HOUSES: INTERIOR.
The sizes of rooms—The absence of
furniture—Sliding-doors—Verandahs—Tenement and other small
houses—Middle-sized dwellings—The porch and anteroom—The
parlour—Parlour furniture—The sitting-room—Closets and
cupboards—Bed-rooms—The dining-room—Chests of drawers and
trunks—The toilet-room—The library—The bath-room—Foot-warmers.
A Japanese room is measured, not by feet and inches, but by the number
of mats it contains. A mat consists of a straw mattress, about an inch
and a half thick, with a covering of fine matting which is sewn on at
the edges of the mattress either by itself or with a border, usually
dark-blue and an inch wide, of coarse hempen cloth. It is six feet
long by three wide; this measure is not always exact, but may vary by
an inch or more in either direction. When a house is newly built, the
mat-maker comes to make mats to fit the rooms in it. But in spite of
the variation, the size of a room is always given in the number of
mats it holds, so that we never know the exact dimensions of a room.
The smallest room has two mats, that is, is about six feet square; the
next smallest is three-matted, or three yards by two. Four-matted
rooms are sometimes to be found; but such rooms are unshapely, being
four yards long by two wide. A room with four and a half mats is three
yards square and has the half mat, which is a yard square, in the
centre. The next size is six-matted, or four yards by three and is
followed by the eight-matted, or four yards square. The ten-matted
room is five yards by four and the twelve-matted is six yards by four.
It is only in large houses that there are rooms with fifteen or more
mats. In some restaurants and story-tellers’ halls we come upon rooms
with a hundred mats. Some rooms have five or seven mats; but they are
really of six or eight mats with the space of one mat occupied by a
closet or an alcove. It will thus be seen that in most rooms the
length is either equal to the breadth or at most only half as much
again. This tends to make the proportion between the two somewhat
monotonous.
[Illustration: A SIX-MATTED ROOM AND VERANDAH.]
The commonest rooms are those with four and a half, six, or eight
mats, that is to say, rooms which are three or four yards square or
four yards by three. Such rooms would be very small in a house built
in European style; there would hardly be elbow-room and one could not
move an inch without knocking down some piece of furniture. But in a
Japanese room there is but little furniture, and certainly none that
one could bring down by knocking against it with the exception,
perhaps, of the screen. Our rooms look very bare to foreigners and
appear to lack comfort to those who have lived in European apartments;
but from the Japanese’s point of view, rooms furnished in the
approved European style suffer from excess of furniture and partake
too much of the nature of a curiosity shop or a museum. This may be
going too far; but there is undoubtedly something repugnant to the
Japanese canons of taste to find all the art treasures of the house
exhibited from day to day on the walls or in the corners of the rooms
to which guests have access. The absence of movable furniture in a
Japanese room, by allowing more free space, makes it look larger than
a European room of the same size. We squat on the mats, and our line
of vision, being consequently much lower than if we sat in a chair,
gives the room a further appearance of greater size. The illusion is
kept up by the lowness of the ceiling, which though seldom more than
eight or nine feet high, seems to be loftier as we squat under it.
The size of a mat being, as already stated, roughly six feet by three,
the yard has naturally become the unit by which other parts of a room
or a house are measured. Thus, the sliding-doors are usually a yard
wide. As these doors are always in pairs and move in two grooves each
at top and bottom, there are a pair in grooves six feet long and two
pairs in those of twelve feet; but in grooves nine feet in length
there are either a pair or two, commonly the latter, in which case
the sliding-doors are each three-quarters of a yard wide. The
sliding-doors are of two kinds: the _shoji_, or paper sliding-doors,
which are partitions admitting light, and the _fusuma_ (also
called _karakami_), or screen sliding-doors, which merely serve as
partitions. The _shoji_ consists of a wooden frame, an inch or more in
thickness, with thinner cross and vertical pieces forming lattices
about nine inches wide by five high. It is covered on the outside with
thin rice-paper, which admits light but is not transparent. It is of
use when there is light on one side as at the verandah or window or
where a room or a passage would be too dark if _fusuma_ were put up.
