Hanare Zen

2021: Start selling remote booth

In mid-September 2021, the Japanese company KI Star Real Estate began selling booths for work on to udalenka Hanare Zen. With this project, the developer is trying to solve the problem of lack of space to work from home in a pandemic, COVID-19 offering a tiny home office building to the market, which can be built next to the house in just two days in good weather.

KI Star Real Estate began accepting orders for Hanare Zen, hoping to find a market among those forced to work in cramped homes. Hanare Zen is a 91 cm wide and 1.8 m long building equipped with sockets, a rack-type table and other necessary devices.

Hanare, translated from Japanese, means "separate" or "isolated," and Zenzen is a Chinese character of Zen Buddhism.

In Japan, they began to sell a booth for working at a remote location

We have already created Hanare as a kind of warehouse, and taking into account the situation with the pandemic, the idea arose to develop Hanare Zen as a workspace. The use of Zen in the title is a minimalist concept of reducing the size and functions to everything necessary. The room is intended for people who find it difficult to find a convenient place to work in their home and who do not want to interfere with their family, "said Chisa Uchiyama, a representative of KI Star Real Estate.

Hanare Zen costs $5,000 and is available in Tokyo and nearby prefectures. For some of Tokyo's 70% of the population living in apartments and unable to use structures such as Hanare Zen has become one way to find silence and peace for work. In Kawasaki, the Tokyu Railway Company repaired old railcars and turned them into remote jobs that can be rented for $1.83 per hour at the Train and Bus Museum.

Although Japan did not introduce complete closures, the government asked those who could work as much as possible at home in a state of emergency to avoid overcrowded public transport in cities, as well as reduce the likelihood of infection in workplaces. The current state of emergency, the fourth since the beginning of the pandemic, was extended in Tokyo, Osaka and 17 other prefectures until the end of September 2021 with the possibility of further extension.

In addition to tight living quarters and the lack of digital infrastructure in many companies, as well as the need to visit offices to affix official seals on documents and receipts, it is difficult for many public and private sector employees to work fully. From September 1, 2021, a new Digital Agency was created in Japan, designed to solve these problems and accelerate the digitization of the economy and administrative processes in local authorities, the central government and enterprises.^[1]

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