- at least 50 hospitalized due to various injuries[1]
- 9 missing, 12 house collapses, 4 trappings, 7 fires so far[1]
- multiple highway road bridges snapped, roads damaged[2]
- AEON brand shopping mall exploded following evacuation, cause unknown[3]
- chimney collapsed at Nippon Seishi paper factory[4]
- TSMC, Sony, Fujifilm chips, imagers, materials plants evacuated[4]
- epicenter reported as 32.6N 130.7E[5], roughly 20km/12mi south of previous major earthquake[7],
320km/200mi SE from Busan, 650km/400mi from Seoul, 900km/550mi WSW from Tokyo, likewise 900km/550mi
due east from Shanghai, 1200km/730mi due south to Vladivostok, etc
- stone wall behind a moat damaged again at Kumamoto castle[8]
On top of that, one of the toughest part could be the extent of the power outage.
It's reported at around 46000 homes, the region has many elders and the outage will impact air conditionners, but also medical equipment they keep at home and supporting appliances.
Japan itself is involved with a lot of the R&D, the factories are there because of that and because of major buyers also being there. It’s not like we’re going to evacuate the hundred million plus of Japan.
This was my first real earthquake since moving to Kyushu. After it stopped I looked it up, and the first place to post the epicenter and shindo was NERV's twitter...which is named after the org from the anime and has an anime screenshot as its banner (https://x.com/EN_NERV). Apparently it's a real disaster information service, though.
It started as a Twitter account during the Tohoku 2011 earthquake, and then subsequently became a “real” service; the IP owners for the Eva agreed to let them use it going forward.
The Nerv app is quite good. It usually gives real-time alerts faster than the official sources.
You can even have the weird experience of being notified of an earthquake, watching the shockwave move outward from the epicenter, and feeling it as it passes.
In parts of Kumamoto Prefecture, it registered 7 on the Japanese shindo (seismic intensity) scale, which reflects the amount of ground shaking at a particular location. The shindo is a better indicator of the likely amount of damage than the magnitude is. A shindo of 7 is extremely strong [1].
Ten minutes ago (at around 17:15 p.m. Japan time), NHK was reporting that there were many emergency calls coming in from Uki City, where shindo 7 was recorded, but that the extent of the damage or injuries was not yet known.
There have also been many aftershocks, including some strong ones, and tsunami warnings.
NHK TV is showing extensive damage including fallen smokestacks at Nippon Paper Factory facility, bridge road separation, fallen bridge lane, road cracks, fire, water coming out of drainage etc. It was a huge earthquake and will take some time to assess the damage.
> Electricity allows for so many more automatic safeguards.
Since the mid-2000s there has actually been a push by Japanese utility companies for adoption of what they call "all-electric" オール電化.
Adoption has been reasonably good with new-builds because they can also have solar panels. But adoption in older properties has been slower.
First in general, electricity in Japan has tended to be more expensive than gas.
Second, a large Part of the slow adoption comes from cooking related inertia.
A lot of traditional (and therefore very common) Japanese cookware just will not work on electric, full stop. For example, traditional donabe (clay pots).
Beyond that, for example, aluminium pans being non-ferromagnetic will not work on induction. Yes you find aluminium pans in the West with extra ferromagnetic bases attached, but that is not common in Japan.
Finally, the Japan Society of Cookery Science did commission a study[1] where they had two groups of people cook four dishes on both gas and induction. The conclusion was gas was preferred across all four.
I’ve worked in appliance repair and have worked on induction cook tops.
I wouldn’t recommend buying one. The fancier models have a stupendous number of circuit boards in them, and obviously a lot of power electronics, as well as cooling fans. Probably buy the cheapest model with the least number of features that you can bear the sight of, style matters in a kitchen, if you have to buy one at all.
I’ve simplified by cooking to an electric pressure cooker, which also functions as a slow cooker and pot for frying, an air fried, and a microwave. No kettle, no pots or pans, no cooktop, no oven. An oven would be useful I suppose if I were cooking for more people. The pressure cooker plus air frier is a faster and more convenient substitute for roasting meat.
As they become more common and age, I predict induction cooktops will have a much higher failure rate than dumb rheostat controlled resistive element cooktops. Everything has a much higher failure rate than dumb resistive element cooktops. And they are much easier to repair with very few parts: a resistive element and a rheostat.
I’ve don’t quite a good many replacements of fully functional dumb resistive cooktops and ovens with the new version of the same model, simply because the 70 to 80 year old residence wanted something newer and shinier, even though the new model is almost identical to the 20 to 30 year old model they’re replacing.
Improper installation of induction cooktops in older kitchens with out the necessary cabinet work to correctly ventilate them is a big problem too.
Anyways, gas is a great source of energy especially for commercial and industrial cooking and heating, where electric is simply impractical due to the immense amount of power required.
At home, sure. The typical setup requires less than 10kW. Trivial.
In a food court or restaurant strip currently serviced by gas, the electricity requirement could easily exceed 1 megawatt, which means major infrastructure upgrades, and you’ll never get the rapid heat control like gas provides, which is essential in reasonable service times, along with the fact that gas cookers are infinitely simpler and have very low failure rates compared to anything electric that is put through repeated thermo cycling 16 or 24hrs a day.
Counterpoint - my dirt cheap entry level induction cooktop has been incredibly reliable. We cook intensely with it almost every day and have done so for years. Do I wish it was smarter? Sure. Is it faster to heat water than my old gas stove? Yup. Do I want even more power? Heck yeah.
Only having 1 large burner is stupid, and the 1 large burner it has could stand to be another inch or so wider.
But it has been a definite upgrade over gas. From better air quality to not heating my house up in the summer, to being faster to get pots hot.
> As they become more common and age, I predict induction cooktops will have a much higher failure rate than dumb rheostat controlled resistive element cooktops. Everything has a much higher failure rate than dumb resistive element cooktops. And they are much easier to repair with very few parts: a resistive element and a rheostat.
Agreed, resistive elements are simple, you can still find ones that are 30+ years old and working fine. Same with old gas stoves, easy to repair, dirt simple.
Induction requires fancy electronics, and modern circuit boards just don't have a long life expectancy.
“People used to cooking with gas, cook better with gas”
Induction offers the benefits of not emitting noxious fumes, the dangers of transporting gas over long distances in bulk, the fire hazards inside the home, and dependency on single source energy.
Electricity, via induction cooktops, is often faster, more energy efficient, safer for everyone, and doesn’t depend on whatever regime or state wants to play games with the supply. Where I live, electricity is often sold at negative rates for most of the day and that electricity is now going into batteries at a massive scale. It seems unlikely gas has any future, outside of niche cooking or industrial/commercial uses.
> Induction offers the benefits of not emitting noxious fumes,
I don’t understanding this criticism.
Who in their right mind ie cooking inside at all without an externally ventilated exhaust fan? The moisture control issue leading to mould growth will destroy your health faster than hoofing nat gas combustion products.
I believe the nat gas combustion product health risks for home and commercial cooking are wildly overblown. Commercial kitchens are required to have certain ventilation requirements, as are all new home builds, at least in any jurisdiction anyone would want to live in.
> electricity is often sold at negative rates for most of the day and that electricity
Is it? Is it though? What evidence is there?
Negative rates may apply to the wholesale price, but I’m not aware of anywhere that passes that on to the residential retail customer.
In Australia, electricity retailers are require to offer a plan that has a 3 hour free period, which is usually in the middle of the day when everyone is at work, and the plans non-free-period rates are worse, as well as the daily supply charge being higher. Thereby resulting, in all likelihood, in people on those plans likely ending up paying the same or more, if they’re not obsessively fussing over their electricity usage.
What are you going to do? Set your induction cook top to fry your eggs for the next morning at 1pm? How’s that supposed to work? Cook your roast chicken in the tumble dryer, because your oven doesn’t have a 12hr delay timer? Admittedly some newer ovens do, because leaving a raw chicken at room temperature in the oven for hours on end is a great idea.
Like everything the Australian Labor government touches, it’s a sham. Including the battery subsidy, which just moves wealth from everyone else (taxpayers), but especially poor people, to already relatively wealthy home owners. All the while alleviating government and energy infrastructure industries of the responsibility of making investments they’ll have to maintain.
Not to mention Australia already has electricity prices that are ridiculously high, so even if you benefit from the three-for-free plan, you’re still worse off than you were five years ago.
And with the propensity of batteries to spontaneously combust and be nearly impossible to extinguish, EV and home battery owners, scooters and ebiked too, are soaking up resources of fire departments.
See StacheD on YouTube for an in exhaustible stream of battery fire nightmares.
Ah, the good old unintended consequences of poorly thought out government policy. Which are always poorly thought out, because a very few number of Australian politicians have ever had to worry about energy prices, because they are nothing but glorified career dole-bludgers.
Jacinta Allan’s, the recent former Premier of the once great state of Victoria, industry experience extended to a brief period as a grocery bagger before her and her drunken uni mates messed around with an Ouija board and some other gray magic and accidentally summoned demons who took their souls and parasitised their bodies.
Or did they summon the demons on purpose? Probably, comrades.
I see some places in the Japanese countryside where homeowners get propane tanks delivered to them for cooking? I believe in an earthquake prone country, this is safer than having natural gas piped to their homes?
The problem I think is that Japanese culture values hot baths daily. Heating water for the bath using electricity is still too costly.
Propane tanks strapped to your house is common even in cities since it's cheaper to install (but then costs more per cubic meter).
The downside to propane tanks is they become fireworks if a neighbor has a fire which heats them up.
In Japan anyone who goes all-electric these days is getting a heat pump water heater ("eco-cute") by default, resistive electric heating doesn't really exist out of small plugin units like kotatsu and radiant heaters.
All the big Japanese makes have them. They basically look like a water tank with the outside portion of a mini split air conditioner hooked up next to them.
With my power company in Japan, by going "all-electric" (having an eco-cute and induction stove), I qualify for a rate plan where I can trade off solar power peak hours (half price) for the duck curve hours (double price), so I have my water heating only running during cheap hours and cut down on air conditioning during the expensive hours.
