Many countries that possess seismically active areas have some regions that are more prepared for earthquakes than others, such as San Francisco being far more earthquake-conscious than Miami in the USA. However, as a country that basically is one entire large quake zone and prepares/builds accordingly, it’s hard to beat Japan.
While it might sound like I’m writing this article about the New Year’s Day Noto Peninsula earthquake, I had actually already started to work on it before the quake. In fact, I’m really surprised at how much damage there was because Japan is essentially the gold standard for seismic construction and personal preparedness and behavior. It still fared quite a bit better than many other countries have in comparable or smaller quakes, presumably because they take quake preparation so seriously at every level. At any rate, while this article is not about the recent earthquake there, I do send my best thoughts to people there including my friends and their families.
Murakoshi cabinet latch, and the ceiling bracing stilts for tops of tall furniture, about which I’ve written in previous articles). Thus, when my wife and I took a trip to Tokyo earlier this year, I made it a point to visit the massive Tokyu* Hands store in Shinjuku to see their earthquake preparedness section (*not a typo; there are several of these stores in Tokyo but this is the one with the impressive earthquake section about which I was tipped off by a friend). If you want to read about Hands, here’s a cute description of them at Buzzfeed, including the description that “It shares Hobby Lobby's love of crafts, Walmart’s size, and Amazon’s broad selection of both the normal and the weird. Then it takes it all up 10 notches.”
(Click to enlarge). Bracing rods and shim strips. |
(Click to enlarge). |
What I wonder about is how easy it is to move the furniture again after it’s stuck down. Many of us have found that if you use too much quake putty on a large flat bottom item so it spreads out at too large of a diameter, it can be extremely difficult to remove the object afterward. Google Translate Lens says that the back of the product mentions that if it is difficult to remove afterward, slowly peel it off from one side to another, but what if your cabinet that’s already 220 lb is stuck to the floor? It also says that if the item is hard to remove, use fishing line wetted with water or neutral detergent and slowly move it back and forth between the pad and the surface. I’m worried...
(The year is 2358, at the world-famous art museum in massive downtown Bakersfield: “Why is this vintage 21st Century wardrobe on display between the Mona Lisa and Clarke’s famous holopainting of Dame Taylor Swift?” “It’s because someone in 2024 used too many Japanese grippy squares to stick down their wardrobe in a house that used to be on this site, and since they could never remove it, they just built the museum around it.”)
Another interesting product I wanted to get and play with was a refrigerator “seismic isolation” disk; in plain English, a grippy saucer that prevents the fridge from moving. This is a complicated issue. Refrigerators have several special challenges for quake safety: first, the doors can swing open causing the contents to scatter. There are braces that swing into place to prevent full-width doors from opening and have to be manually moved out of the way each time the door is open. I have had “French Door” fridge/freezer units for a long time and have less concern about those doors, since they are not as wide and don’t have as large of a lever arm (go check your old Physics textbook for that one). Second, they can tip over. There are braces for fridges to attach them to the wall like other tall furniture, but they are frequently in pretty tight frames in modern kitchens that don’t really give the top enough room to tip over. The thing that bedevils people still is when they roll out of their cubbyholes, and I THINK that is what these disks are supposed to prevent.
(Click to enlarge). |
Lastly, longtime readers of this blog know that I’m really interested in quakeproof cabinet latches, so when I saw a new cabinet latch I hadn’t seen before, I had to get it. I tend to not like motion-activated latching mechanisms where something has to fall into place during an earthquake to prevent the cabinet from opening; I’ve seen that kind of latch fail many times. The ones I’ve liked have been push latches (touch latches), and the relatively recent Murakoshi latch (yep, from Japan) in which a small pendulum inside the mechanism needs to be perfectly straight for the latch to open; in other words, motion-DEactivated unlatching. Well, here was another motion-activated latch but instead of something having to fall in place, the slight motion in the outward direction makes a spring-loaded latch shoot down instantly, very effective.
(Click to enlarge). (Warning: reading the instructions can cause seizures) |
(Click to enlarge). Stepped cabinet frames present challenges for many types of latches. |
Ok, the fatal flaw in this article is that while I’ve seen various references to the ability to purchase from Hands online, I’ve been unable to find a way to do it. The online store exists but currently has a note saying that overseas delivery is not available. The Buzzfeed article that I mentioned earlier says that there’s a company that purchases from Hands and then sends to people overseas but the link doesn’t appear to work. I had managed to purchase the wardrobe bracing rods via Rakuten online, but that site appears to be gone. But these products are out there, hopefully available somewhere in the global online economy; and if you happen to be around Shinjuku, go check it out. (Omitting my typical more lighthearted endings out of respect for the current quake recovery effort in Japan.)