The _fusuma_ consists of a wooden frame with a few pieces within,
which is pasted over on both sides with thick paper and covered with
ornamental paper. It is quite opaque. The frame and lattices of the
_shoji_ are of plain white wood; but the frame of the _fusuma_ is
often varnished, though it may also be left plain. The _fusuma_
has a small hollow handle, a few feet from the floor, which is
sometimes highly ornamented.
The verandah is also usually three feet wide. It consists generally
of long narrow planks ranged parallel to the grooves of the
sliding-doors, though it is sometimes made up of wider pieces set at
right angles to them. In the former case the planks, as they age,
shrink and leave cracks between, which admit light when the outer
doors or shutters are closed in the daytime. Bamboos are sometimes
laid between the pieces to cover the shrinkage. The shutters run in
grooves on the outer edge of the verandah. They are also three feet
wide and kept in a receptacle at the end of the groove. The last one
only is usually bolted. There are similar shutters at all the windows,
which are also provided with paper sliding-doors and lattices or bars
as precautions against house-breaking. When a verandah runs along more
than one room, there are pillars on its outer edge just inside the
groove of the shutters and opposite the pillars dividing the rooms.
All sets of sliding-doors need a pillar to close against at either end.
The smallest houses are those in the slums which have only three
yards’ frontage and a depth of four yards. The entrance, the space for
kitchen utensils and the sink, and perhaps a closet or cupboard would
leave room for little more than three mats, on which the whole family
live; but as children spend all their playtime outside and come in
only for meals, it is at night that the house is crowded, and even
then as they sleep higgledy-piggledy, a couple or so of children
do not inconvenience their parents to any appreciable extent. A
two-roomed house is common enough and is not confined to the slums.
A childless old couple, when the wife has to do the household work,
find such a house large enough for them. Artisans also live in them.
Three-roomed houses, too, are very common. Houses built in blocks
are oftenest of this size. They are made up of the porch, the
sitting-room, and the parlour or drawing-room. These three rooms are
the essential portions of a house; and larger houses merely add to
them. A visitor calls at the porch, the paper sliding-door is opened,
he is invited to come in, he leaves his hat and greatcoat in the
porch, and enters the parlour. The master, or in his absence his
wife, entertains him there, while the rest of the family remain in the
sitting-room. In cold weather the sliding-doors between the two rooms
are closed; but in summer they are kept open, or frequently doors with
reed screens within the frames are used. These admit the breeze and
let the people in the other room be seen; but the fiction of their
invisibility is kept up and those in the inner room are not obliged to
greet the visitor.
In a four-roomed house the fourth room may be the servant’s room, if
one is kept, a toilet-room, or a reserve room without any definite
purpose. A five-roomed house may be taken as the smallest in which a
man of the middle class would live. One living in a smaller house may
be reckoned among that class; but five rooms are perhaps the fewest in
which one can live with comfort if there are not too many children or
dependants. A servant would be kept and a room assigned to her, though
it would not be exclusively her own as much household work would be
done there. The fifth room would be the anteroom or a private room
where the family effects, especially the wardrobe, would be kept.
Houses with more rooms are pretty numerous; but probably ten rooms may
be put as the limit for the middle class proper, if they do not indeed
exceed its means. The average size for that class may be given as
seven or eight rooms. In such a house there would be, in addition to
the three rooms first mentioned, the anteroom, the servant’s room,
the room for the wardrobe, and one between the sitting-room and the
kitchen or back-entrance where inferior callers, such as tradesmen,
artisans, servants’ relatives, or former dependants would be received.
The eighth room, if there is one, may be reserved for the father or
mother of the master or his wife, who may be staying with them, the
master’s private room, the children’s study, or the student’s room. As
the rooms, with the exception of the porch, parlour, and perhaps the
servant’s room, are not built with a definite object in view, they can
be used in any way. This is in a sense convenient; but it has also
this disadvantage that the very indefiniteness of their object often
makes them inconvenient for any purpose, for in many houses there are
rooms which cannot be utilised, sometimes owing to their exposure
which makes them too cold or too hot for comfort or too dark to work
in, and sometimes by reason of their position which renders them good
only for passages from one room to another.