Ours is from Mitsubishi and is just the builder-grade one from our fix-rate renovation company. It will connect to the wifi so you can start a bath from an app on your phone on your way home from work. There's also an intercom between the bath and the kitchen so mom can tell the kids to get out of the bath, dinner is done. Traditional Japanese values.
The bath intercom always cracks me up. I’m sure it makes sense in bigger, maybe multi-level houses; but I can’t imagine myself ever using it in my 2LDK.
Hey thanks. I'll be reading these in-depth. I am fascinated by Japanese appliance tech-wizardry. LOL about the mom using the intercom to get the kids out of the bath.
From a quick look, these are very similar to the heat pump water heaters that are starting to become common in the SF Bay Area (it looks like gas water heaters will be banned in the next few years, so people are hopping on the band wagon).
At a glance the only difference is the ones I am seeing have the heat exchangers in the body of the unit (so take the heat from the room where the tank is), whereas these "eco-cute" look like they put that outside the home.
Where I live in the US (near Seattle), there's no piped natural gas, most detatched houses have a 250-500 gallon propane tank. Seattle has piped gas, but my county never had the density to justify the expense to install distribution piping and now its disfavored.
My house has a second tank for a backup generator. We use the main tank for our stove/range, water heater, clothes dryer, and a decorative fireplace that's rarely used. Some neighbors have a propane furnace, but we've got a heatpump with resistive strips as backup heat.
This is block by block. Long ago Seattle asked home owners on each block to foot the bill to run gas. Many blocks said yes, some said no. For blocks where only 1 side was developed, the cost was higher and there was a greater chance of everyone saying no. That is what happened on the street I grew up on, when the city had asked everyone to pay for gas lines, there were so few houses on that working class block that it was cost prohibitive for everyone to pony up how much $ would have been needed.
So instead people had oil furnaces installed and now that block will at some point require serious environmental remediation. :/
It's interesting all the permutations there are out there. We have gas from PG&E. Our house has an electric clothes dryer, gas stove with dual-fuel oven, gas furnace, and gas water heater. No air-conditioning other than a portable unit for "emergency" heatwave and AQI events. Our furnace is ancient, and the winter gas bill is the painful part.
I have a long term interest in full electrification, but find the process daunting due to the interlocking set upgrades. Between insulation envelope upgrades and electrical system upgrades, there is a lot of potentially disruptive work needed to even allow permits to be issued for heat-pump HVAC and water heater or fully electric kitchen.
If the internal wiring also needs much work, it threatens to be almost as invasive as a gut renovation. Then, I ponder what other work we'd want to piggyback on it. But then it all sounds too much for life and budgets, so we procrastinate...
Yep, when I was in the bay area, we had a gas furnace that was built in week 53 of the year before the 78% efficiency standard took effect. Our plan was to put in a heatpump to replace it when it stopped working and get A/C to manage (at least) the heatwaves, but it kept going, so you know. That house was built in 1907 and had an unfinished basement for the original footprint and a generous crawl space for the addition --- wiring would have been pretty simple, but it would still be a lot of investment to replace something that was working ... of course a heat pump system would be way more than replacing like for like.
Were you there for the earthquake in 2001? I was. I still find it surprising there hasn't been another large quake in Seattle since then. Pretty fortunate.
No, I moved in 2018; long enough to complain about all the people moving here even though I did the same thing ;) I did get to experience the viaduct, and did the tunnel / viaduct ride before the grand opening of the 99 tunnel and the demolishing of the viaduct; so I've got some street cred?
I think the area got off pretty light from the 2001 quake and the pace of retrofits has been too slow, but has had fortunate timing so I think things won't be too bad for the next quake, depending on exactly where it hits.
Yes, our climate rarely drops below freezing, so the heatpump is a good fit. My house has little shade, so a/c in the summer is very nice.
I would have a separate unit for the basement and the first floor though; we do have zoning dampers, but it's not very effective and the basement gets too cold.
Propane deliveries are expensive, if starting from scratch, I might have wired for electric clothes drying and water heating. And I would have probably gone with owned tanks instead of the current system where the delivery company owns the tanks. Electricity prices doubled in the last 5 years, but propane may have gone up more.
At the plastics plant I worked at in the 2010's, they had seismic emergency valves for the natural gas. At the time, I thought they were such a pain, as the vibration caused by a semi-trailer bumping a warehouse dock could cause them to shut off. (But it only took a screwdriver and 2 minutes to reset the valve.)
Now I'm thinking such valves are a good measure. I have no idea if they could work in such a major quake, though - for example, if the gas line fractured farther back from the seismic cutoff valve?
The study doesn't appear to be blind (not sure how you can do a blind cooking test). Also, The panellists were satisfied with cooking when they could control the heat as desired suggests inexperience with electric is a part of preference (as a personal anecdote, it took me a few months to get used to an electric stove in a new house after a lifetime of cooking on gas). This is also over a decade old. There have been some advancements in electric cookery since.
Sure, but it imposes its own limitations as the previous poster pointed out. There is no 1:1 swap-out for cooking that doesn't require either changing out your cookware or settling for a frustrating and slow cooking experience.
Also (this is a US perspective - perhaps Japan's labor costs are different?), running new heavy duty (240v, high-amperage) power cabling from the main breaker box to your kitchen is another huge cost barrier to electrification - this could easily cost many thousands of dollars. Which is why even places like California, which are happy to add costly burdens to homeowners in the name of "green," are only trying to push electrification in new builds.
It's true though that in a new build, if you have a roof chock full of solar panels and a big battery, getting a heat pump furnace, induction cooking, and all the rest of the electric appliances is super economical and awesome.
Japan has a very different real estate market. Homes are typically built to order, you buy it on a 35 year loan and then live it until you die, then the next person buys the land, tears the house down and builds their own dream home to order. So houses depreciate like cars. Land only gains value in specific downtown areas since the country is depopulating.
It's common to do a "full renovation" where the house is torn down to the frame and the rooms rebuilt. Instead of people DIY maintaining their house (they're too busy with work or whatever), they'll just do one of these after 10-20 years to modernize it. When you do this it's easy to have it converted to all-electric at the same time.
For the 180 m2 (1900 sq ft) house we bought used, the full renovation cost us $120k. This included literally ripping everything out down to the base concrete walls, re-arranging rooms, and re-building everything - walls, floors, ceilings, kitchen, all exterior/roofing, all plumbing/fixtures including installing a heat pump water heater, electrical including lights and an induction stove, cat 6a, tearing out the old rock garden, etc etc etc.
That is super cool. Unimaginable budget from a US perspective. I think in California I could struggle to stay under that $120k budget on just one kitchen renovation, and I don't mean a luxury kitchen with Viking appliances. Just the normal Home Depot grade stuff. If you added a single bathroom to the invoice there's no way it would stay under.
We agree. New buildings can be designed and built with induction stoves without destroying precious Japanese cooking culture, just as gas (and wood for that matter) has been replaced elsewhere. And medium term Japan does not lack the resources to convert legacy buildings, either.
I had an issue when I first got induction where I'd warp my pans because I turned the stove up to max and the metal would get so hot so fast the bottom of the pan would bend.
It’s just the price of living on the Pacific ring of fire. What are you going do give up modern living in a modern country and live in tents, it is the price to pay living on or near tectonic plates, as a resident who has lived several 6.0-7.0 magnitude quakes (California) they are much easier to live through than living in hurricane or tornado alley or living in places where there is a deep freeze every other year, although in Japan, you can get the trifecta, a earthquake, Cyclone (in the south) and a deep freeze in the north Hokkaido.
Japan is a beautiful modern country and they have gotten through worse and they will get through this too.
I will admit in recent times the area between the Philippines north to the Kamchatka Peninsula is one most active areas on the planet at some point a 9.0 earthquake will happen in a major populated area on land but something that large usually happens once every 15 to 326 years.
The largest earthquake in California was 7.9, second largest 7.8 in San Francisco, the largest earthquake on west coast of North America 9.0 was Vancouver island in 1700.
And compressed flammable gas canisters, which are sadly common all over Asia. If they leak due to structural compromise, e.g. being squashed by falling concrete, there isn't really a shutoff valve you can use.
Yeah it's crazy to me, especially in earthquake-prone places like Japan or California.
I bought a house here in Japan last year and replaced the gas with all-electric due to concerns of not only leaks and disasters but also just in day-to-day use gas isn't good for indoor air quality.
Modern ones are well done, but old chimney based ones are a notorious problem.
Cooking is really the only thing where gas has real (e.g., not cost) advantages. Nobody says “this hot water just doesn’t feel right, I like it boiled by dragon’s breath”.
But a steak burned with gas is different than one burned with hot electric.
If you have the space/configuration for it, a really nice setup is an induction stove in the house, and then a gas-powered BBQ, so then you can cook outside for things that really call for gas. (Without any effect on your indoor air quality.)
Replicating the power density of a gas pipe requires far more than 110v ac. The future might wonder why we accepted the danger of 5,000v power lines running through food courts just to avoid using gas burners.
You wouldn't multiply the volts, you'd multiply the amps, by using a separate sub-breaker for each shop, which you're doing anyway since you want to meter them separately.
This is already the norm in lots of Europe. It's not some weird new thing. In Sweden, no mall food courts have natural gas hookups, it's all three-phase electrical appliances. It's been like this forever (since Sweden has craploads of hydro and nuclear and zero gas).
We use 400V in Europe (in the most modern infrastructure, probably since the early 2000s) and have roughly 1.7x the power of gas for cooking. Gas measures at around 4.5kW and the modern induction stoves are at 7.5kW (old "ceran" electric cooking fields are 3.5kW)
I agree there's a huge amount of energy that would need to go into a commercial kitchen to replace gas, and I also agree its probably a bit unfeasible at a lot of locations with current technology to do it at any reasonable scale and have it be economically efficient.
However, you're not really being honest by suggesting things have to either be 110VAC or 5,000V. Even residentially, an electric range isn't often going to be operating at 110VAC aide from some portable single burner things, you'll likely see them operate at 208V or 240V. And when it comes to commerical equipment it'll likely be three-phase, so its not like you need a single massive conductor running thousands of volts to power it. For something like a shopping mall, you're already likely to have some pretty massive electrical infrastructure feeding the facility running at something like 13.8kV. At that step down point, do a few big 480Y three-phase runs over towards the food court, then do 208Y three-phase to the ranges.
