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Want your own Japanese coronavirus quarantine room? Cardboard cubicles on sale to general public

Casey Baseel Jul 10, 2020
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Absolutely no tools, tape, or glue required for construction.

Tochigi Prefecture’s Takamura Co. specializes in processed corrugated cardboard products, and a lot of their lineup consists of packing materials, with boxes of various shapes and sizes for personal or commercial use. But what’s getting attention these days aren’t Takamura’s items for holding stuff, but for housing people.

With the coronavirus pandemic creating a sudden need to keep people quarantined from the general population during testing and observation, Takamura is offering what it calls the Cardboard Partition Series. Made of reinforced cardboard, each room is a 2.322-meter (7.618-foot) square with 1.95-meter-high walls, helping maintain social distancing from others in order to lessen the chance of coronavirus transmission. A curtain door provides some extra privacy, and a cardboard beam that stretches across one corner of the interior even provides a rack on which to hang clothes (on cardboard hangers, naturally).

Inside there’s a broad bench to sit on or place a sleeping mat atop, and also a desk for studying, working, or pleasure reading.

▼ Without seeing this guy’s screen, we have no way of knowing if he’s putting together a spreadsheet for his company’s marketing team or just reading SoraNews24’s recent article about that adorable walking Pikachu robot.

What’s really amazing is that the rooms require no tools to assemble, and you don’t even need tape or glue. All the necessary pieces slot securely into one another, making for quick, easy construction.

While it’d be a stretch to say the setup provides all the comforts of home, it does at least allow those waiting through quarantine to have some amount of privacy and personal space, and every bit of psychological comfort is welcome when you’re waiting to find out if you’ve been infected with the plague of the 21st century.

The “1 Unit,” as Takamura calls the most compact room, is priced at 45,000 yen (US$420), but there are also larger 2 Unit and 4 Unit versions.

While these could theoretically be used for more palatial temporary housing, it’s more likely that the extra space will be employed for administrative and/or medical procedures, which is why they can be ordered with panels designating them not only as bed rooms, but also as meeting, medical examination, or changing rooms.

While the target market is no doubt government and medical organizations, Takamura is also offering the Cardboard System Partition to private citizens as well, and orders can be placed through its website here.

Sources: @Press, Takamura Co.
Top image: @Press
Insert images: @Press, Takamura Co.
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[ Read in Japanese ]