[Illustration: THE PORCH, OPEN AND LATTICED.]
Although, as has already been stated, there is no hard and fast
rule for the disposition of the rooms, the commonest is perhaps the
following:—At the front entrance there is the porch; the ground in
front of it may be open with only a roof projecting over it, or it may
be enclosed by latticed doors. In the open porch there is a stone step
where the footgear are taken off before entering, while in the closed
one there is a wooden ledge for stepping from the ground on to the
mats. The porch itself, which would correspond to the hall in a
European-built house, is of two or three mats; here the visitor leaves
his hat, greatcoat, and other articles which he would not take into
the parlour. On one side of the porch may be the student’s room if
there is one at all and on the opposite side the porch opens upon the
anteroom. The size of this room depends upon that of the parlour;
sometimes it is of the same size, but more frequently smaller by two
or more mats. Thus, if the parlour is of ten mats, the anteroom has
eight; and if the former has eight mats as is oftenest the case, there
are six in the other. The anteroom opens upon the same verandah as the
parlour; and the two rooms are separated only by sliding-doors, so
that these doors may, when necessary, be removed and the two rooms
run into one. Such a room, which would have from fourteen to eighteen
mats, would be large enough for most purposes. The anteroom thus opens
upon the porch on one side, upon the verandah on another, and upon
the parlour on the third, and on the fourth it usually communicates
directly or indirectly with the servant’s room. In large houses,
however, there is a separate passage from the kitchen to the porch.
Thus, the room is open on all sides though there may sometimes be a
bit of a wall by the doors from the porch and the kitchen. The room
has little furniture, except, perhaps, one or two framed pictures or
writings over the lintels of the doors; and in rare cases there is an
alcove by the wall. Cushions for callers are usually kept in a
corner of the anteroom.
[Illustration: AN EIGHT-MATTED PARLOUR.]
The parlour, the principal room of the house, is always kept tidy. It
has an alcove, six feet long by three deep, consisting of a dais, a
few inches high, of plain hard wood, which will bear polishing, though
a thin matting is sometimes put over it. Not unfrequently, another
piece of wood, generally square, forms the outer edge so that the
thickness of the floor of the alcove can be concealed. The dais has a
special ceiling of its own, or a bit of a wall, of plaster or wood,
coming down over it a foot or more from the ceiling. On the dais is
set a vase of porcelain or metal, bottle-shaped or flat, in which
branches of a tree or shrubs in flower are put in, and on the wall
is hung a _kakemono_, or scroll of picture or writing. These two
constitute the main ornament of the room. New flowers are put in every
few days and the _kakemono_ is changed from time to time. This is the
peculiarity of the _kakemono_ as a piece of house decoration. We do
not exhibit all our treasures in _kakemono_ at the same time, but
hang them one, two, or three at a time according to the size of the
alcove and the _kakemono_ themselves, so that the visitor calling
at different seasons may delight his eyes with the sight of fresh
pictures or writings each time he calls. The inmates, too, do not grow
weary with gazing at the same pictures day after day, but enjoy the
variety the seasons offer. To the Japanese it is a more artistic and
pleasurable method of displaying his treasures than keeping them all,
as it were, on permanent exhibition. The flowers, too, in the vases
are arranged in an artistic style; their arrangement is an art which
boasts many schools and professors and is considered an indispensable
branch of a girl’s education. They are not thrown haphazard in a
bundle into a vase and expected to give pleasure merely by the
profusion of colours and forms, It may be a single stem or half a
dozen with the flowers ranged in relation to one another after fixed
canons of the art.
There are in the parlour as in the anteroom pictures or writings in
frames over the lintels of the sliding-doors. On a line with the
alcove and usually of the same length is another recess, with a
small closet at the top or bottom where the _kakemono_ and their cases
are generally kept. In this recess there are, also, a pair of shelves
at different heights and coming out from opposite walls, the free
ends of which overlap each other a few inches. On these shelves some
ornaments, usually curios, are placed. When unoccupied, the room is
kept clear of any other object. When a visitor calls, even the cushion
is brought from the anteroom for him to sit on, and then a small cup
of tea set before him and a brazier if it is cold and if warm, a
_tabako-bon_. The cushion is round or square; that for summer is made
of matting, hide, or a thin wadding of cotton in a cover of hempen
cloth, while for winter use the wadding is much thicker and the cover
is silk or cotton. It is about sixteen inches at the side if square.