To be fair though, I'm mostly speaking from a US-grid mindset here. I don't really know the specifics about what would be done in Japan, but I imagine it would be somewhat similar. I'm also not necessarily arguing they should do it, but its not as impossible or ridiculous as you're making it seem.
Gas was the most efficient way to produce electricity for its time. I agree money should of been piped in to infrastructure upgrades when the ability came yet still.
About 40% of the electricity coming to my house from the grid is from renewable sources, and I live in a state where if it was ranked against countries around the world would be the 3rd biggest natural gas producer.
Electrical is inadequate power delivery-wise and requires completely different cookware to the point that it's a different cuisine.
For example to replicate a gas burner you have to have above 15KW continious power. Good luck wiring that into your apartment, or feeding this with local solar. Or even finding an induction stovetop that won't melt its insides in a year or two at a measly 5KW.
Gas has more raw power but it's extremely inefficient because most of it just escapes into the room, whereas with induction it all goes into the cookware. Our induction stove boils water way faster than our gas one did, and the gas one on full blast melted and ruined the handle on the pot since so much of the heat escapes around the sides.
Agreed. My current electric cooktop boils water faster than any gas cooktop I've ever had, and it isn't even induction. It produces so much less excess heat into the kitchen too. You can't stop the heat instantly like you can with gas, but in practice that has been a complete non-issue. Definitely my favorite cooktop.
https://www.impulselabs.com/ achieves this by storing energy in a battery. 120V15A in to charge, 10kW out for short durations. I don't have one, but it's an interesting concept.
That said, I don't know what's better, a massive lithium battery in the kitchen that can be set into thermal runaway, or a gas line.
But also, most Japanese styles of cooking doesn't need those levels of power anyway. 4-5kW induction hobs running on a proper 240V outlet or whatever the Japanese industrial equivalent is are usually plenty for most professional cooking.
I like how the video shows that you can detach the knob to clean the now flat surface ... instead of just putting the knobs somewhere other than the flat surface where food is likely to spill.
If you're in an American home, you typically have one of the following 4 setups for a stove: (A) 36" range (B) 30" range (C) 36" countertop cutout (D) 30" countertop cutout. That's about >95% of US homes.
This company appears to be catering to markets (C) and (D), and would be a drop-in replacement for whatever other stovetop they currently have. Most likely it can be a DIY self-install with the exception of capping a prior gas line.
If you require the user to cut new holes in their fancy granite for your custom knobs, they lose the option of going back if they don't like it.
There are some extremely-high end cooktops (e.g. Gaggenau) do require the additional cutouts for controls, but they have already proven their brand with high-end users so they can pull that off. A startup can't.
I don't think anybody wants to cut a separate hole in their countertop for controls when everyone already has one big rectangular hole where a cooktop goes.
Something doesn’t make sense here because an electric kettle operating at 120v at less than 10 amps will boil water much faster than the large burner on my stove.
That's kind of a special case, one couldn't pick a situation more tuned to the strengths of electric. The big burner on the stove heats the air up a ton, including a huge amount of heat going around the pot, straight up around the edges. (Add more inefficiency if the pot is uncovered). Whereas the electric element in the kettle is inside there conducting almost all its heat into the water and the insulated kettle is great at keeping the heat in (my kettle doesn't really get all that hot on the outside).
Stir-frying in a wok, for instance, will not be nearly as lopsided a win, but it will still be more efficient.
Every test done comparing residential gas vs induction burners has shown induction burners heat up pots and pans faster than gas.
Induction puts ~98% of the energy right into your pan. (Based on how losses are measured, some say 90%, whatever, it is way more than 50%!)
> Electrical is inadequate power delivery-wise and requires completely different cookware to the point that it's a different cuisine.
There are Chinese induction wok cooktops that have a curved bottom so a wok fits in and can be heated up all around. Sadly the ones sold here in the states are just 120v, really wish I could get my kitchen stove equipped with one of those running at full power. Though honestly even 240v is limiting.
Most Japanese household stoves top out at 5kW per burner. IH stoves are limited to 3kW per burner for 5.8kW combined by radio regulations. 15kW is a figure for combined output or for restaurant burners.
It's apparently not great but not substantially worse either, and it's not like 5kW output of gas stoves are plenty for serious cooking in the first place so it's okay.
If I turn my old gorenje all out on four burners it'll output the likes of maybe 30kW give or take. The largest burner is I think about 15KW on full throttle and that does only acceptable wok or very smoky steak on cast iron ribbed pan.
For a couple of years I had nothing but a 3.7kW inductions while I lived elsewhere. Two of them melted and warped from the heat to the point of breaking the top glass and forget about wok or steaks.
If all you cook is ramen or oatmeal, induction is fine, yes.
> If I turn my old gorenje all out on four burners it'll output the likes of maybe 30kW give or take. The largest burner is I think about 15KW on full throttle and that does only acceptable wok or very smoky steak on cast iron ribbed pan.
I have an American made dirt cheap entry level induction range. It is nearly a decade old. It gets used for wok cooking almost daily. During holidays I run all 4 burners non stop for hours on end.
Plenty of commercial kitchens are switching to induction as well, it dramatically reduces ventilation costs, and it provides better temperature control. For smaller kitchens, or when a lower cost build out is needed, induction is a huge win.
The technology is reliable, even if you unfortunately got stuck with bad implementations in the past.
The largest burner has an output of 3.5 kW (12K BTU).
Did a general pass before sending my previous comment anyhow, found much the same across the board. What you say reliably checks out with the unit corrected to BTU on the gas side, but not otherwise.
Are you sure you're not mixing BTU and watts?
> If all you cook is ramen or oatmeal, induction is fine, yes.
No, I cook full on meals. Stews, soups, what have you. Power never even remotely came up as a concern. Quite the contrary in fact.
I indeed never used a wok or cooked any steaks though, and probably never will either, so I can't say much about that stuff.
What I have is from 2008 or so, I can't even find the exact model. I guess it's now politically incorrect to even list it.
Plus side: works as new, even the original thermal pair shutoffs were never swapped and that's basically the only thing that fails in them.
Soups i can see. Stews.. unless we completely misunderstand each other they're better done in the stove, inside. Not to mention baking some bread. With which an induction top will not help either. To be honest, baking and stewing imo depend more on thermal mass that brings very stable temperature, for which even gas ovens are meh, you're better off with true wood-fueled brick stove, or the result is not even close. One can maybe make an electrically-heated brick stove, but for some reason I haven't seen one. Maybe it's because it'll be slow as hell to heat up. And no authentic crunchy charcoal in your fresh pizza.
Breville makes a small electric pizza oven that's actually quite good - not quite as hot as gas but reaches 750F in about 20 minutes, and then with time to reheat if you've got your prep done you can pump out a 12-inch pizza every 5 minutes.
> What I have is from 2008 or so, I can't even find the exact model. I guess it's now politically incorrect to even list it.
I did check for older models as well. Even dug up some stove catalogues from the 70s and 80s to be extra sure. I just genuinely cannot confirm your numbers. I'm about as confident in my unit confusion hypothesis as I can reasonably be.
I'm sure you had the experiences you're recounting, but as far as the numbers go, they do not seem to explain them. Especially since these are the burner ratings, before the heat transfer losses.
If I do accept the unit confusion on your behalf:
15K BTU (your biggest gas burner) -> 55% efficiency (optimistic) -> 8250 BTU reaching the pan
3.6 kW (cheap plug-in induction stove) -> 80% efficiency (pessimistic) -> 10045 BTU reaching the pan
That's more like it, although that is a commercial-use unit. Maybe you have something particularly beefy?
If you do get the chance to figure out the exact model you have at home, please do let me know here. Won't blame you if you don't though, I appreciate this is a chore.
The second floor of the mall exploded for some reason, and the roof collapse is secondary to that. It seems to have happened after the earthquake and subsequent evacuation. There are videos of people leaving the mall:
And ironically in their press release for the re-open they said they re-built it with more disaster-proofing with the knowledge from the previous disaster...
The emerging thing is that the earthquake caused a gas leak which later caused an explosion. Pipes will just go out of alignment during an earthquake, there isn’t a ton you can do to prevent that wholly.
My question is why upon calling in a gas leak, the mall was not immediately evacuated and cordoned off.
I've always wondered why automatic earthquake shutoff valves weren't a requirement. Apparently they're required in some areas of the US by surprisingly recent code (2013 in Los Angeles is what I'm seeing?) but I've never heard of it in Japan. Maybe this incident will be a regulatory turning point.
I'm living in the South of Japan, it was a 4 intensity where I am (about 90km) from the epicenter. Luckily there was only some light shaking and nothing fell over here.
Kumamoto is barely finished rebuilding from the last quake, you can still see cracks in structures as you drive down the road. This is really horrible; not to mention the city is already beginning to depopulate as the youth move north to Fukuoka.
It's my understanding that small to medium sized cities (and rural areas) depopulating is going on now throughout almost all of Japan. One of the things that really surprised me recently is how low the cost of real estate is for an older, normal middle class home in some sparsely populated areas of Japan.
Apparently the declining population and younger people not wanting to live in their parents' rural countryside home is having a significant effect on property values.
I wouldn't let this get in the way of going there though. Kumamoto is a very nice prefecture to see. They will rebuild (again) and it'll continue to be a great place.
I hope everyone is safe in Kumamoto.
In my area, we have been repeatedly warned that a major earthquake called the Nankai Trough is likely to occur in the last few years or decades, so I am very scared of big earthquakes happening in other areas as well.
To be a bit more precise, the Nankai ("South Sea") Trough is a tectonic subduction zone to the south of Japan, roughly the entire length from Izu to Kyushu:
I've heard there's been a lot of redevelopment in Nagoya, in preparation for a possible future earthquake from the Nankai Trough.
Exactly one month ago, there was almost consecutive daily earthquakes in Kantō region. Always a good reminder the whole country lies on seismically active fault lines.
