Hammering Home a Point : U.S. Carpenters, Houses Could Aid Quake Recovery

The builder proudly patted the all-American home--designed by California architects, constructed with Seattle carpenters and made from 2-by-4 wooden planks from Washington state.

“We’ve built 300 imported homes . . . in Kobe and not one was damaged in the earthquake, while many traditional Japanese homes collapsed,” said H. Kohda, director of Sumitomo Fudosan Home Co.

Sumitomo is touting imported housing and foreign carpenters as a way to ease the plight of 240,000 people still left homeless in chilly and cramped relief centers throughout this devastated region in western Japan, and the firm is not alone.

The sudden demand for housing--and the sturdiness of the prefab, imported homes in surviving the quake--has touched off a cry for more imported manufactured homes and for American carpenters with the expertise to put them together.

It remains to be seen whether the call for American carpenters, in a nation which has cracked down on the entry of foreign workers, will be heeded by authorities. It would require a relaxation of visa requirements.

“It would be a big change in the attitude of the Japanese authorities, comparable to the opening of Japan by Commodore Matthew Perry 120 years ago,” said Sumitomo’s Kohda, who has struggled, with little luck, to bring more American carpenters to Japan.

But the demand for U.S. construction expertise is growing. The California State Office of Trade and Investment has received inquiries about possible imports from 10 Japanese home builders and building suppliers--a flood that director Jon Kaji calls “the tip of the iceberg.”

And on Thursday, Hyogo prefectural (state) authorities said they would try to import as many as 10,000 homes from the United States, Canada and elsewhere, according to a report in the Nihon Keizai Shimbun, a financial daily.

Officials already had announced they would import 800 of the 30,000 temporary homes planned--500 from Britain and 300 from the United States. But they estimate they’ll also need 100,000 to 140,000 permanent homes over the next three years, and homes using the 2-by-4 construction standard can be built at half the cost in half the time as ones using traditional Japanese construction.

The rub is that relatively few Japanese carpenters know how to build the 2-by-4 homes, which account for just 220,000 of Japan’s 1.5 million annual housing starts. Their higher labor costs also boost the final price tag, wiping out much of the savings between Japanese and imported homes.

As a result, Hyogo officials also said they would seek a relaxation of visa rules to allow the large-scale entry of foreign carpenters to build the homes and teach the techniques to their Japanese counterparts.

If the government agrees to relax visa regulations, it would remove one of the biggest obstacles to increasing imported homes here. It would also represent a major departure from past labor policy, which has staunchly limited the number of foreign carpenters in Japan.

So far, the firm has won public contracts to build 50 imported temporary homes.

Sumitomo currently has two Seattle carpenters working on the site in Kobe--but they had to come on a special visa that allows them only to train Japanese workers and bars them from doing most of the work themselves.

“The government of Japan does not want to import foreign workers, especially those who do simple labor,” Kohda said. “They are afraid many people from developing countries, such as China or Korea, would rush into Japan as workers did with Germany.”

Indeed, the issue of foreign carpenters could develop into a major trade conflict with the United States. Labor ministry officials have stoutly resisted calls to relax immigration rules, citing Japan’s own recession and unemployment problems.

“Even in an emergency, we don’t desire letting in simple laborers,” an official told the Japanese media this week.

That attitude violates the spirit if not the letter of a U.S.-Japan commercial treaty guaranteeing the free entry of technical experts needed to help firms from each country do business in the other’s, a U.S. official said. The treaty has allowed thousands of Japanese technical experts to work in the United States--many of them in the auto industry.

But Japanese authorities have tended to shut out American carpenters by classifying them as simple laborers, which are not covered by the treaty, sources say. U.S. officials argue they should be considered technical experts because they possess specialized skills in 2-by-4 construction, along with everything from dry-walling to electrical wiring.

Because the treaty gives Americans in Japan rights beyond those of other foreign workers, the argument that letting them in would invite a flood of cheap labor from other nations is “irrelevant,” the U.S. official said.

“American home builders have every (right) to bring their essential technical experts to Japan, just as Japanese firms bring their essential technical experts to America,” the U.S. official said. “The Japanese, in my opinion, are not properly executing their part of the agreement, but now we’re going to test them. We want our treaty rights.”

He urged carpenters to apply for a visa under the treaty provisions and said the U.S. government will be monitoring the results.

In addition, Japanese construction sources say that bureaucratic turf wars, as well as power battles between the central and local governments, may impede progress in expanding housing imports. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry, which controls prefabricated housing, has called for more housing imports.

But the Ministry of Construction remains protective of the traditional Japanese building industry and “won’t want to put themselves in a position of kicking them out because of their political power,” one source said.

Construction ministry official Yushi Hieda downplayed reports that Hyogo prefecture might import 10,000 homes. Although he said the final decision would be made by local authorities, Hieda declared: “We have no shortage of domestic ability to put up permanent housing.”

Asked if the ministry was protecting the market against imports, however, he replied, “Absolutely not.”

In any case, demand for prefabricated homes seems certain to increase. “Everyone is saying that when they rebuild, they want a prefab or a 2-by-4, because those are the ones that stood up in the earthquake,” said Tadao Idehara, a cab driver.

* KOBE QUAKE DAMAGE ESTIMATE

Japan said last month’s killer quake caused $96 billion in damage. D3

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Selling Prefab

U.S. exports to Japan of prefab buildings*, in millions of dollars:

1993: 18.14

* Including manufactured homes, log homes, prefab home kits, building components and wall components.

Source: Commerce Department