Break it down and...

If you rebuild your house you must demolish your current house first thing. It costs you something. And this "something" is really something. It is very close to \3 million just to destroy things. It's partly because of the regulation that requires house wreckers to sort out and properly dispose of the debris and things you won't use in your new house. The more waste---washing machine, sofa, tables, or anything you leave, the more it will cost you.
I decided, therefore, to throw away as much such things as possible before wrecking the house. But in Tokyo you have to pay for the disposal of electric appliances. The only way to do it for free is to make it small, taking it apart to small parts so that garbage collectors do not even want to take the trouble of imagining what their original forms were.
I broke down three oil heaters. As I started the mission, given from my wife to be honest, I noticed one thing. It consists of so many parts put together with so many screws. Old one turned out to use as many as 45 screws (It turned out that newer one uses less screws, possibly reflecting more sophisticated, cost-cutting designing). What it means is that someone screwed them in one by one. It is a massive work.
In the process of disassembly, you will know that an oil heater is made up of a computer (a computer itself consists of so many parts and undergoes so many processes), oil pump, temperature sensor, oil controller, electric fan, oil carburetor, burner... each of which is composed of perhaps more than 10 sub-members. With all the parts (also shown in the picture), it is not hard to imagine how outrageously much it must have cost. When I think about the price of the heater I bought it at (it was less than \20,000), I cannot but think how cheaply those electric appliances are being sold. When you compare it to, say, furniture, it is quite obvious that far more labor is put into an oil heater.
A problem here is that it implies the fate of Japan as a state of industry. If you want to buy such products this cheap, the manufacturers must make them cheap. If a manufacturer pays its workers enough for them to enjoy a living of Japanese standard, it will soon go bankrupt. Naturally it would have no choice but to commission the product to such countries with cheaper labor cost. If you think of how many Japanese people are more or less engaged in the manufacturing business (about 10 million; it is a huge number), it doesn't take a super computer to calculate how many people would lose their jobs when all the factories were relocated in Asian countries. It may not be on such a large scale but it is something that is certainly going on in this country.
We depreciate our strength in engineering. We take it for granted that electric appliances are cheap. We won't buy them until it becomes cheaper and cheaper to the point that manufacturers cannot help deciding to make an exodus. Aren't we slowly killing our industry? If manufacturing industry died in this country, other businesses, bankers, layers, cinema industries, jewelry, cosmetics, or whatever, would be bound to decline because they are just parasites, so to speak^^, getting money from the earnings of manufacturing industry.
It may be the fate of this country. But as a scientist getting paid by manufacturing business, I feel it sad to see such products of elaborate work are sold at prices low enough to hurt the pride of engineers or developers.
As history shows a country in prosperity is sure to fall. Are we going that way?