Ask any Japanese why the traditional Japanese house is bitterly cold in winter and uncomfortably hot in summer, and he will unfailingly tell you that the design is historically adapted to the climate. Inquire about his purpose in rejecting furniture, thus to kneel daylong on a straw floor mat, and he will explain that the mat is more comfortable. Question his preference for sleeping on a wadded cotton floor pallet instead of a conventional mattress and springs, and he will reply that the floor provides surer rest. What he will not say, since he assumes a Westerner cannot comprehend it, is that through these seeming physical privations he finds shelter for the inner man.
The exquisite traditional Japanese house has been compared to an outsized umbrella erected over the landscape, not dominating its surroundings but providing a shaded space for living amid nature. The outside resembles a tropical hut, while the inside is an interworking of Mondrian geometries. Together they represent the culmination of a long tradition of defining and handling interior space, using natural materials, and integrating architecture and setting. The Japanese house is one of those all too rare earthly creations that transcend the merely utilitarian, that attend as closely to man's interior needs as to his physical comfort.
The classic house evolved over two millennia through the adaptation and blending of two dissimilar architectural traditions—the tropical nature shrine, which was part of the Shinto religion of the early immigrants to Japan, and the Chinese model, beginning with the palace architecture of the T'ang dynasty and culminating in the designs used in the monasteries of Chinese Ch'an Buddhism. The early immigrants, the Yayoi, today are believed to have arrived from points somewhere to the South, bringing a theology that defied the earth, the sun, and all the processes of nature. Their shrines to these gods were like conventional Oceanic huts. Thanks to a peculiar quirk of Shinto, which dictates that certain of these wood-and-thatch shrines be dismantled and built anew every two decades, it is still possible to see these lovely structures essentially as they were two millennia ago. Spartan and elegant in their simplicity, they were lyrically described by the nineteenth-century Western Japanophile, Lafcadio Hearn:
The typical shrine is a windowless oblong building of un-painted timber with a very steep overhanging roof; the front is a gable end; and the upper part of the perpetually closed doors is a wooden latticework—usually a grating of bars closely set and crossing each other at right angles. In most cases the structure is raised slightly above the ground on wooden pillars; and the queer peaked facade, with its visorlike apertures and the fantastic projections of beamwork above its gable-angle, might remind the European traveler of old gothic forms of dormer There is no artificial color. The plain wood soon turns, under the action of rain and sun, to a natural gray varying according to surface exposure from a silvery tone of birch bark to a somber gray of basalt.1
Although the early immigrants lived first in caves and later in roofed pits dug into the earth, by the beginning of the Christian Era the aristocracy was building elevated dwellings on posts, with roofs supported not by the walls but by a central horizontal ridge pole suspended between two large columns at either end of the structure.2
It was, in fact, identical to the Shinto shrine design described by Hearn. As a home for the Shinto gods, this tropical design may well have been adequate, since nature spirits are presumably adapted to the rigors of a Japanese winter, but the Yayoi must have found that it enforced an unwelcome communion with the seasons. Even so, Hearn's description could be applied almost without alteration to the external qualities of the traditional dwelling as it finally evolved. One still finds the thatch roof, the use of pillars to suspend the floor above the ground, unfinished natural wood, and the virtual absence of nails.
During the fifth and sixth centuries a.d. the early Japanese became aware of the complex Chinese culture on the Asian mainland, and by the beginning of the eighth century they had forsworn the primitive tropical architecture of Shinto and begun to surround themselves with palaces and temples modeled on the Chinese. During the Heian era, a Chinese-inspired aristocrat dwelling developed which represented a compromise between Japanese requirements and Chinese models. Although influenced by T'ang Chinese palaces, it was the first indigenous Japanese architectural style and is known as shinden.
The shinden mansion was a sprawling complex dominated by a main building facing a pond, around which were flanked ancillary structures connected to it by open galleries protected only by a roof. These open galleries, being very much the fashion, were also built around the outside of all the larger rooms and served as passageways. There were no solid walls inside the buildings; privacy was obtained by curtains and two-part horizontal doors hinged at the top and attached to the ceiling. Adopting Chinese construction methods, Japanese began roofing the buildings with dark clay tiles instead of native thatch, and walls were frequently surfaced with clay rather than wood planks or woven straw. Exterior woods were painted Chinese vermilion instead of being left to age naturally.
Furnishings were meager, and rooms were not identified according to usage; the building was one large area temporarily divided according to the needs of the moment. Instead of chairs there were movable floor mats of woven straw, while around the exterior of the rooms there were heavy shutters; these could be removed in summer or replaced by light bamboo blinds, which rolled down like window shades. Lighting was not a prominent feature of shinden mansions, and in winter the aristocracy huddled around a smoky fire in almost total darkness, the price of seeing being to open the blinds and freeze.
The shinden style suppressed for a time the indigenous affection for simplicity and unadorned natural materials revealed in the earlier, pre-Heian dwellings. However, it was never really naturalized, and it was eventually to be remembered in Japan's architectural history largely as an aberrant interlude, whose major legacy was the sense of openness or fluid space in the classic Zen house.