Straw Mats and Sliding Doors

Nothing in Japan is crafted without concern for aesthetics. There is great elegance in every bowl, dish, cup, and plate, and an eye for detail in every corner of traditional home furnishings. The beautiful older wooden houses in the country, and in residential suburban areas, are a clear contrast to the chicken-coop apartments in the cities, although even these can contain features of real visual grace. I learned many lessons in Japan, but perhaps the most important one was that it is possible to be elegant, dainty, and pleasing -- even though my natural instinct was to rebel against that last trait in my own behavior. I learned that utilitarianism does not necessarily have to preclude beauty -- nor should it have to do so.

For the gaijin -- "barbarian" -- in Japan, many facts rush at us in our first few days. We are too big. We smell bad. Our feet are abnormally huge. And if you're me, with a gnarly big neb, you have to learn to accept every new acquaintance saying with real shock "Oh! You have a very high nose!" We have to conform to an allotted amount of space, and try not to look "crammed in" but as if we are comfortable sitting on our heels. We have to take off our shoes everywhere we go. We have to remember not to wear jeans unless we want them to have baggy knees (kneeling in jeans will do that for them). We have to learn when to bow (i.e. all the time), how to use chopsticks, and we very quickly have to learn that the Japanese will not meet us halfway with helpful attempts at understanding us, unless they live in Tokyo and are used to daft barbarian behavior. And that's just in the first seventy-two hours or so.

I miss my apartment there to this day. It had two tatami rooms, one small western room; a fair-sized kitchen with toy reizoko (fridge), two little gas burners, and a balcony; a shower/hot tub room, vanity unit and toy washing machine area, and a western-style loo. The tatami rooms had sliding doors and a step up to them. Tatami mats are the thick straw mats that most suburban Japanese still sleep on. They are about three inches thick, and depending on the price can be bound with plain cloth or gold-threaded brocade. A tatami mat averages about 182 cm by 91 cm, the covering is woven soft rushes, and it's  packed with rice straw. Rooms are measured by how many mats they contain, and I don't remember clearly, but think the two tatami rooms we had were either four-and-a-half or six-and-a-half mats each. One end of each of these rooms comprised huge cupboards with floor-to-ceiling sliding doors (shogi) in which to store bedding and clothes.

All homes and apartments have an area by the door (a genkan) where you take off your shoes immediately upon entering.  Then there is one step up into the hallway.  If you put on soft slippers to walk around the house, you take these off, too, in order to step up into a tatami room.  No stomping around on these lovely mats in yer boots, mate! 

We are familiar in the West with futons that come on a sofa frame and fold down into a bed.  Futons in Japan are quite different, and are softer items of bedding that are stored in the cupboards, to be taken out at bedtime and laid on the tatami.  Pillows are small, like everything else, and futons are covered with a duvet or comforter wrapped in its own sheet cover.  Sleeping on these futon, on sweet-scented tatami, is very cozy and comfortable indeed.  Then in the morning, you can drag your futon out onto the balcony and hang it over the railing, holding it in place with special large clips, and air it out.

One of my favorite weekend getaways was to a little traditional inn north of Hamamatsu.  This little onsen was perched on a steep hillside, partly on stilts, with a view over a valley containing rice fields in terraces around the curves of the hills, and tea fields with the bushes in neatly clipped rows.  The onsen itself was wooden, all the shogi doors sliding easily, and paper shogi led onto little balconies with stronger doors looking out over the valley. 

The communal bath house had floor-to-ceiling glass panes set in wood, overlooking the valley.  The inn wasn't on a hot spring, and the water was heated artificially, but a rock pool with surrounding tiles was a great place to relax.  Beside the pool, a row of little showers and shower stools to sit on, let you wash before getting into the water.  It was hot -- as in often too hot for me -- and I had to sit perfectly still, as any movement put more of the body in contact with the water. . .   When you get out of the water, dry yourself with a tiny towel, and put on clean cotton yukata (a kimono-style robe), and go back to your room for dinner.  Comfort!