The weather could not have been better for a day trip from Tokyo, a warm, lushly-cloudless, humidity-free, late summer day. Which was ironic.

Barreling north from the Philippines, a monster of a storm, Typhoon Trami, packing 125 mile an hour winds and life-threatening, flooding rains, bore down on Okinawa on a direct path up through Japan.

So, an excursion about 50 miles due north of Tokyo to visit Sekisui House’s Kanto factory complex—where on a busy season end-of-September day as many as 600 fully loaded trucks will leave the site, carrying factory-produced structural components for about 40% of the world’s largest residential builder’s yearly unit volume—struck a chord on a couple of levels.

Sekisui House established the Kanto campus with its first factories there in 1970, and in the 48 years since, the 80-plus acre facility has grown exponentially, to about 7 times the size of the Tokyo Dome, and it produces lightweight steel frame, heavy steel frame, wooden panels, housing materials, such as ceramic exterior cladding. The site, which accounts for more than 5,600 buildings, over 470 buildings a month, each designed, developed and produced on an on-time basis from an order.

Thing is, while the facility is a hive of construction productivity, it’s more than that.

A seven-home model park serves as a sales center and showcase of the ways Sekisui House fuses age-old artisanal practices with tomorrow’s technology, and literally pushes the envelope in building technologies, design for living, structural resilience, and healthy sustainable living.

An experience—the “Housing Dream Factory”—introduces new technologies, a seismic demonstration visitors can experience a 7-Richter Scale event for themselves, fire-testing, and other smart, healthy, safe features and functionality go into the Sekisui House line of homes.

In light of the typhoon due to arrive within 48 hours of our fair-weather tour of the Kanto facility, homes and communities built to withstand natural disaster events that put as many as four out of five U.S. homes at risk of flooding, wildfires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and drought could not be more timely.

What’s more, Sekisui House’s Kanto site is living testament to the fact that its mission marries profit with purpose that could only be achieved via a triple-bottom-line business philosophy. Environmental capital ranks as a priority equal to quarterly or annual earnings from operations.

Nearby the Kanto factory site, at Sekisui House’s Eco First Park, a team member works all day recycling traditional tatami floor panel mats at carefully separating wood chip boards, from polystyrene foam, from woven soft rush straw, from cloth, a process that takes 10 to 15 minutes in all, and one that he completes with the flair and panache of a teppanyaki chef.

His record, he says, is 40 of the tatami panels in one day.

Throughout his particular part of the large campus of factory buildings, his peers toil in similar work stations, recovering 27 different types of excess or waste building materials from new home sites, and further separating those components into 80 categories of subcomponents, each of which finds reuse in either new building materials or structural cementitious material for breakwaters protecting communities on Japan’s coasts. So committed to its environmental mission is Sekisui House, that it has opened the facility to 35,000 visitors a year--including bus loads of school children--who come to there as learning and discovery lab for how to live more sustainable lives.

Which brings us back to the coming storm.

The visit to Sekisui House’s Kanto facility the day before Typhoon Trami is due to begin savaging Okinawa, and eventually, all of Japan, makes it clear why the organization is focused not only on the safety of its home buyers in the homes Sekisui House builds, but on the safety of a planet at risk of losing climatic balance.

This article first appeared on the website of MFE sister brand BUILDER.