture called kyosho jutaku dedicated to building pleasant, functional homes in places where land is at a premium, like Tokyo. There’s even an interesting TV show on Saturday mornings that showcases newly built homes on fantastically tiny plots of land.

There are some oddly shaped buildings in Japan.