Helping Hands: A Field Trip to Japan’s Earthquake Preparedness Store

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.

(Click to enlarge). You can’t see it, but Matt’s eyes are

wide open and his jaw is on the floor. Shoppers probably 

assumed he was an artificial garden gnome statuette

that had been misplaced in the wrong section.

I try to remain pretty up-to-date on what kinds of quake preparation devices are out there, at least that I know how to purchase.  I keep running into impressive surprises though and they almost always are from Japan (such as the 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.

I was initially a bit disappointed at how small the section was (just a couple of short aisles) but then I realized that they didn’t have very much of any one product out on the shelf, so that small area actually contained many different kinds of products.  Looking over the available products, I saw several versions of things we can get in the US from companies like Ready America (a.k.a. Quakehold).  I saw some clever variations on what I’m used to seeing; for example, I have long used small plastic shims (that is, wedges) under objects that might be otherwise unstable but are hard to appropriately brace, such as floor lamps, and even under a box of emergency supplies to stop it from sliding in a closet to block its own door.  Here, they mean business; they had long shim strips that would stretch across the entire front edge of a wardrobe or bookcase.  I was also delighted to see a whole array of the very wardrobe bracing rods that I had purchased from Japan to brace my massive wardrobe to the ceiling, about which I had written before.

(Click to enlarge). 

I decided to purchase three products to play around with them at home.  The first one was grippy blocks to be placed under flat objects.  “YAWN” you say, “big deal, you’ve written about Gripeez lots of times for sticking down small light things, so what’s new?”  Well, the strongest of these products there advertises that it braces 100 kg!  (That’s 220 lb, for us Yanks.)  Check out the photos, including the Google Translate “Lens” screenshot showing what is says in English (for us Yanks).  (Got to take those Google Translate Lens shots with a grain of salt though; on the same trip, it translated the plaque near a statue of a famous person to say his name was “Fast Food.”)  I got one and plan to use it to brace something when the need arises.  As the diagrams suggest, this product is for large flat-bottom furniture on smooth hard floors (although Google Translate Lens initially suggested that this product was intended to stick down bicycles).  Never try using grippy pads of any strength to attach things to vertical surfaces like walls.

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). 

These disks are basically metal saucers with a grippy outer ring on the floor side, and a grippy inner plug for the fridge side.  I’m a bit confused by the diagrams.  If the fridge has only wheels, then I can see tipping it up and placing the front wheels on the grippy saucers, which come in pairs. However, my fridge has adjustable leveling feet in front of each front wheel, and it appears in the diagram that it’s the leveling feet that go on the grippy saucer.  However, I would have thought that simply by leveling those feet so that they are on the floor and taking the main weight of the fridge rather than the wheels taking the weight, the fridge would not be able to roll.  Unlike my previous refrigerator, which I could easily roll out to retrieve things that fell behind it, the current one does not roll, so I’m not sure I need these saucers and probably won’t use them.  (That’s the cue for my various quake expert colleagues to pile on and correct me... I’ll update this article should that happen.)

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)

Things to like about this latch: from my limited playing around with it, it seems like the mechanism will be very effective and reliable.  Unlike any of the others I’ve tried, there’s no drilling or screws; it’s all done with wide pieces of adhesive tape (good if you never plan to remove the latch, bad if you want flexibility to put it elsewhere.)  With the supplied templates for installation, it seems like there’s no guessing as to position.  And, there’s a nifty extra arm that swings into place after it activates that will push the catch part back up out of the way the next time you push the door into place, restoring the ability to open the door.

(Click to enlarge).  Stepped cabinet frames present
challenges for many types of latches.

Things to not like: As mentioned, it can’t be repositioned or reused unless relying on different adhesive if you trust it. The thing that worries me, though, is that if you have a cabinet in which there’s a little step, as shown in this figure lifted from my earlier articles about latches, you still have to either build up extra material to fill in the step, or, you might be able to put this latch’s main part further back behind the step (see figure at right). However, if the latch is too far back away from the cabinet door, then even though it will still activate and stop the door from opening, it looks like pushing the door closed won’t push the moving catch back up because that little nifty swinging arm I mentioned won’t reach it.  It’s hard to describe, but I’d be worried that a door with such a recessed latch could be permanently latched after a quake.  Also, just like the other latches, they won’t work on cabinets in which the ceiling of the cabinet is much higher than the top of the frame, which is common in lower cabinets.

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.)

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