[steven]

Yea I remember the basement thread.

I don't have a 'Japanese common sense' yet so I'll gladly go by what you say and by what I hear where I live.

As far as my experience goes, it's quite limited... I've just kind of worked a room into a studio-type atmosphere which included building sound absorption with glass wool (ボードタイプグラスウールの方が通じるかな）. I covered my walls with two layers of drywall. Needless to say, I've made hundreds of trips to hardware stores and I've only really seen drywall as far as materials to build walls with go. However I wouldn't be surprised to hear of something completely different.

In this area even new houses are built elevated from the ground. I've seen this come into play when the cities in the area decide to build new roads or make the existing roads wider. They will take a whole house off the ground and move it a few meters back. I can't imagine that happening in California... but maybe it happened and I just didn't notice it.

At any rate, to kind of change the conversation, I've noticed in the short time that I've lived here that there are particular smells to particular seasons. Around here early spring means kind of a dry and dusty smell (from sand that comes from the Gobi Desert) late spring means the smell of water being put in and out of rice fields, one of the smells of summer is just the humidity itself and another is those bug repellant swirly green things, the smell of the early fall is burning rice field leftovers after the harvest and plants getting ready for the winter, and the winter is the smell of cold wind and ice and kerosine from heaters. All those smells seem to exist in the Japanese house around here (although I'm sure it differs depending on where you go).