13 | west north

Wee Japanese fire trucks, as some Stateside auto enthusiasts have discovered, are adorably, I-wanna-pinch-your-cheeks tiny. Here’s one on the streets of Onomichi:

Japanese fire trucks: streets of Onomichi

Of course, something this different doesn’t exist in isolation; there are systemic differences between Japanese and American fire response that allow and even require smaller trucks.

There are more, but smaller, trucks. Japan has smaller, specialized fire and rescue trucks, whereas America chooses to have larger, generalist trucks. Nagata Shozo, a disaster mitigation administration professor at Kansai University, says in a recent NHK documentary (see ~5m in): “In other countries, you may see a single vehicle that combines firefighting and rescue equipment… in Japan, we have a tradition of specialization… We improve the vehicles’ specific uses and capabilities, and when it comes to dealing with emergency, vehicles with different special features are used in combination to tackle the situation.”

At many fire stations I saw vehicles parked nose-to-tail, with garage doors on both sides of the building. A peek inside the Mukojima Fire Station in eastern Tokyo shows a second set of doors behind perhaps a dozen vehicles, including conventional trucks and van-sized ambulances. That is much larger than my brand-new local fire station (Engine #13, Truck #10, Ambulance #13), which has just five bays.

Japanese fire trucks: Mukojima Fire Station

Equally capable equipment is smaller. A ladder truck inside the Shiba Fire Station is about the size of a typical US fire truck. This station is surrounded by new high-rises along the waterfront just south of the Imperial Palace.

Japanese fire trucks: Shiba Fire Station vehicles at night

Compare that to a ladder truck in DC, whose service area only has buildings up to 130′ tall (40m). [Or, check out this short video of a Japanese truck visiting a downtown DC fire station.]

A NACTO/Volpe report from 2018 calls out ladder trucks in particular as being peculiarly over-sized: “Aerial ladder fire trucks used in major European and Asian cities can reach just as high, despite being only two-thirds as long and having only half of the turn radius as common American models.”

By the way, the Shiba station was huge, with eight ranks of vehicles and garage doors in front and back.

Japanese fire trucks: Shiba Fire Station

There are even smaller vehicles. Note the rescue motorcycle at the right edge of the garage at the Arakawa Fire Department, Otonashigawa Branch. There were even cargo bicycles parked behind it. These can reach medical situations quickly even in pedestrian zones, or after earthquakes when roads may not be clear. (Mukojima above also had motorcycles.)

Japanese fire trucks: Arakawa Fire Department, Otonashigawa Branch

Fire stations are more numerous, and often mixed-use. Shinjuku-gyoen and Shiba are 3 miles apart, and there are five other fire stations in between them – meaning about one station every half-mile. Central Tokyo is dense, but not absurdly so; these areas have the population density of Brooklyn or the Bronx, not Manhattan.

A downside of having so many fire stations is that the land footprint is extensive, but that’s mitigated by combining fire stations into mixed-use buildings. None of the urban fire stations I saw were single-story structures.

Japanese fire trucks: Shinjuku-gyoen and Shiba are 3 miles apart, with five stations between

This isn’t just in urban areas; it also means putting fire trucks in remote areas, like this one stationed at the Enryaku-ji temple complex atop Mount Hiei east of Kyoto:

Japanese fire trucks: Mount Hiei (Enryaku-ji)

The small trucks respond to historically narrow streets – and enable narrow streets into the future. These tiny fire trucks can fight fires and respond to medical emergencies even though Japanese streets are famously narrow (often 4m, sometimes narrower), and just as importantly they allow new streets to be narrow as well. Contrast that with the absolute narrowest street I can build in Raleigh, which is 6.7m wide (34% wider) and requires a 40′ long fire truck turnaround.

Whatever they’re doing, it works. Japan’s fire death rate is substantially below America’s, which is notable given that its cities have historically been even more fire-prone than US cities. America’s “era of great urban fires” was over a century ago; by then, Tokyo alone had seen 49 large-scale urban fires in the preceding two centuries.

More importantly, given that the death rate for car crashes in the US (128 per million) is about ten times higher than the fire death rate (13 per million), the narrow streets and slower speeds found in Japan contribute to a traffic death rate that’s 3/4 lower per capita and 2/3 lower per vehicle.