If the internet searches are to be believed, that is indeed sadly likely to be the cause.
The internet suggests the explosion happened on the second floor of the mall where a large food court is located.
Electricity allows for so many more automatic safeguards.
Since the mid-2000s there has actually been a push by Japanese utility companies for adoption of what they call "all-electric" オール電化.
Adoption has been reasonably good with new-builds because they can also have solar panels. But adoption in older properties has been slower.
First in general, electricity in Japan has tended to be more expensive than gas.
Second, a large Part of the slow adoption comes from cooking related inertia.
A lot of traditional (and therefore very common) Japanese cookware just will not work on electric, full stop. For example, traditional donabe (clay pots).
Beyond that, for example, aluminium pans being non-ferromagnetic will not work on induction. Yes you find aluminium pans in the West with extra ferromagnetic bases attached, but that is not common in Japan.
Finally, the Japan Society of Cookery Science did commission a study[1] where they had two groups of people cook four dishes on both gas and induction. The conclusion was gas was preferred across all four.
[1]https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/cookeryscience/47/6/47_...
I wouldn’t recommend buying one. The fancier models have a stupendous number of circuit boards in them, and obviously a lot of power electronics, as well as cooling fans. Probably buy the cheapest model with the least number of features that you can bear the sight of, style matters in a kitchen, if you have to buy one at all.
I’ve simplified by cooking to an electric pressure cooker, which also functions as a slow cooker and pot for frying, an air fried, and a microwave. No kettle, no pots or pans, no cooktop, no oven. An oven would be useful I suppose if I were cooking for more people. The pressure cooker plus air frier is a faster and more convenient substitute for roasting meat.
As they become more common and age, I predict induction cooktops will have a much higher failure rate than dumb rheostat controlled resistive element cooktops. Everything has a much higher failure rate than dumb resistive element cooktops. And they are much easier to repair with very few parts: a resistive element and a rheostat.
I’ve don’t quite a good many replacements of fully functional dumb resistive cooktops and ovens with the new version of the same model, simply because the 70 to 80 year old residence wanted something newer and shinier, even though the new model is almost identical to the 20 to 30 year old model they’re replacing.
Improper installation of induction cooktops in older kitchens with out the necessary cabinet work to correctly ventilate them is a big problem too.
Anyways, gas is a great source of energy especially for commercial and industrial cooking and heating, where electric is simply impractical due to the immense amount of power required.
At home, sure. The typical setup requires less than 10kW. Trivial.
In a food court or restaurant strip currently serviced by gas, the electricity requirement could easily exceed 1 megawatt, which means major infrastructure upgrades, and you’ll never get the rapid heat control like gas provides, which is essential in reasonable service times, along with the fact that gas cookers are infinitely simpler and have very low failure rates compared to anything electric that is put through repeated thermo cycling 16 or 24hrs a day.
Only having 1 large burner is stupid, and the 1 large burner it has could stand to be another inch or so wider.
But it has been a definite upgrade over gas. From better air quality to not heating my house up in the summer, to being faster to get pots hot.
> As they become more common and age, I predict induction cooktops will have a much higher failure rate than dumb rheostat controlled resistive element cooktops. Everything has a much higher failure rate than dumb resistive element cooktops. And they are much easier to repair with very few parts: a resistive element and a rheostat.
Agreed, resistive elements are simple, you can still find ones that are 30+ years old and working fine. Same with old gas stoves, easy to repair, dirt simple.
Induction requires fancy electronics, and modern circuit boards just don't have a long life expectancy.
Induction offers the benefits of not emitting noxious fumes, the dangers of transporting gas over long distances in bulk, the fire hazards inside the home, and dependency on single source energy.
Electricity, via induction cooktops, is often faster, more energy efficient, safer for everyone, and doesn’t depend on whatever regime or state wants to play games with the supply. Where I live, electricity is often sold at negative rates for most of the day and that electricity is now going into batteries at a massive scale. It seems unlikely gas has any future, outside of niche cooking or industrial/commercial uses.
I don’t understanding this criticism.
Who in their right mind ie cooking inside at all without an externally ventilated exhaust fan? The moisture control issue leading to mould growth will destroy your health faster than hoofing nat gas combustion products.
I believe the nat gas combustion product health risks for home and commercial cooking are wildly overblown. Commercial kitchens are required to have certain ventilation requirements, as are all new home builds, at least in any jurisdiction anyone would want to live in.
> electricity is often sold at negative rates for most of the day and that electricity
Is it? Is it though? What evidence is there?
Negative rates may apply to the wholesale price, but I’m not aware of anywhere that passes that on to the residential retail customer.
