Tokushima Shimbun’s Housing & Living Fair 2024 Showcases Benefits of 2×4 Construction
The Tokushima Shimbun, a well-read local newspaper, sponsored and organized a “Housing & Living Fair 2024” on July 6th and 7th in Tokushima City, the capital city of Tokushima Prefecture on Shikoku Island. Shikoku Island is quite rural, where people living on Japan’s fourth largest island are inclined to live in homes built using the traditional Post & Beam construction method and very few people there are familiar or knowledgeable about the benefits of living in a two-by-four home. As such, COFI / Canada Wood Japan was asked by the local Shikoku branch of the Two-by-Four Home Builders Association’s to help promote the advantages of 2×4 housing at this event.
To accomplish this, two leading members of the Shikoku branch based in Tokushima, Ikawa Architecture & Life Planning and Dairi Forest Products & Construction (FPC) arranged with the event’s organizer to display a booth promoting 2×4 housing in addition for two 60-minute time slots at the event to speak about the positive attributes of 2×4 homes. Our office was tasked to provide a speaker well versed in the 2×4 construction method to talk at the event, and we obliged by arranging for Mr. Toshiyuki Yoshizawa of Sumakura Design, with more than 45 years of experience in designing and build 2×4 homes in Japan to travel from Tokyo to speak at the event.
The housing fair had thirty-six exhibitors – mostly housing companies and over 3,000 visitors – young families and couples looking at or considering on purchasing a new family home. In total about forty persons attended two seminars promoting and introducing 2×4 homes as having excellent design flexibility and energy efficiency as well as being comfortable and safe with exceptional earthquake and fire-resistance performance. At the fair, the Two-by-Four Home Builders Association’s Shikoku branch sponsored a booth at the event that featured and showed episodes of COFI’s Three Little Pigs 2×4 amination series and also distributed our 2×4 promotional pamphlet based on the series. Photo images showing the booth and seminars promoting two-by-four homes at the event included below.