Of Fire Buckets

There's something about Kyoto which has continually perplexed me. All around the city outside of every store and house is a little red bucket with one of two things written on it: For Fire Fighting Use (消火用) or Fire Prevention (防火用). If there are no houses, you find these buckets on corners, in temples, hanging from rafters, absolutely everywhere. Interestingly enough, the other places that I've visited in Japan haven't had these. Only Kyoto.

In the past, this probably made a lot of sense. After all, the entire city was made of wood, and the houses are built extremely close to each other. That means that if one caught fire, it would likely burn down a couple other houses around it before it was put out. This led to huge sections of the city burning down relatively frequently. Long droughts, hot summers, and just general mishaps contributed to this. Of course, in the past, you couldn't just call up your local fire department and ask them to help put it out, so everyone in your neighborhood would try to put the fire out as they gathered more people to carry buckets, etc. All in all, it was a rather organized system, and this prevented the entire city from burning down.

In the modern day and age though, this really doesn't make a lot of sense. Houses are still built with a significant portion of wood, but they also built with concrete, flexible steel, and other materials in order to prevent the collapse of houses in earthquakes and such. If there is a fire, I'm not going to deny that it's useful to have people with buckets to prevent the spread of the flames, but buckets should not be the primary fire prevention here. People have fire extinguishers (消火器) now, and they're in homes and businesses as well. If you're given a choice between a fire extinguisher and a bucket, doesn't it seem more practical to use the fire extinguisher? You might think when would you ever have this choice? Well, sometimes you do. You can run outside and choose. As this picture or this one show.

I actually asked one of my friends this exact same question, and they explained that they don't want the fire extinguisher fumes and excess in their house. Practical enough. But if the fire's big enough, even they would use the fire extinguisher. And in that respect any different from the rest of the world. But these buckets are still everywhere.

The best part of this is that even Amazon, Yahoo, and Rakuten have gotten in on this. You can buy the things for anywhere from 500-1260 yen. Who spends approximately $13 US on a fire fighting bucket they'll never use, I have no idea.

I've come up with a few explanations. They're the only explanations I can find besides the ones given above.

1. It's tradition. Japan, and Kyoto especially, is really big on this. Things are continued just because it's the way that it's always been. "But, we've used buckets for a thousand years. They've always worked in the past." And for that exact reason, their existence continues.
2. It's some law that I haven't been able to find. I've searched all over, but to no avail. It might be secretly one of those things that the Kyoto government has decided for all of its residents to do.
3. Kyoto has this sadistic motive to become the city with the most mosquitoes in all of Japan. Understand that these buckets don't just sit there empty. No, they are always full of water, and the water is never changed. I know this because sometimes they're growing moss and algae. This means that the water is at the perfect speed - meaning nonexistent, and always still - to breed mosquitoes. So far, they're doing pretty well.

Either way I'll give it to Japan. Fire prevention measures are doing well.