In Australia, electricity retailers are require to offer a plan that has a 3 hour free period, which is usually in the middle of the day when everyone is at work, and the plans non-free-period rates are worse, as well as the daily supply charge being higher. Thereby resulting, in all likelihood, in people on those plans likely ending up paying the same or more, if they’re not obsessively fussing over their electricity usage.
What are you going to do? Set your induction cook top to fry your eggs for the next morning at 1pm? How’s that supposed to work? Cook your roast chicken in the tumble dryer, because your oven doesn’t have a 12hr delay timer? Admittedly some newer ovens do, because leaving a raw chicken at room temperature in the oven for hours on end is a great idea.
Like everything the Australian Labor government touches, it’s a sham. Including the battery subsidy, which just moves wealth from everyone else (taxpayers), but especially poor people, to already relatively wealthy home owners. All the while alleviating government and energy infrastructure industries of the responsibility of making investments they’ll have to maintain.
Not to mention Australia already has electricity prices that are ridiculously high, so even if you benefit from the three-for-free plan, you’re still worse off than you were five years ago.
And with the propensity of batteries to spontaneously combust and be nearly impossible to extinguish, EV and home battery owners, scooters and ebiked too, are soaking up resources of fire departments.
See StacheD on YouTube for an in exhaustible stream of battery fire nightmares.
Ah, the good old unintended consequences of poorly thought out government policy. Which are always poorly thought out, because a very few number of Australian politicians have ever had to worry about energy prices, because they are nothing but glorified career dole-bludgers.
Jacinta Allan’s, the recent former Premier of the once great state of Victoria, industry experience extended to a brief period as a grocery bagger before her and her drunken uni mates messed around with an Ouija board and some other gray magic and accidentally summoned demons who took their souls and parasitised their bodies.
Or did they summon the demons on purpose? Probably, comrades.
Nyet Zero, as Topher Field is fond of saying.
Anyone in an older gas-served apartment building has the potential to not have direct external ventilation.
The problem I think is that Japanese culture values hot baths daily. Heating water for the bath using electricity is still too costly.
The downside to propane tanks is they become fireworks if a neighbor has a fire which heats them up.
In Japan anyone who goes all-electric these days is getting a heat pump water heater ("eco-cute") by default, resistive electric heating doesn't really exist out of small plugin units like kotatsu and radiant heaters.
With my power company in Japan, by going "all-electric" (having an eco-cute and induction stove), I qualify for a rate plan where I can trade off solar power peak hours (half price) for the duck curve hours (double price), so I have my water heating only running during cheap hours and cut down on air conditioning during the expensive hours.
Ours is from Mitsubishi and is just the builder-grade one from our fix-rate renovation company. It will connect to the wifi so you can start a bath from an app on your phone on your way home from work. There's also an intercom between the bath and the kitchen so mom can tell the kids to get out of the bath, dinner is done. Traditional Japanese values.
Mitsubishi https://www.mitsubishielectric.co.jp/home/ecocute/
Panasonic https://sumai.panasonic.jp/hp/
Daikin https://www.ac.daikin.co.jp/sumai/alldenka/ecocute/structure
Corona https://www.corona.co.jp/eco/
Noritz https://www.noritz.co.jp/product/kyutou_bath/ecocute/
At a glance the only difference is the ones I am seeing have the heat exchangers in the body of the unit (so take the heat from the room where the tank is), whereas these "eco-cute" look like they put that outside the home.
My house has a second tank for a backup generator. We use the main tank for our stove/range, water heater, clothes dryer, and a decorative fireplace that's rarely used. Some neighbors have a propane furnace, but we've got a heatpump with resistive strips as backup heat.
This is block by block. Long ago Seattle asked home owners on each block to foot the bill to run gas. Many blocks said yes, some said no. For blocks where only 1 side was developed, the cost was higher and there was a greater chance of everyone saying no. That is what happened on the street I grew up on, when the city had asked everyone to pay for gas lines, there were so few houses on that working class block that it was cost prohibitive for everyone to pony up how much $ would have been needed.
So instead people had oil furnaces installed and now that block will at some point require serious environmental remediation. :/
I have a long term interest in full electrification, but find the process daunting due to the interlocking set upgrades. Between insulation envelope upgrades and electrical system upgrades, there is a lot of potentially disruptive work needed to even allow permits to be issued for heat-pump HVAC and water heater or fully electric kitchen.
If the internal wiring also needs much work, it threatens to be almost as invasive as a gut renovation. Then, I ponder what other work we'd want to piggyback on it. But then it all sounds too much for life and budgets, so we procrastinate...
