Caring for the land: from buying it until the construction starts

27 Jul 2025 | #housing | #money | #japan

We are currently building our home in Tokyo. I wrote about our process and the costs associated with buying the land and the process of designing our house, and in this post I’ll describe how we cared for the land from the time we bought it to the time construction started.

To protect the actual location of our house, I will be using photos of other lands in this post.

May 2024: buying the land

As detailed in my other post, in mid May of 2024. we closed on the land, and became the official owners of the plot. The seller already cleared off the old house and built a fence towards the neighbors, so the land looked something like this:

This is ready for the house to be built. Except this was the time we could finally start designing the house, and construction was to start only 9 months later the earliest (and ended up starting 12 months later due to us taking our time with the design).

July 2024: nature takes over

June is the rainy season in Japan, which nature loves. In mere 2 month of time our land looked like this:

It was becoming higher than people, and our Ichijo guy asked us to do something about it (cut it and then cover the land with an anti-weed sheet), so that it doesn’t become a jungle by next year.

August 2024: anti-weed sheet

We considered cutting the grass ourselves, but buying the tools and figuring out the disposal would have been a challenge, so we hired a company to take care of it. We paid 97,350 yen for cutting the grass and covering the land with an anti-weed sheet (防草シート).

This was the state of the land for the next 8 months or so.

May 2025: removing the sheet

Ichijo asked us to have the sheet removed by 2 weeks before the construction start. Most house makers will take care of this, but apparently Ichijo has their processes streamlined so much, that they ask for an empty land.

We could have hired a company to remove the sheets, but we decided to do it ourselves. It took only a few hours, including pulling out the weed that has grown out in the gaps at the edge and between the sheets.

We called the garbage collection company in the city we currently live (Mitaka) and they told us that as long as the sheets don’t contain too much soil, they can be thrown away as burnable trash. So we bagged the sheets up, carried them home on bicycle, and threw them away. I was a bit concerned if our building’s maintenance guy would complain (as he is pretty strict with trash), but he didn’t say anything.

May 2025: ceremony and final check

A week before construction start we visited the land for 2 things: the ground-breaking ceremony and the ground rope marking confirmation.

Ground breaking ceremony (地神祭)

This is a traditional Shinto ceremony that involves a priest coming to the land to ask the gods of the land for safe construction and the prosperity of the building. It is completely optional, and when I asked Ichijo if their constructions workers cared about having it performed (since the safe construction part affects them), I was told that they don’t care.

Ichijo offers to help organize it (for a fee of 50,000 yen or so), but in that case the priest would come from some shrine in central Tokyo (that Ichijo has a relationship with). I wanted to do the ceremony with the local shrine since we are moving into the area. Ichijo told us that this is fine, however warned that some smaller shrines will ask the house builder to prepare some of the things for the ceremony, and Ichijo can’t help with that. Luckily our local shrine could handle everything for an overall fee of 45,000 yen.

The ceremony took about an hour. The priest was chill and explained what was happening (the prayers are in old Japanese, that most people don’t understand). Part of the ceremony was to symbolically start the construction: the Ichijo guy cut a few pieces of grass (put there intentionally for this), then I got to make the first mark on the ground.

During the ceremony the priest offered various food and sake to the gods. At the end of the ceremony, we were to drink the sake, which ended up being mainly ceremonial: both the priest and the Ichijo guy came by car and my wife is pregnant, so they only pretended to take a snip, then poured the rest on the ground. The priest also gave us all the vegetables that were offered to the gods and told us that we can eat it later. (It took us a few days to cook and eat them all.)

After the ceremony I asked which god did he pray for, and he told us that there were actually 6 gods involved today: some general gods known for constructions/houses, gods specific to this area (he looked up the gods for this land based on the address), and gods of his shrine (which are apparently different than the gods of the land, even though it’s a nearby shrine).

Overall it was a fun experience, and I can recommend it. As with everything related to Shinto, it is more of a tradition rather than a religion, and most Japanese people would claim they don’t believe in it, but yet still do it.

A slightly related fun fact

Before and during the second Word War, the Japanese government used Shinto to support its war efforts. To prevent this in the future, the constitution (written after the war) implemented strong separation of the state and religion, making it illegal for e.g. the state to give money to any religion. That’s how the Tsu Groundbreaking Ceremony Case came about: city officials paid for a groundbreaking ceremony on a municipal gymnasium construction, then city council members sued them claiming it to be unconstitutional. The cases ended up going up to the supreme court that in 1977 ruled:

Although it cannot be denied that this groundbreaking ceremony is related to religion, its purpose is purely secular — to pray for the peace and stability of the land and the safety of the construction work upon commencement, and to conduct a ritual in accordance with general social customs. Therefore, its effect is not considered to support, promote, or encourage Shinto, nor to oppress or interfere with other religions. Accordingly, it is reasonable to interpret that it does not constitute a religious activity prohibited under Article 20, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution.

So there you have it, it is officially a non-religious social custom.

Btw Woven City, the smart city Toyota is building, also had the same ceremony performed.

Ground rope marking (地縄張り)

On the same day as the ground breaking ceremony, we also got to check the ground rope marking. This is a simple rope installed a day earlier by Ichijo to show the location of the house. After checking that the distance from the sides of the land is as planned, we signed a document to confirm this.

I like that this check exists, just to ensure there is no misunderstanding about the location and size of the house. It also feels good that while there is very little I can contribute to the actual construction of the house, double-checking the location is at least something I can do myself.

June 2025: construction begins

Then in June 2025 the construction began. But details of that is for a different post.