The brazier is of various shapes and makes. It may be a wooden box
with an earthenware case inside or with a false bottom of copper, or
it may be a glazed earthenware case alone; the wooden box may be plain
with two holes for handles, or it may be elaborately latticed;
and sometimes a brazier is made of the trunk of a tree cut with
the outside rough-hewn or only barked and highly polished. The
_tabako-bon_, or “tobacco-tray,” is a small open square or oblong box
of sandal-wood or other hard wood, which holds a small china or metal
pan, three-quarters full of ashes, with a few tiny pieces of live
charcoal in the middle to light a pipe with, and beside it a small
bamboo tube with a knot at the bottom for receiving tobacco-ashes.
[Illustration: A VISITOR.]
The sitting-room has little furniture. An indispensable article in it
is the brazier, usually oblong, with a set of three small drawers one
under another at the side and two others side by side under the
copper tray filled with ashes, on which charcoal is burnt inside an
iron or clay trivet. On this trivet is set a kettle of iron or copper.
The iron kettle is made of thick cast-iron and kept on the trivet
so as always to have hot water ready for tea-making: and the copper
kettle is used when we wish to boil water quickly. Beside the brazier
is a small shelf or cabinet for tea-things. Behind the brazier is a
cushion where the wife sits; this is her usual post. There is also a
cushion on the other side or the brazier, where the husband or other
members of the house may sit.
[Illustration: A SITTING-ROOM.]
As for the other rooms of the house, there is no fixed article of
furniture as much depends upon the uses to which they are put. The
general absence of furniture in the rooms, however, does not imply
that we are absolutely without necessary articles of daily use. The
principle on which we proceed is to keep in a room only such articles
as are in constant use, the rest being put away as soon as they are
done with and brought out again when they are needed. Hence, one
of the most striking features of a Japanese house is the number of
closets and cupboards in it. Indeed, next to the arrangement of the
rooms, the most important consideration in selecting a house is the
number of closets it contains. These closets are three feet deep and a
yard or two in width. Considering the quantity of household goods that
are put away in these closets, there is no inconvenience we feel so
much as their scarcity.
There are no rooms specially set apart for sleeping. This absence of
bed-rooms enables us to put up with fewer rooms than would be required
in a European house for a family of the same size. There are no
bedsteads. A bed consists of one or two mattresses, and one or two
quilts according to the season, and a pillow. These beds are spread in
any room that is handy and put away in the closets in the morning. The
parents and the children, especially if young, sleep in the same room;
and unless there is an out-of-the-way chamber where they can sleep in
peace, their beds are made in the parlour. For if the beds are made in
that room, the others can be swept and made ready for use while the
family are still in bed. In the sitting-room breakfast can be got
ready, while the anteroom can be used at once if a visitor calls, as
he sometimes does very early in the morning or very late at night
when the children have been put to bed. In a two-storied house an
upstair room is often used as a reserve parlour, so that the anteroom
need not be got ready for receiving callers at unseasonable hours. If
the family is a large one, the rest shake down where they are least in
the way. The rooms to sleep in every night are of course assigned to
permanent members of the household; but country-cousins on a prolonged
visit can be put to bed anywhere without much inconvenience. For the
belated guest the bed is spread in the parlour and its usual occupants
are driven into other rooms.
There is no special dining-room. The family take their meals in the
sitting-room. If there is a visitor, a dinner-tray is set before him
as well as before the host in the parlour; thus, there is no need
to have a room set apart for dining. A Japanese at home, then, may
remain all day in one room; he can sleep, take his meals, receive his
friends, or study without once standing up, for the room changes its
character with the articles that are brought into it.
[Illustration: A CHEST OF DRAWERS AND A TRUNK.]
Articles of clothing are put into chests of drawers or wicker-trunks.