I think the area got off pretty light from the 2001 quake and the pace of retrofits has been too slow, but has had fortunate timing so I think things won't be too bad for the next quake, depending on exactly where it hits.
I would have a separate unit for the basement and the first floor though; we do have zoning dampers, but it's not very effective and the basement gets too cold.
Propane deliveries are expensive, if starting from scratch, I might have wired for electric clothes drying and water heating. And I would have probably gone with owned tanks instead of the current system where the delivery company owns the tanks. Electricity prices doubled in the last 5 years, but propane may have gone up more.
Now I'm thinking such valves are a good measure. I have no idea if they could work in such a major quake, though - for example, if the gas line fractured farther back from the seismic cutoff valve?
Yes you can get used to turning the heat up 5 minutes before you want hot. A down 5 minutes before your food is done. But it's a pain.
Also (this is a US perspective - perhaps Japan's labor costs are different?), running new heavy duty (240v, high-amperage) power cabling from the main breaker box to your kitchen is another huge cost barrier to electrification - this could easily cost many thousands of dollars. Which is why even places like California, which are happy to add costly burdens to homeowners in the name of "green," are only trying to push electrification in new builds.
It's true though that in a new build, if you have a roof chock full of solar panels and a big battery, getting a heat pump furnace, induction cooking, and all the rest of the electric appliances is super economical and awesome.
It's common to do a "full renovation" where the house is torn down to the frame and the rooms rebuilt. Instead of people DIY maintaining their house (they're too busy with work or whatever), they'll just do one of these after 10-20 years to modernize it. When you do this it's easy to have it converted to all-electric at the same time.
For the 180 m2 (1900 sq ft) house we bought used, the full renovation cost us $120k. This included literally ripping everything out down to the base concrete walls, re-arranging rooms, and re-building everything - walls, floors, ceilings, kitchen, all exterior/roofing, all plumbing/fixtures including installing a heat pump water heater, electrical including lights and an induction stove, cat 6a, tearing out the old rock garden, etc etc etc.
I had an issue when I first got induction where I'd warp my pans because I turned the stove up to max and the metal would get so hot so fast the bottom of the pan would bend.
Oops. Lesson learned.
Japan is a beautiful modern country and they have gotten through worse and they will get through this too.
I will admit in recent times the area between the Philippines north to the Kamchatka Peninsula is one most active areas on the planet at some point a 9.0 earthquake will happen in a major populated area on land but something that large usually happens once every 15 to 326 years.
The largest earthquake in California was 7.9, second largest 7.8 in San Francisco, the largest earthquake on west coast of North America 9.0 was Vancouver island in 1700.
https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/eventpage/official17...
Coincidentally the Japanese recorded a mild tsunami at the time on their side of the Pacific.
Hurricanes and tornadoes are more immediate threats along with a heat wave or a cold snap.
I bought a house here in Japan last year and replaced the gas with all-electric due to concerns of not only leaks and disasters but also just in day-to-day use gas isn't good for indoor air quality.
Cooking is really the only thing where gas has real (e.g., not cost) advantages. Nobody says “this hot water just doesn’t feel right, I like it boiled by dragon’s breath”.
But a steak burned with gas is different than one burned with hot electric.
This is already the norm in lots of Europe. It's not some weird new thing. In Sweden, no mall food courts have natural gas hookups, it's all three-phase electrical appliances. It's been like this forever (since Sweden has craploads of hydro and nuclear and zero gas).
However, you're not really being honest by suggesting things have to either be 110VAC or 5,000V. Even residentially, an electric range isn't often going to be operating at 110VAC aide from some portable single burner things, you'll likely see them operate at 208V or 240V. And when it comes to commerical equipment it'll likely be three-phase, so its not like you need a single massive conductor running thousands of volts to power it. For something like a shopping mall, you're already likely to have some pretty massive electrical infrastructure feeding the facility running at something like 13.8kV. At that step down point, do a few big 480Y three-phase runs over towards the food court, then do 208Y three-phase to the ranges.
To be fair though, I'm mostly speaking from a US-grid mindset here. I don't really know the specifics about what would be done in Japan, but I imagine it would be somewhat similar. I'm also not necessarily arguing they should do it, but its not as impossible or ridiculous as you're making it seem.
Gas was the most efficient way to produce electricity for its time. I agree money should of been piped in to infrastructure upgrades when the ability came yet still.
For example to replicate a gas burner you have to have above 15KW continious power. Good luck wiring that into your apartment, or feeding this with local solar. Or even finding an induction stovetop that won't melt its insides in a year or two at a measly 5KW.