I was camping/bike packing in Kyushu when this happened! I think I was in Miyazaki on the 14th when we felt the first shock. It was the first earthquake I’d experienced. The multi-story hotel we stayed at felt like it was gyrating in a circular fashion.
Then my pal and I were camping by the Utagenka Bridge, east of Kumamoto for the main shock!
Fukuoka here (about 100km from Kumamoto) and definitely felt it, so it must have been a real big one in Kumamoto itself.
My friend was driving home from work closer to Miyazaki and didn't feel the quake, but had huge hailstones hitting his car. There's a rapture going on or something
Many emergency shelters have not had their building safety confirmed so parking lots are opened to allow people to sleep in their cars, as they are warned to avoid "economy-class syndrome" from sleeping in a tight space. https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10015189161000
Found a few online webcams, but I'm not really sure I saw the earthquake. People didn't even seem to stop on the webcam I was watching. Lots of cars on the bridge afterwards though while before it there were much less, idk
Given it’s barely even felt outside of Kyushu (JMA 3, the dark blue dots, is "dishes may rattle, some people walking outside notice") that seems unlikely.
Every once in a while (not every year) there are minor earthquakes you can feel in some parts of SK, like Busan: the ground tremors a bit, some shelves wobble... that's the most I've ever noticed.
One thing I've noticed is that people in Fukuoka have stayed calm. I haven't seen panic buying of food or emergency supplies despite being so close to the disaster area.
Not like earthquakes are unheard of in Taiwan or South Korea either.
Buildings are going to be more expensive (base isolation and an extra commie blocks worth of reinforced concrete), but given how expensive fab equipment is, that might not even matter all that much.
Earthquake isolation can be pretty amazing. Here’s a video of a data center during the big 2011 quake. The camera is attached to the outer wall so the point of reference makes the wrong side look like it’s shaking, but you can see the people walking without difficulty during some pretty heavy shaking. A fab will have even better stuff.
Wow, it's incredible how far civil engineering has come in the past 600 years. To think that we used to have bridges collapse all the time, and buildings crack and collapse, and now we have buildings that can withstand a whole earthquake.
“A whole earthquake” is a very funny way to phrase it when it comes to Japan. That building has withstood tens of smaller ones before that big one, they’re just _incredibly_ common here.
There's plenty of old buildings here that are not built up to the latest standards; increasing exponentially the further you get from the core of a big city.
Japan is _very good_ at tearing down old buildings and building better in their place; but it doesn't mean that there are zero old buildings around.
They could have been further away from the epicenter of the previous ones, or the previous ones weren't strong enough to cause that specific structure to collapse, the previous ones might have weakened the structure and this one brought it down, a million different things factor into this.
Earthquakes aren't a perfectly repeatable occurrences you can run a regression test against.
Meanwhile here an 80 year old, completely unremarkable house is likely to get declared "historic" and you as the owner can't even change the windows without permission. Tearing it down would be virtually impossible.
Some of those old houses seem to burn mysteriously. Bad wiring, I suppose.
Then there was the developer who tore down a couple of houses over a weekend before the historical commission had a chance to meet and formally confer historic status on the rotting, worn out properties.
Like half of the buildings are non-resistant since they are old and made of wood. IIRC only buildings built after 1991 are guaranteed to be earthquake resistant.
Yes, but the situation got a lot better and a lot worse...
Sadly there has been a bunch of pretty devastating earthquakes in recent years.
In particular in Kumamoto the one in 2016 (magnitude 6.5) was huge and many of the houses built at lower standard or not in great shape anymore got partially or totally wrecked. Right now the house that are left are relatively well built.
The bad news is, that still doesn't help as the cumulative damage can still bring them down, and they're still subject to landslides, water damage, and other second order disastrous events.
For a long time "live with earthquakes and build accordingly" meant "make it easy to rebuild", not "engineer the structures to withstand the earthquakes".
The regulations got hardened in 1991. Obviously there has been earthquakes forever, but the buildings were not built to withstand them. That's one of the reasons why Japanese do not buy old homes: they are not earthquake proof.
One of the reasons Japan uses wood for construction is that combined with their traditional building techniques it results in earthquake resistant buildings.
Hope everybody is staying safe in Japan but this will not be the last earthquake, there are many experts pointing this as the beginning with even bigger magnitude coming up.
I'd strongly caution against a Japan trip right now.
Why does this earthquake, of similar magnitude, get so much more attention compared to the recent Venezuelan earthquake last month that was 100x more devastating? There was no commentary on HN about it.
The few socialist papers that I've read make the claim that there is nothing to pay attention to, and that the event is "American Propaganda" to try and make Venezuela look weak. The government attempts to control and suppress videos of the event.
Following the event involves trying to see past the state's narrative and take in anything that trickles through. Combine this with the fact that it's likely far easier for most HN readers to send aid to, or know someone in, a friendly nation like Japan. You get the recipe for coverage of Venezuela being muted by comparison.
I live in an earthquake prone area and thought Japan was cutting edge in earthquake protection. Beyond the obvious concern for other human beings, I am interested in why there was so much damage from what I would have thought was still a relatively manageable size earthquake for them. I am here trying to learn a lesson that I would not expect to learn from Venezuelan infrastructure and earthquake response.
It is also the timing of building booms. Problems being exposed have triggered regulations and enforcement in Venezuela but that is relatively recent and much inventory was built decades before.
The speed of videos coming out was a little slower so it lost the HN attention span - but it was definitely a hot topic in many other news places - Reddit, X, etc...
Haven't seen anything on the Tsunami global warning list so hopefully it's okay. Earthquake looks centered on land which (to my unofficial understanding) means low risk of Tsunami but of course higher chance of direct damage
HN is exaggerating to feel close to the action. It's childish.
There is a trench off of Tokyo that is likely to rupture in our lifetimes, and people who have other people to check on don't care about HN's disaster fantasies.
On top of that, one of the toughest part could be the extent of the power outage.
It's reported at around 46000 homes, the region has many elders and the outage will impact air conditionners, but also medical equipment they keep at home and supporting appliances.
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/55a0a3ebb9d0087ae8492ce85c...
> TSMC, Sony, Fujifilm chips, imagers, materials plants evacuated
This makes me think, is it wise to build these places in regions with known earthquake trends.
Almost no earthquakes in Korea and Samsung fabs are also located in the most safe area within Korea.
Japan itself is involved with a lot of the R&D, the factories are there because of that and because of major buyers also being there. It’s not like we’re going to evacuate the hundred million plus of Japan.
It's a major reason why Arizona was selected for a US site.
This was my first real earthquake since moving to Kyushu. After it stopped I looked it up, and the first place to post the epicenter and shindo was NERV's twitter...which is named after the org from the anime and has an anime screenshot as its banner (https://x.com/EN_NERV). Apparently it's a real disaster information service, though.
It's been mentioned before but maybe interesting to some (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38835419).
It started as a Twitter account during the Tohoku 2011 earthquake, and then subsequently became a “real” service; the IP owners for the Eva agreed to let them use it going forward.
Get the app
The Nerv app is quite good. It usually gives real-time alerts faster than the official sources.
You can even have the weird experience of being notified of an earthquake, watching the shockwave move outward from the epicenter, and feeling it as it passes.
You can keep an eye on this english tracker in the browser too https://earthquakesjapan.com
Somewhat unrelated but how did you find the process of moving to Japan (assuming you emigrated there)
In parts of Kumamoto Prefecture, it registered 7 on the Japanese shindo (seismic intensity) scale, which reflects the amount of ground shaking at a particular location. The shindo is a better indicator of the likely amount of damage than the magnitude is. A shindo of 7 is extremely strong [1].
Ten minutes ago (at around 17:15 p.m. Japan time), NHK was reporting that there were many emergency calls coming in from Uki City, where shindo 7 was recorded, but that the extent of the damage or injuries was not yet known.
There have also been many aftershocks, including some strong ones, and tsunami warnings.
[1] https://www.jma.go.jp/jma/en/Activities/jishintsunami/jishin...
NHK TV is showing extensive damage including fallen smokestacks at Nippon Paper Factory facility, bridge road separation, fallen bridge lane, road cracks, fire, water coming out of drainage etc. It was a huge earthquake and will take some time to assess the damage.
I at least can see English translated version of NHK here https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live_tv/
There is a collapsed roof of a shopping centre as well in Kumamoto. The Aeon Mall.
The mall had a (most likely gas) explosion, and there are many dead being found inside https://newsdig.tbs.co.jp/articles/-/2833412?display=1
> The mall had a (most likely gas) explosion
If the internet searches are to be believed, that is indeed sadly likely to be the cause.
The internet suggests the explosion happened on the second floor of the mall where a large food court is located.
A hundred years from now people are going to be absolutely flabbergasted how we just piped gas everywhere all the time.
Electricity allows for so many more automatic safeguards.
> Electricity allows for so many more automatic safeguards.
Since the mid-2000s there has actually been a push by Japanese utility companies for adoption of what they call "all-electric" オール電化.
Adoption has been reasonably good with new-builds because they can also have solar panels. But adoption in older properties has been slower.
First in general, electricity in Japan has tended to be more expensive than gas.
Second, a large Part of the slow adoption comes from cooking related inertia.
A lot of traditional (and therefore very common) Japanese cookware just will not work on electric, full stop. For example, traditional donabe (clay pots).
Beyond that, for example, aluminium pans being non-ferromagnetic will not work on induction. Yes you find aluminium pans in the West with extra ferromagnetic bases attached, but that is not common in Japan.
Finally, the Japan Society of Cookery Science did commission a study[1] where they had two groups of people cook four dishes on both gas and induction. The conclusion was gas was preferred across all four.
[1]https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/cookeryscience/47/6/47_...
I’ve worked in appliance repair and have worked on induction cook tops.
I wouldn’t recommend buying one. The fancier models have a stupendous number of circuit boards in them, and obviously a lot of power electronics, as well as cooling fans. Probably buy the cheapest model with the least number of features that you can bear the sight of, style matters in a kitchen, if you have to buy one at all.
