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.
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.
THE PORCH, OPEN AND LATTICED.