Technology Connections on YouTube has done videos on the topic, comparing electric to gas, showing that even old-school resistive electric is faster than gas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yMMTVVJI4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUywI8YGy0Y
That said, I don't know what's better, a massive lithium battery in the kitchen that can be set into thermal runaway, or a gas line.
But also, most Japanese styles of cooking doesn't need those levels of power anyway. 4-5kW induction hobs running on a proper 240V outlet or whatever the Japanese industrial equivalent is are usually plenty for most professional cooking.
This company appears to be catering to markets (C) and (D), and would be a drop-in replacement for whatever other stovetop they currently have. Most likely it can be a DIY self-install with the exception of capping a prior gas line.
If you require the user to cut new holes in their fancy granite for your custom knobs, they lose the option of going back if they don't like it.
There are some extremely-high end cooktops (e.g. Gaggenau) do require the additional cutouts for controls, but they have already proven their brand with high-end users so they can pull that off. A startup can't.
Stir-frying in a wok, for instance, will not be nearly as lopsided a win, but it will still be more efficient.
Every test done comparing residential gas vs induction burners has shown induction burners heat up pots and pans faster than gas.
Induction puts ~98% of the energy right into your pan. (Based on how losses are measured, some say 90%, whatever, it is way more than 50%!)
> Electrical is inadequate power delivery-wise and requires completely different cookware to the point that it's a different cuisine.
There are Chinese induction wok cooktops that have a curved bottom so a wok fits in and can be heated up all around. Sadly the ones sold here in the states are just 120v, really wish I could get my kitchen stove equipped with one of those running at full power. Though honestly even 240v is limiting.
And that’s before we get into the safety features of modern ones that bring that limit even lower.
It's apparently not great but not substantially worse either, and it's not like 5kW output of gas stoves are plenty for serious cooking in the first place so it's okay.
Where are you getting this from? 15K BTU sure, but 15K watts? Do you mean the entire stove?
For a couple of years I had nothing but a 3.7kW inductions while I lived elsewhere. Two of them melted and warped from the heat to the point of breaking the top glass and forget about wok or steaks.
If all you cook is ramen or oatmeal, induction is fine, yes.
I have an American made dirt cheap entry level induction range. It is nearly a decade old. It gets used for wok cooking almost daily. During holidays I run all 4 burners non stop for hours on end.
Plenty of commercial kitchens are switching to induction as well, it dramatically reduces ventilation costs, and it provides better temperature control. For smaller kitchens, or when a lower cost build out is needed, induction is a huge win.
The technology is reliable, even if you unfortunately got stuck with bad implementations in the past.
The largest burner has an output of 3.5 kW (12K BTU).
Did a general pass before sending my previous comment anyhow, found much the same across the board. What you say reliably checks out with the unit corrected to BTU on the gas side, but not otherwise.
Are you sure you're not mixing BTU and watts?
> If all you cook is ramen or oatmeal, induction is fine, yes.
No, I cook full on meals. Stews, soups, what have you. Power never even remotely came up as a concern. Quite the contrary in fact.
I indeed never used a wok or cooked any steaks though, and probably never will either, so I can't say much about that stuff.
Plus side: works as new, even the original thermal pair shutoffs were never swapped and that's basically the only thing that fails in them.
Soups i can see. Stews.. unless we completely misunderstand each other they're better done in the stove, inside. Not to mention baking some bread. With which an induction top will not help either. To be honest, baking and stewing imo depend more on thermal mass that brings very stable temperature, for which even gas ovens are meh, you're better off with true wood-fueled brick stove, or the result is not even close. One can maybe make an electrically-heated brick stove, but for some reason I haven't seen one. Maybe it's because it'll be slow as hell to heat up. And no authentic crunchy charcoal in your fresh pizza.
I did check for older models as well. Even dug up some stove catalogues from the 70s and 80s to be extra sure. I just genuinely cannot confirm your numbers. I'm about as confident in my unit confusion hypothesis as I can reasonably be.
I'm sure you had the experiences you're recounting, but as far as the numbers go, they do not seem to explain them. Especially since these are the burner ratings, before the heat transfer losses.
If I do accept the unit confusion on your behalf:
15K BTU (your biggest gas burner) -> 55% efficiency (optimistic) -> 8250 BTU reaching the pan
3.6 kW (cheap plug-in induction stove) -> 80% efficiency (pessimistic) -> 10045 BTU reaching the pan
It just doesn't compute.
the main burner is two-row high somewhat like
https://www.hallsintl.com/heavy-duty-gas-stove-2-burners-15k...
If you do get the chance to figure out the exact model you have at home, please do let me know here. Won't blame you if you don't though, I appreciate this is a chore.