I’ve simplified by cooking to an electric pressure cooker, which also functions as a slow cooker and pot for frying, an air fried, and a microwave. No kettle, no pots or pans, no cooktop, no oven. An oven would be useful I suppose if I were cooking for more people. The pressure cooker plus air frier is a faster and more convenient substitute for roasting meat.
As they become more common and age, I predict induction cooktops will have a much higher failure rate than dumb rheostat controlled resistive element cooktops. Everything has a much higher failure rate than dumb resistive element cooktops. And they are much easier to repair with very few parts: a resistive element and a rheostat.
I’ve don’t quite a good many replacements of fully functional dumb resistive cooktops and ovens with the new version of the same model, simply because the 70 to 80 year old residence wanted something newer and shinier, even though the new model is almost identical to the 20 to 30 year old model they’re replacing.
Improper installation of induction cooktops in older kitchens with out the necessary cabinet work to correctly ventilate them is a big problem too.
Anyways, gas is a great source of energy especially for commercial and industrial cooking and heating, where electric is simply impractical due to the immense amount of power required.
At home, sure. The typical setup requires less than 10kW. Trivial.
In a food court or restaurant strip currently serviced by gas, the electricity requirement could easily exceed 1 megawatt, which means major infrastructure upgrades, and you’ll never get the rapid heat control like gas provides, which is essential in reasonable service times, along with the fact that gas cookers are infinitely simpler and have very low failure rates compared to anything electric that is put through repeated thermo cycling 16 or 24hrs a day.
Counterpoint - my dirt cheap entry level induction cooktop has been incredibly reliable. We cook intensely with it almost every day and have done so for years. Do I wish it was smarter? Sure. Is it faster to heat water than my old gas stove? Yup. Do I want even more power? Heck yeah.
Only having 1 large burner is stupid, and the 1 large burner it has could stand to be another inch or so wider.
But it has been a definite upgrade over gas. From better air quality to not heating my house up in the summer, to being faster to get pots hot.
> As they become more common and age, I predict induction cooktops will have a much higher failure rate than dumb rheostat controlled resistive element cooktops. Everything has a much higher failure rate than dumb resistive element cooktops. And they are much easier to repair with very few parts: a resistive element and a rheostat.
Agreed, resistive elements are simple, you can still find ones that are 30+ years old and working fine. Same with old gas stoves, easy to repair, dirt simple.
Induction requires fancy electronics, and modern circuit boards just don't have a long life expectancy.
“People used to cooking with gas, cook better with gas”
Induction offers the benefits of not emitting noxious fumes, the dangers of transporting gas over long distances in bulk, the fire hazards inside the home, and dependency on single source energy.
Electricity, via induction cooktops, is often faster, more energy efficient, safer for everyone, and doesn’t depend on whatever regime or state wants to play games with the supply. Where I live, electricity is often sold at negative rates for most of the day and that electricity is now going into batteries at a massive scale. It seems unlikely gas has any future, outside of niche cooking or industrial/commercial uses.
> Induction offers the benefits of not emitting noxious fumes,
I don’t understanding this criticism.
Who in their right mind ie cooking inside at all without an externally ventilated exhaust fan? The moisture control issue leading to mould growth will destroy your health faster than hoofing nat gas combustion products.
I believe the nat gas combustion product health risks for home and commercial cooking are wildly overblown. Commercial kitchens are required to have certain ventilation requirements, as are all new home builds, at least in any jurisdiction anyone would want to live in.
> electricity is often sold at negative rates for most of the day and that electricity
Is it? Is it though? What evidence is there?
Negative rates may apply to the wholesale price, but I’m not aware of anywhere that passes that on to the residential retail customer.
In Australia, electricity retailers are require to offer a plan that has a 3 hour free period, which is usually in the middle of the day when everyone is at work, and the plans non-free-period rates are worse, as well as the daily supply charge being higher. Thereby resulting, in all likelihood, in people on those plans likely ending up paying the same or more, if they’re not obsessively fussing over their electricity usage.
What are you going to do? Set your induction cook top to fry your eggs for the next morning at 1pm? How’s that supposed to work? Cook your roast chicken in the tumble dryer, because your oven doesn’t have a 12hr delay timer? Admittedly some newer ovens do, because leaving a raw chicken at room temperature in the oven for hours on end is a great idea.
Like everything the Australian Labor government touches, it’s a sham. Including the battery subsidy, which just moves wealth from everyone else (taxpayers), but especially poor people, to already relatively wealthy home owners. All the while alleviating government and energy infrastructure industries of the responsibility of making investments they’ll have to maintain.
Not to mention Australia already has electricity prices that are ridiculously high, so even if you benefit from the three-for-free plan, you’re still worse off than you were five years ago.
And with the propensity of batteries to spontaneously combust and be nearly impossible to extinguish, EV and home battery owners, scooters and ebiked too, are soaking up resources of fire departments.
See StacheD on YouTube for an in exhaustible stream of battery fire nightmares.
Ah, the good old unintended consequences of poorly thought out government policy. Which are always poorly thought out, because a very few number of Australian politicians have ever had to worry about energy prices, because they are nothing but glorified career dole-bludgers.
Jacinta Allan’s, the recent former Premier of the once great state of Victoria, industry experience extended to a brief period as a grocery bagger before her and her drunken uni mates messed around with an Ouija board and some other gray magic and accidentally summoned demons who took their souls and parasitised their bodies.
Or did they summon the demons on purpose? Probably, comrades.
Nyet Zero, as Topher Field is fond of saying.
"Who in their right mind ie cooking inside at all without an externally ventilated exhaust fan?"
Anyone in an older gas-served apartment building has the potential to not have direct external ventilation.
I see some places in the Japanese countryside where homeowners get propane tanks delivered to them for cooking? I believe in an earthquake prone country, this is safer than having natural gas piped to their homes?
The problem I think is that Japanese culture values hot baths daily. Heating water for the bath using electricity is still too costly.
Propane tanks strapped to your house is common even in cities since it's cheaper to install (but then costs more per cubic meter).
The downside to propane tanks is they become fireworks if a neighbor has a fire which heats them up.
In Japan anyone who goes all-electric these days is getting a heat pump water heater ("eco-cute") by default, resistive electric heating doesn't really exist out of small plugin units like kotatsu and radiant heaters.
If you have a link to an "eco-cute" water heater, I would like to learn more. Thanks.
All the big Japanese makes have them. They basically look like a water tank with the outside portion of a mini split air conditioner hooked up next to them.
With my power company in Japan, by going "all-electric" (having an eco-cute and induction stove), I qualify for a rate plan where I can trade off solar power peak hours (half price) for the duck curve hours (double price), so I have my water heating only running during cheap hours and cut down on air conditioning during the expensive hours.
Ours is from Mitsubishi and is just the builder-grade one from our fix-rate renovation company. It will connect to the wifi so you can start a bath from an app on your phone on your way home from work. There's also an intercom between the bath and the kitchen so mom can tell the kids to get out of the bath, dinner is done. Traditional Japanese values.
Mitsubishi https://www.mitsubishielectric.co.jp/home/ecocute/
Panasonic https://sumai.panasonic.jp/hp/
Daikin https://www.ac.daikin.co.jp/sumai/alldenka/ecocute/structure
Corona https://www.corona.co.jp/eco/
Noritz https://www.noritz.co.jp/product/kyutou_bath/ecocute/
btw, "eco-cute" is a pun on cute and kyuto(給湯, "supply hotwater")
The bath intercom always cracks me up. I’m sure it makes sense in bigger, maybe multi-level houses; but I can’t imagine myself ever using it in my 2LDK.
I thought so to until I repurposed some old Cisco phones - the difference between talking and yelling is huge.
Hey thanks. I'll be reading these in-depth. I am fascinated by Japanese appliance tech-wizardry. LOL about the mom using the intercom to get the kids out of the bath.
From a quick look, these are very similar to the heat pump water heaters that are starting to become common in the SF Bay Area (it looks like gas water heaters will be banned in the next few years, so people are hopping on the band wagon).
At a glance the only difference is the ones I am seeing have the heat exchangers in the body of the unit (so take the heat from the room where the tank is), whereas these "eco-cute" look like they put that outside the home.
Where I live in the US (near Seattle), there's no piped natural gas, most detatched houses have a 250-500 gallon propane tank. Seattle has piped gas, but my county never had the density to justify the expense to install distribution piping and now its disfavored.
My house has a second tank for a backup generator. We use the main tank for our stove/range, water heater, clothes dryer, and a decorative fireplace that's rarely used. Some neighbors have a propane furnace, but we've got a heatpump with resistive strips as backup heat.
> Seattle has piped gas,
This is block by block. Long ago Seattle asked home owners on each block to foot the bill to run gas. Many blocks said yes, some said no. For blocks where only 1 side was developed, the cost was higher and there was a greater chance of everyone saying no. That is what happened on the street I grew up on, when the city had asked everyone to pay for gas lines, there were so few houses on that working class block that it was cost prohibitive for everyone to pony up how much $ would have been needed.
So instead people had oil furnaces installed and now that block will at some point require serious environmental remediation. :/
It's interesting all the permutations there are out there. We have gas from PG&E. Our house has an electric clothes dryer, gas stove with dual-fuel oven, gas furnace, and gas water heater. No air-conditioning other than a portable unit for "emergency" heatwave and AQI events. Our furnace is ancient, and the winter gas bill is the painful part.
I have a long term interest in full electrification, but find the process daunting due to the interlocking set upgrades. Between insulation envelope upgrades and electrical system upgrades, there is a lot of potentially disruptive work needed to even allow permits to be issued for heat-pump HVAC and water heater or fully electric kitchen.
If the internal wiring also needs much work, it threatens to be almost as invasive as a gut renovation. Then, I ponder what other work we'd want to piggyback on it. But then it all sounds too much for life and budgets, so we procrastinate...
Yep, when I was in the bay area, we had a gas furnace that was built in week 53 of the year before the 78% efficiency standard took effect. Our plan was to put in a heatpump to replace it when it stopped working and get A/C to manage (at least) the heatwaves, but it kept going, so you know. That house was built in 1907 and had an unfinished basement for the original footprint and a generous crawl space for the addition --- wiring would have been pretty simple, but it would still be a lot of investment to replace something that was working ... of course a heat pump system would be way more than replacing like for like.
