Peeps at Many Lands: Japan | Page 8

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.

CHAPTER VII
IN THE HOUSE (_continued_)
Even supposing that a well-to-do Japanese has a good deal of native
furniture--such as beautifully painted screens, handsome vases, tables
of ebony inlaid with gold or with fancy woods, and so forth--yet he
does not keep them in the house. He stores them away in a special
building, and a