IN THE HOUSE
A Japanese house is one of the simplest buildings in the world. Its main
features are the roof of tiles or thatch, and the posts which support the
latter. By day the walls are of oiled paper; by night they are formed of
wooden shutters, neither very thick nor very strong. As a rule, the house
is of but one story, and its flimsiness comes from two reasons, both very
good ones.
The first is that Japan is a home of earthquakes, and when an earthquake
starts to rock the land and topple the houses about the peoples' ears, then
a tall, strong house of stone or brick would be both dangerous in its fall
and very expensive to put up again. The second is that Japan is a land of
fires. The people are very careless. They use cheap lamps and still cheaper
petroleum. A lamp explodes or gets knocked over; the oiled paper walls
burst into a blaze; the blaze spreads right and left, and sweeps away a
few streets, or a suburb of a city, or a whole village. The Jap takes this
very calmly. He gets a few posts, puts the same tiles up again for a roof,
or makes a new thatch, and, with a few paper screens and shutters, there
stands his house again.
A house among the poorer sort of Japanese consists of one large room in the
daytime. At night it is formed into as many bedrooms as its owner requires.
Along the floor, which is raised about a foot from the ground, and along
the roof run a number of grooves, lengthways and crossways. Frames covered
with paper, called shoji, slide along these grooves and form the wall
between chamber and chamber. The front of the house is, as a rule, open to
the street, but if the owners wish for privacy they slide a paper screen
into position. At night wooden shutters, called amado, cover the screens.
Each shutter is held in place by the next, and the last shutter is fastened
by a wooden bolt.
The Japanese are very fond of fresh air and sunshine. Unless the day is too
wet or stormy, the front of the house always stands open. If the sun is
too strong a curtain is hung across for shade, and very often this curtain
bears a huge white symbol representing his name, just as an Englishman puts
his name on a brass plate on his front-door. The furniture in these houses
is very simple. The floor is covered with thick mats, which serve for
chairs and bed, as people both sit and sleep on them. For table a low stool
suffices, and for a young couple to set up housekeeping in Japan is a very
simple matter. As Mrs. Bishop, the well-known writer, remarks:
"Among the strong reasons for deprecating the adoption of foreign houses,
furniture, and modes of living by the Japanese, is that the expense
of living would be so largely, increased as to render early marriages
impossible. At present the requirements of a young couple in the poorer
classes are: a bare matted room (capable or not of division), two wooden
pillows, a few cotton futons (quilts), and a sliding panel, behind which
to conceal them in the daytime, a wooden rice bucket and ladle, a wooden
wash-bowl, an iron kettle, a hibachi (warming and cooking stove), a tray
or two, a teapot or two, two lacquer rice-bowls, a dinner box, a few china
cups, a few towels, a bamboo switch for sweeping, a tabako-bon (apparatus
for tobacco-smoking), an iron pot, and a few shelves let into a recess, all
of which can be purchased for something under £2."
These young people would, however, have everything quite comfortable about
them, and housekeeping can be set up at a still lower figure, if necessary.
Excellent authorities say, and give particulars to prove, that a coolie
household may be established in full running order for 5-1/2 yen--that is,
somewhere about a sovereign.
In better-class houses the same simplicity prevails, though the building
may be of costly materials, with posts and ceilings of ebony inlaid with
gold, and floors of rare polished woods. The screens (shoji) still separate
the rooms; the shutters (amado) enclose it at night. There are neither
doors nor passages. When you wish to pass from one room to the next you
slide back one of the shoji, and shut it after you. So you go from room
to room until you reach the one of which you are in search. The shoji are
often beautifully painted, and in each room is hung a kakemono (a wall
picture, a painting finely executed on a strip of silk). A favourite
subject is a branch of blossoming cherry, and this, painted upon white
silk, gives an effect of wonderful freshness and beauty.
There is no chimney, for a Japanese house knows nothing of a fireplace. The
simple cooking is done over a stove burning charcoal, the fumes of which
wander through the house and disperse through the hundred openings afforded
by the loosely-fitting paper walls. To keep warm in cold weather the
Japanese hug to themselves and hang over smaller stoves, called hibachi,
metal vessels containing a handful of smouldering charcoal.
In the rooms there are neither tables nor chairs. The floor is covered
with most beautiful mats, as white as snow and as soft as a cushion, for
they are often a couple of inches thick. They are woven of fine straw,
and on these the Japanese sit, with their feet tucked away under them.
At dinner-time small, low tables are brought in, and when the meal is
finished, the tables are taken away again. Chairs are never used, and the
Japanese who wishes to follow Western ways has to practise carefully how to
sit on a chair, just as we should have to practise how to sit on our feet
as he does at home.
When bedtime comes, there is no change of room. The sitting-room by day
becomes the bedroom by night. A couple of wooden pillows and some quilts
are fetched from a cupboard; the quilts are spread on the floor, the
pillows are placed in position, and the bed is ready. The pillows would
strike us as most uncomfortable affairs. They are mere wooden neckrests,
and European travellers who have tried them declare that it is like trying
to go to sleep with your head hanging over a wooden door-scraper.
As they both sit and sleep on their matting-covered floors, we now see why
the Japanese never wear any boots or clogs in the house. To do so would
make their beautiful and spotless mats dirty; so all shoes are left at
the door, and they walk about the house in the tabi, the thick glove-like
socks.