Were you there for the earthquake in 2001? I was. I still find it surprising there hasn't been another large quake in Seattle since then. Pretty fortunate.
No, I moved in 2018; long enough to complain about all the people moving here even though I did the same thing ;) I did get to experience the viaduct, and did the tunnel / viaduct ride before the grand opening of the 99 tunnel and the demolishing of the viaduct; so I've got some street cred?
I think the area got off pretty light from the 2001 quake and the pace of retrofits has been too slow, but has had fortunate timing so I think things won't be too bad for the next quake, depending on exactly where it hits.
Wow that's interesting. If you have to do it all over again, would you still get the heatpump?
Yes, our climate rarely drops below freezing, so the heatpump is a good fit. My house has little shade, so a/c in the summer is very nice.
I would have a separate unit for the basement and the first floor though; we do have zoning dampers, but it's not very effective and the basement gets too cold.
Propane deliveries are expensive, if starting from scratch, I might have wired for electric clothes drying and water heating. And I would have probably gone with owned tanks instead of the current system where the delivery company owns the tanks. Electricity prices doubled in the last 5 years, but propane may have gone up more.
seattle is basically the ideal location for a heatpump.
At the plastics plant I worked at in the 2010's, they had seismic emergency valves for the natural gas. At the time, I thought they were such a pain, as the vibration caused by a semi-trailer bumping a warehouse dock could cause them to shut off. (But it only took a screwdriver and 2 minutes to reset the valve.)
Now I'm thinking such valves are a good measure. I have no idea if they could work in such a major quake, though - for example, if the gas line fractured farther back from the seismic cutoff valve?
odd not to mention resistance heating in what otherwise seems like a thorough review of the question
The study doesn't appear to be blind (not sure how you can do a blind cooking test). Also, The panellists were satisfied with cooking when they could control the heat as desired suggests inexperience with electric is a part of preference (as a personal anecdote, it took me a few months to get used to an electric stove in a new house after a lifetime of cooking on gas). This is also over a decade old. There have been some advancements in electric cookery since.
If you aren't using induction, it's also slow, slow to heat, slow to cool.
Yes you can get used to turning the heat up 5 minutes before you want hot. A down 5 minutes before your food is done. But it's a pain.
Induction is the trick. It's nearly as fast as gas.
Sure, but it imposes its own limitations as the previous poster pointed out. There is no 1:1 swap-out for cooking that doesn't require either changing out your cookware or settling for a frustrating and slow cooking experience.
Also (this is a US perspective - perhaps Japan's labor costs are different?), running new heavy duty (240v, high-amperage) power cabling from the main breaker box to your kitchen is another huge cost barrier to electrification - this could easily cost many thousands of dollars. Which is why even places like California, which are happy to add costly burdens to homeowners in the name of "green," are only trying to push electrification in new builds.
It's true though that in a new build, if you have a roof chock full of solar panels and a big battery, getting a heat pump furnace, induction cooking, and all the rest of the electric appliances is super economical and awesome.
Japan has a very different real estate market. Homes are typically built to order, you buy it on a 35 year loan and then live it until you die, then the next person buys the land, tears the house down and builds their own dream home to order. So houses depreciate like cars. Land only gains value in specific downtown areas since the country is depopulating.
It's common to do a "full renovation" where the house is torn down to the frame and the rooms rebuilt. Instead of people DIY maintaining their house (they're too busy with work or whatever), they'll just do one of these after 10-20 years to modernize it. When you do this it's easy to have it converted to all-electric at the same time.
For the 180 m2 (1900 sq ft) house we bought used, the full renovation cost us $120k. This included literally ripping everything out down to the base concrete walls, re-arranging rooms, and re-building everything - walls, floors, ceilings, kitchen, all exterior/roofing, all plumbing/fixtures including installing a heat pump water heater, electrical including lights and an induction stove, cat 6a, tearing out the old rock garden, etc etc etc.
That is super cool. Unimaginable budget from a US perspective. I think in California I could struggle to stay under that $120k budget on just one kitchen renovation, and I don't mean a luxury kitchen with Viking appliances. Just the normal Home Depot grade stuff. If you added a single bathroom to the invoice there's no way it would stay under.
We agree. New buildings can be designed and built with induction stoves without destroying precious Japanese cooking culture, just as gas (and wood for that matter) has been replaced elsewhere. And medium term Japan does not lack the resources to convert legacy buildings, either.
Induction is faster than gas.
I had an issue when I first got induction where I'd warp my pans because I turned the stove up to max and the metal would get so hot so fast the bottom of the pan would bend.
Oops. Lesson learned.
Yup. I did the exact same thing, except I split a cast iron pan, and shattered the induction cooktop.
It’s just the price of living on the Pacific ring of fire. What are you going do give up modern living in a modern country and live in tents, it is the price to pay living on or near tectonic plates, as a resident who has lived several 6.0-7.0 magnitude quakes (California) they are much easier to live through than living in hurricane or tornado alley or living in places where there is a deep freeze every other year, although in Japan, you can get the trifecta, a earthquake, Cyclone (in the south) and a deep freeze in the north Hokkaido.
Japan is a beautiful modern country and they have gotten through worse and they will get through this too.
I will admit in recent times the area between the Philippines north to the Kamchatka Peninsula is one most active areas on the planet at some point a 9.0 earthquake will happen in a major populated area on land but something that large usually happens once every 15 to 326 years.
The largest earthquake in California was 7.9, second largest 7.8 in San Francisco, the largest earthquake on west coast of North America 9.0 was Vancouver island in 1700.
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/official17...
Coincidentally the Japanese recorded a mild tsunami at the time on their side of the Pacific.
Hurricanes and tornadoes are more immediate threats along with a heat wave or a cold snap.
And compressed flammable gas canisters, which are sadly common all over Asia. If they leak due to structural compromise, e.g. being squashed by falling concrete, there isn't really a shutoff valve you can use.
Yeah it's crazy to me, especially in earthquake-prone places like Japan or California.
I bought a house here in Japan last year and replaced the gas with all-electric due to concerns of not only leaks and disasters but also just in day-to-day use gas isn't good for indoor air quality.
The one place gas makes sense is heating in cold climates because furnaces are externally vented.
Modern ones are well done, but old chimney based ones are a notorious problem.
Cooking is really the only thing where gas has real (e.g., not cost) advantages. Nobody says “this hot water just doesn’t feel right, I like it boiled by dragon’s breath”.
But a steak burned with gas is different than one burned with hot electric.
If you have the space/configuration for it, a really nice setup is an induction stove in the house, and then a gas-powered BBQ, so then you can cook outside for things that really call for gas. (Without any effect on your indoor air quality.)
Replicating the power density of a gas pipe requires far more than 110v ac. The future might wonder why we accepted the danger of 5,000v power lines running through food courts just to avoid using gas burners.
You wouldn't multiply the volts, you'd multiply the amps, by using a separate sub-breaker for each shop, which you're doing anyway since you want to meter them separately.
This is already the norm in lots of Europe. It's not some weird new thing. In Sweden, no mall food courts have natural gas hookups, it's all three-phase electrical appliances. It's been like this forever (since Sweden has craploads of hydro and nuclear and zero gas).
We use 400V in Europe (in the most modern infrastructure, probably since the early 2000s) and have roughly 1.7x the power of gas for cooking. Gas measures at around 4.5kW and the modern induction stoves are at 7.5kW (old "ceran" electric cooking fields are 3.5kW)
I agree there's a huge amount of energy that would need to go into a commercial kitchen to replace gas, and I also agree its probably a bit unfeasible at a lot of locations with current technology to do it at any reasonable scale and have it be economically efficient.
However, you're not really being honest by suggesting things have to either be 110VAC or 5,000V. Even residentially, an electric range isn't often going to be operating at 110VAC aide from some portable single burner things, you'll likely see them operate at 208V or 240V. And when it comes to commerical equipment it'll likely be three-phase, so its not like you need a single massive conductor running thousands of volts to power it. For something like a shopping mall, you're already likely to have some pretty massive electrical infrastructure feeding the facility running at something like 13.8kV. At that step down point, do a few big 480Y three-phase runs over towards the food court, then do 208Y three-phase to the ranges.
To be fair though, I'm mostly speaking from a US-grid mindset here. I don't really know the specifics about what would be done in Japan, but I imagine it would be somewhat similar. I'm also not necessarily arguing they should do it, but its not as impossible or ridiculous as you're making it seem.
haha who is cooking on 5kv?
Anyone who crosses the streams while doing high voltage line line work.
Ehh, without gas we wouldn't have electricity.
Gas was the most efficient way to produce electricity for its time. I agree money should of been piped in to infrastructure upgrades when the ability came yet still.
About 40% of the electricity coming to my house from the grid is from renewable sources, and I live in a state where if it was ranked against countries around the world would be the 3rd biggest natural gas producer.
Electrical is inadequate power delivery-wise and requires completely different cookware to the point that it's a different cuisine.
For example to replicate a gas burner you have to have above 15KW continious power. Good luck wiring that into your apartment, or feeding this with local solar. Or even finding an induction stovetop that won't melt its insides in a year or two at a measly 5KW.
Gas has more raw power but it's extremely inefficient because most of it just escapes into the room, whereas with induction it all goes into the cookware. Our induction stove boils water way faster than our gas one did, and the gas one on full blast melted and ruined the handle on the pot since so much of the heat escapes around the sides.
Technology Connections on YouTube has done videos on the topic, comparing electric to gas, showing that even old-school resistive electric is faster than gas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMMTVVJI4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUywI8YGy0Y
Agreed. My current electric cooktop boils water faster than any gas cooktop I've ever had, and it isn't even induction. It produces so much less excess heat into the kitchen too. You can't stop the heat instantly like you can with gas, but in practice that has been a complete non-issue. Definitely my favorite cooktop.
https://www.impulselabs.com/ achieves this by storing energy in a battery. 120V15A in to charge, 10kW out for short durations. I don't have one, but it's an interesting concept.
That said, I don't know what's better, a massive lithium battery in the kitchen that can be set into thermal runaway, or a gas line.