Chests of drawers are commonly made in halves with two drawers each,
put one upon the other and fastened by iron clamps. This is to
facilitate their removal, a provision which is of importance where
fires are frequent. The wicker-trunk has a lid which is as deep as the
trunk itself and encloses it, and thus any amount of clothing may be
put into it up to the joint depth of the two. The trunks are hidden
away in the closets; but the chests of drawers, if they cannot be put
into a closet without inconvenience as they are over three feet wide,
are set in a corner or against a wall. Indeed, they are purposely put
sometimes where they can be seen and become part of the furniture of
the room. In large houses where there are godowns, or fireproof
plaster storehouses, the chests are put in them, and only such as
contain articles of daily wear for the season are kept in the house
itself.
If the house is large enough, a special room is set apart for toilet;
but even then, as the toilet-case and its appurtenances can be readily
moved to any other room, the toilet-room is more useful for keeping
the necessary articles than for the toilet itself. And from the way in
which Japanese dresses are worn, that is, as nothing is put on over
the head like a jersey or the feet foremost like the European nether
garments, a Japanese woman can change her clothes without exposing her
body, and it is possible for her to dress or undress in any part of
the house. When she is going out with her children, she often manages
to turn the house inside out by calling upon its inmates to help her
and the children to dress. Tables or desks are set for children in a
spare room or in a corner of one that is occupied; but there is no
nursery, and the children pervade the whole house. They play wherever
they please, and peace prevails only when they are out or asleep.
Nor is there a special room for books, for the library does not find
a place as an important feature in a Japanese house. We Japanese are
not a nation of readers. A man of ordinary education has studied the
Chinese classics and read the legendary histories and quasi-romances
of his country recounting the exploits of the favourite national
heroes; he also reads the papers and some of the current
literature; but his knowledge of books cannot be said to be wide or
sympathetic. What books he has, if they are in the usual Japanese
style of binding, are piled up in small wooden cases with lids in
front. If he has a godown, he keeps the more valuable of his books in
it and only brings out such as he may require at the moment; but there
are not many, besides those with whom literature is a hereditary
calling, with so many books as to need storing in godowns. Far more
Japanese take to the composition of Chinese poems or Japanese odes as
a refined pastime, while a still larger number lose their heads over
games of _go_ and chess. For these they use their private rooms more
frequently than for reading and study.
Public baths are, on account of their great convenience, largely
patronised in Tokyo; but in many private houses bath-rooms are also
built. A bath-room of the ordinary size is three yards by two. The
bath of the commonest kind is made of wooden staves bound together
with metal hoops. It is oval in shape and inside the bath near the
edge a thin iron cylinder with a grating at its lower end passes
through its bottom. Into this cylinder live charcoal is put in to heat
the water of the bath; and a small plank partitions the cylinder to
protect the bather from being burnt by contact with it. Oblong baths
are now made with thick wooden sides and a furnace at one end which is
fed with coke or faggot. The ground of the bath-room is paved with
stone or beaten down with concrete; and on it stands a movable
flooring, a foot or more high, of narrow planks with open spaces
between to allow the water to run down. The bath holds one person or
at most two spare persons, and the water in it is deep enough to cover
the crouching body. The bather always washes himself on the flooring
and gets into the bath only to warm himself.
[Illustration: FOOT-WARMERS.]
Sometimes a small square hearth is cut in the sitting-room or some
other convenient room; and in cold season a wooden frame supported by
four pillars is put over the hearth and covered with a large quilt.
Live charcoal is put into the hearth and the family sit around it with
their knees under the quilt or lie down with their feet stretched out
to the hearth. At other seasons the wooden frame is removed and a
small mat of the same size as the hearth is put over it. As the hearth
cannot be moved about, most people prefer a portable foot-warmer,
which is usually a square wooden box with openings at the top and
sides; one of the sides slides open and through it an earthen pan of
live charcoal is placed inside. A quilt is laid over it as in the
case of the hearth. Another, made specially for putting in bed, is of
earthenware with a rounded top, which takes some time to heat. As the
ordinary cut charcoal is consumed too quickly, balls of charcoal dust
are used in these foot-warmers.