But also, most Japanese styles of cooking doesn't need those levels of power anyway. 4-5kW induction hobs running on a proper 240V outlet or whatever the Japanese industrial equivalent is are usually plenty for most professional cooking.
I like how the video shows that you can detach the knob to clean the now flat surface ... instead of just putting the knobs somewhere other than the flat surface where food is likely to spill.
This is… literally the only surface that stoves in this form factor have?
This form factor is installed by literally cutting a whole into a flat surface, nothing limits you to only one hole.
If you're in an American home, you typically have one of the following 4 setups for a stove: (A) 36" range (B) 30" range (C) 36" countertop cutout (D) 30" countertop cutout. That's about >95% of US homes.
This company appears to be catering to markets (C) and (D), and would be a drop-in replacement for whatever other stovetop they currently have. Most likely it can be a DIY self-install with the exception of capping a prior gas line.
If you require the user to cut new holes in their fancy granite for your custom knobs, they lose the option of going back if they don't like it.
There are some extremely-high end cooktops (e.g. Gaggenau) do require the additional cutouts for controls, but they have already proven their brand with high-end users so they can pull that off. A startup can't.
I don't think anybody wants to cut a separate hole in their countertop for controls when everyone already has one big rectangular hole where a cooktop goes.
I genuinely can’t tell - you’re aware that this is a standardized form factor, and they didn’t invent this just for this particular device, right?
Something doesn’t make sense here because an electric kettle operating at 120v at less than 10 amps will boil water much faster than the large burner on my stove.
That's kind of a special case, one couldn't pick a situation more tuned to the strengths of electric. The big burner on the stove heats the air up a ton, including a huge amount of heat going around the pot, straight up around the edges. (Add more inefficiency if the pot is uncovered). Whereas the electric element in the kettle is inside there conducting almost all its heat into the water and the insulated kettle is great at keeping the heat in (my kettle doesn't really get all that hot on the outside).
Stir-frying in a wok, for instance, will not be nearly as lopsided a win, but it will still be more efficient.
50% of a gas burner's power goes into the air.
Every test done comparing residential gas vs induction burners has shown induction burners heat up pots and pans faster than gas.
Induction puts ~98% of the energy right into your pan. (Based on how losses are measured, some say 90%, whatever, it is way more than 50%!)
> Electrical is inadequate power delivery-wise and requires completely different cookware to the point that it's a different cuisine.
There are Chinese induction wok cooktops that have a curved bottom so a wok fits in and can be heated up all around. Sadly the ones sold here in the states are just 120v, really wish I could get my kitchen stove equipped with one of those running at full power. Though honestly even 240v is limiting.
I can personally guarantee you that the average Japanese コンロ does not have a heat output that would require 15kW of power to match using IH.
And that’s before we get into the safety features of modern ones that bring that limit even lower.
Most Japanese household stoves top out at 5kW per burner. IH stoves are limited to 3kW per burner for 5.8kW combined by radio regulations. 15kW is a figure for combined output or for restaurant burners.
It's apparently not great but not substantially worse either, and it's not like 5kW output of gas stoves are plenty for serious cooking in the first place so it's okay.
Most heat from gas burners is wasted heating the room. Induction is vastly more efficient.
> For example to replicate a gas burner you have to have above 15KW continious power.
Where are you getting this from? 15K BTU sure, but 15K watts? Do you mean the entire stove?
If I turn my old gorenje all out on four burners it'll output the likes of maybe 30kW give or take. The largest burner is I think about 15KW on full throttle and that does only acceptable wok or very smoky steak on cast iron ribbed pan.
For a couple of years I had nothing but a 3.7kW inductions while I lived elsewhere. Two of them melted and warped from the heat to the point of breaking the top glass and forget about wok or steaks.
If all you cook is ramen or oatmeal, induction is fine, yes.
> If I turn my old gorenje all out on four burners it'll output the likes of maybe 30kW give or take. The largest burner is I think about 15KW on full throttle and that does only acceptable wok or very smoky steak on cast iron ribbed pan.
I have an American made dirt cheap entry level induction range. It is nearly a decade old. It gets used for wok cooking almost daily. During holidays I run all 4 burners non stop for hours on end.
Plenty of commercial kitchens are switching to induction as well, it dramatically reduces ventilation costs, and it provides better temperature control. For smaller kitchens, or when a lower cost build out is needed, induction is a huge win.
The technology is reliable, even if you unfortunately got stuck with bad implementations in the past.
OK, Gorenje, gas stove, wok use: https://international.gorenje.com/products/cooking-and-bakin...
The largest burner has an output of 3.5 kW (12K BTU).
Did a general pass before sending my previous comment anyhow, found much the same across the board. What you say reliably checks out with the unit corrected to BTU on the gas side, but not otherwise.
Are you sure you're not mixing BTU and watts?
> If all you cook is ramen or oatmeal, induction is fine, yes.
No, I cook full on meals. Stews, soups, what have you. Power never even remotely came up as a concern. Quite the contrary in fact.
I indeed never used a wok or cooked any steaks though, and probably never will either, so I can't say much about that stuff.
What I have is from 2008 or so, I can't even find the exact model. I guess it's now politically incorrect to even list it.
Plus side: works as new, even the original thermal pair shutoffs were never swapped and that's basically the only thing that fails in them.
Soups i can see. Stews.. unless we completely misunderstand each other they're better done in the stove, inside. Not to mention baking some bread. With which an induction top will not help either. To be honest, baking and stewing imo depend more on thermal mass that brings very stable temperature, for which even gas ovens are meh, you're better off with true wood-fueled brick stove, or the result is not even close. One can maybe make an electrically-heated brick stove, but for some reason I haven't seen one. Maybe it's because it'll be slow as hell to heat up. And no authentic crunchy charcoal in your fresh pizza.
Breville makes a small electric pizza oven that's actually quite good - not quite as hot as gas but reaches 750F in about 20 minutes, and then with time to reheat if you've got your prep done you can pump out a 12-inch pizza every 5 minutes.
> What I have is from 2008 or so, I can't even find the exact model. I guess it's now politically incorrect to even list it.
I did check for older models as well. Even dug up some stove catalogues from the 70s and 80s to be extra sure. I just genuinely cannot confirm your numbers. I'm about as confident in my unit confusion hypothesis as I can reasonably be.
I'm sure you had the experiences you're recounting, but as far as the numbers go, they do not seem to explain them. Especially since these are the burner ratings, before the heat transfer losses.
If I do accept the unit confusion on your behalf:
15K BTU (your biggest gas burner) -> 55% efficiency (optimistic) -> 8250 BTU reaching the pan
3.6 kW (cheap plug-in induction stove) -> 80% efficiency (pessimistic) -> 10045 BTU reaching the pan
It just doesn't compute.
I'm not at home or I would've sent you a photo.
the main burner is two-row high somewhat like
https://www.hallsintl.com/heavy-duty-gas-stove-2-burners-15k...
That's more like it, although that is a commercial-use unit. Maybe you have something particularly beefy?
If you do get the chance to figure out the exact model you have at home, please do let me know here. Won't blame you if you don't though, I appreciate this is a chore.
This article has confirmation that there was a report of a gas leak, and if you scroll down there is a dashcam video of the explosion https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10015188721000
For the record, Aeon Mall is basically a brand - there are many Aeon malls in Japan in various cities.
Yes but there is just one in Kumamoto.
The second floor of the mall exploded for some reason, and the roof collapse is secondary to that. It seems to have happened after the earthquake and subsequent evacuation. There are videos of people leaving the mall:
https://x.com/yuto4388/status/2082060992377475247/video/1?s=...
That mall was also damaged in a similar earthquake that happened in 2016.
And ironically in their press release for the re-open they said they re-built it with more disaster-proofing with the knowledge from the previous disaster...
The emerging thing is that the earthquake caused a gas leak which later caused an explosion. Pipes will just go out of alignment during an earthquake, there isn’t a ton you can do to prevent that wholly.
My question is why upon calling in a gas leak, the mall was not immediately evacuated and cordoned off.
I've always wondered why automatic earthquake shutoff valves weren't a requirement. Apparently they're required in some areas of the US by surprisingly recent code (2013 in Los Angeles is what I'm seeing?) but I've never heard of it in Japan. Maybe this incident will be a regulatory turning point.
English link on the shindo scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_Meteorological_Agency_se...
I'm living in the South of Japan, it was a 4 intensity where I am (about 90km) from the epicenter. Luckily there was only some light shaking and nothing fell over here.
Glad to hear it is not too terrible where you are
Hope the areas around you were just as lucky, thanks for the update!
Kumamoto is barely finished rebuilding from the last quake, you can still see cracks in structures as you drive down the road. This is really horrible; not to mention the city is already beginning to depopulate as the youth move north to Fukuoka.
It's my understanding that small to medium sized cities (and rural areas) depopulating is going on now throughout almost all of Japan. One of the things that really surprised me recently is how low the cost of real estate is for an older, normal middle class home in some sparsely populated areas of Japan.
Apparently the declining population and younger people not wanting to live in their parents' rural countryside home is having a significant effect on property values.
I wouldn't let this get in the way of going there though. Kumamoto is a very nice prefecture to see. They will rebuild (again) and it'll continue to be a great place.
GPS reference data shows the ground has been displaced as much as 84 centimeters https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10015189191000
I hope everyone is safe in Kumamoto. In my area, we have been repeatedly warned that a major earthquake called the Nankai Trough is likely to occur in the last few years or decades, so I am very scared of big earthquakes happening in other areas as well.
To be a bit more precise, the Nankai ("South Sea") Trough is a tectonic subduction zone to the south of Japan, roughly the entire length from Izu to Kyushu:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nankai_Trough
And Nankai megathrust earthquakes are those caused by plate movement there:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nankai_megathrust_earthquakes
Statistically major earthquakes occur here every 90-200 years, and the last was in 1946.
I've heard there's been a lot of redevelopment in Nagoya, in preparation for a possible future earthquake from the Nankai Trough.
Exactly one month ago, there was almost consecutive daily earthquakes in Kantō region. Always a good reminder the whole country lies on seismically active fault lines.
Similar strength and location as the 2016 one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Kumamoto_earthquakes
I was camping/bike packing in Kyushu when this happened! I think I was in Miyazaki on the 14th when we felt the first shock. It was the first earthquake I’d experienced. The multi-story hotel we stayed at felt like it was gyrating in a circular fashion.
Then my pal and I were camping by the Utagenka Bridge, east of Kumamoto for the main shock!
Fukuoka here (about 100km from Kumamoto) and definitely felt it, so it must have been a real big one in Kumamoto itself.
My friend was driving home from work closer to Miyazaki and didn't feel the quake, but had huge hailstones hitting his car. There's a rapture going on or something
Many emergency shelters have not had their building safety confirmed so parking lots are opened to allow people to sleep in their cars, as they are warned to avoid "economy-class syndrome" from sleeping in a tight space. https://news.web.nhk/newsweb/na/na-k10015189161000
Was looking at webcams here (https://tokyo.fyi) but realized this is further south.
Found a few online webcams, but I'm not really sure I saw the earthquake. People didn't even seem to stop on the webcam I was watching. Lots of cars on the bridge afterwards though while before it there were much less, idk
Some of the webcams are fake fwiw, I noticed a while ago when there were ads emblassened with old dates on them.
Edit: to be clear, this was random ones on YouTube, not sure about that site.
Woah yes I found those on YouTube, didn’t expect them to be fake. This kind of makes sense but also makes me very disappointed of humanity
Does anyone know if this also affects South Korea?
Given it’s barely even felt outside of Kyushu (JMA 3, the dark blue dots, is "dishes may rattle, some people walking outside notice") that seems unlikely.
Dishes may rattle feels like such a japanese way to describe it
Indeed! I've never experienced an earthquake strong enough to rattle anything
Every once in a while (not every year) there are minor earthquakes you can feel in some parts of SK, like Busan: the ground tremors a bit, some shelves wobble... that's the most I've ever noticed.
Never felt anything in SK
Thank you for this update.
I was told that some people in Busan, the Korean city nearest to Japan, felt the earthquake and even felt dizzy.
I'm in Busan, though I didn't feel anything. (I was on the beach at the time though.)
I'm in Fukuoka. We had shindo 3 here.
My phone alarm went off just before the shaking, but the thing that really surprised me was how strong it felt. I instinctively ran outside.
I hope everyone closer to the epicenter is safe.
One thing I've noticed is that people in Fukuoka have stayed calm. I haven't seen panic buying of food or emergency supplies despite being so close to the disaster area.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixEhLWGJE4M
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/28/asia/japan-earthquake-int... for some Reuters reporting.
Man, why are the beautiful places of this world so much at constant risk :(
This was felt in Shanghai, like a truck passing by. The second one in two months?
arent they trying to make silicon fabs there?
Not like earthquakes are unheard of in Taiwan or South Korea either.
Buildings are going to be more expensive (base isolation and an extra commie blocks worth of reinforced concrete), but given how expensive fab equipment is, that might not even matter all that much.
Earthquake isolation can be pretty amazing. Here’s a video of a data center during the big 2011 quake. The camera is attached to the outer wall so the point of reference makes the wrong side look like it’s shaking, but you can see the people walking without difficulty during some pretty heavy shaking. A fab will have even better stuff.
https://youtu.be/GXwQSCStRaw
Wow, it's incredible how far civil engineering has come in the past 600 years. To think that we used to have bridges collapse all the time, and buildings crack and collapse, and now we have buildings that can withstand a whole earthquake.
“A whole earthquake” is a very funny way to phrase it when it comes to Japan. That building has withstood tens of smaller ones before that big one, they’re just _incredibly_ common here.
South Korea? Almost nil. It's not known to be a seismological region.
Taiwan, Japan have far more exposure to a long history of earthquakes, tsunamis.
For Taiwan, there is another existential threat man made.
It is currently summer vacation season in Japan, so we expect there to be many tourists. We hope everyone stays safe.
7.1 seems to mean non resistant buildings may collapse.
Yea seems pretty bad given its on the higher end of the scale... I might be naive but I hope nobody died
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Kumamoto_earthquakes
The main shock of this one at 7.0 killed 277 people so sadly I think it’s pretty likely there will be some deaths.
It's Japan though. They don't have non-resistant buildings.
There's plenty of old buildings here that are not built up to the latest standards; increasing exponentially the further you get from the core of a big city.
Japan is _very good_ at tearing down old buildings and building better in their place; but it doesn't mean that there are zero old buildings around.
Wouldn't the not so strong old buildings have collapsed during previous quakes?
They could have been further away from the epicenter of the previous ones, or the previous ones weren't strong enough to cause that specific structure to collapse, the previous ones might have weakened the structure and this one brought it down, a million different things factor into this.
Earthquakes aren't a perfectly repeatable occurrences you can run a regression test against.
Possibly, and then rebuilt. They rebuild houses every 20, 30 odd years anyway (according to https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusabl...), and temples too https://longnow.org/ideas/long-term-building-in-japan/.
Meanwhile here an 80 year old, completely unremarkable house is likely to get declared "historic" and you as the owner can't even change the windows without permission. Tearing it down would be virtually impossible.
If only a 7.1 earthquake came along to cull the herd every now and then?
Some of those old houses seem to burn mysteriously. Bad wiring, I suppose.
Then there was the developer who tore down a couple of houses over a weekend before the historical commission had a chance to meet and formally confer historic status on the rotting, worn out properties.
Like half of the buildings are non-resistant since they are old and made of wood. IIRC only buildings built after 1991 are guaranteed to be earthquake resistant.
Yes, but the situation got a lot better and a lot worse...
Sadly there has been a bunch of pretty devastating earthquakes in recent years. In particular in Kumamoto the one in 2016 (magnitude 6.5) was huge and many of the houses built at lower standard or not in great shape anymore got partially or totally wrecked. Right now the house that are left are relatively well built.
The bad news is, that still doesn't help as the cumulative damage can still bring them down, and they're still subject to landslides, water damage, and other second order disastrous events.
Earthquakes didn't start in 1991. The Japanese have always had to live with earthquakes and build accordingly.
For a long time "live with earthquakes and build accordingly" meant "make it easy to rebuild", not "engineer the structures to withstand the earthquakes".
In Gölcük/İzmit, there was a huge 7.4 earthquake in 99.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_%C4%B0zmit_earthquake
It took around 10 years until the city felt "normal" again (source: a close friend lives there).
My point is, it's never easy to rebuild.
The regulations got hardened in 1991. Obviously there has been earthquakes forever, but the buildings were not built to withstand them. That's one of the reasons why Japanese do not buy old homes: they are not earthquake proof.
One of the reasons Japan uses wood for construction is that combined with their traditional building techniques it results in earthquake resistant buildings.
It’s been officially revised down to 6.8, but that’s still a lot.
Hope the residents of Kumamoto Prefecture stay safe and are able to evacuate.
Hope everybody is staying safe in Japan but this will not be the last earthquake, there are many experts pointing this as the beginning with even bigger magnitude coming up.
I'd strongly caution against a Japan trip right now.
also earth quake in china.
Why does this earthquake, of similar magnitude, get so much more attention compared to the recent Venezuelan earthquake last month that was 100x more devastating? There was no commentary on HN about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Venezuela_earthquakes
Venezuela's own choices.
https://rsf.org/en/venezuela-censorship-exacerbates-earthqua...
If anything that should warrant more attention...
The few socialist papers that I've read make the claim that there is nothing to pay attention to, and that the event is "American Propaganda" to try and make Venezuela look weak. The government attempts to control and suppress videos of the event.
Following the event involves trying to see past the state's narrative and take in anything that trickles through. Combine this with the fact that it's likely far easier for most HN readers to send aid to, or know someone in, a friendly nation like Japan. You get the recipe for coverage of Venezuela being muted by comparison.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/06/venezuela-hum...
Venezuela supposedly is a "friendly nation" now though, ever since the palace coup
I live in an earthquake prone area and thought Japan was cutting edge in earthquake protection. Beyond the obvious concern for other human beings, I am interested in why there was so much damage from what I would have thought was still a relatively manageable size earthquake for them. I am here trying to learn a lesson that I would not expect to learn from Venezuelan infrastructure and earthquake response.
It is also the timing of building booms. Problems being exposed have triggered regulations and enforcement in Venezuela but that is relatively recent and much inventory was built decades before.
The speed of videos coming out was a little slower so it lost the HN attention span - but it was definitely a hot topic in many other news places - Reddit, X, etc...
It is very sad
United States Geological Survey https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?extent=21.04224...
Live NHK-WORLD-NEWS feed (English-language commentator) https://www.youtube.com/live/f0lYkdA-Gtw?si=Sc8ZbldZUQESiJQZ
The HNK stream can also be viewed at https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/live_tv/ with English dubs. The youtube feed looks to have stopped for now.
For anyone that had their heart skip a beat like me:
"The Japanese Nuclear Energy Agency says no damage has been detected at three nearby nuclear power plants."
bless them
thoughts and prayers
Shit hope everyone is ok.
Tldr; Seems like major cities didn't get hit by the earthquake at 7 scale.
Hoping for zero casualities.
Apparently there is a risk for tsunami so Japanese govt has issued a further alert. Hope it isn't anything too bad either
Haven't seen anything on the Tsunami global warning list so hopefully it's okay. Earthquake looks centered on land which (to my unofficial understanding) means low risk of Tsunami but of course higher chance of direct damage
ohh. what was the intensity?
8 is serious. 9 is Pacific subduction rupture.
7 is not really top news of the day.
People with friends and family exposed don't really appreciate being false-alarmed with 7s and 6s.
I'm sure everyone in the hospital and with collapsed houses would agree with your assessment that it's not a big deal.
Okay. Let's make every such instance news?
HN is exaggerating to feel close to the action. It's childish.
There is a trench off of Tokyo that is likely to rupture in our lifetimes, and people who have other people to check on don't care about HN's disaster fantasies.
The HN audience decides what is top news of the day, that’s the whole principle this website is based upon
273 people died from a 7.0 earthquake in Kumamoto in 2016.