Home Life in Japan
"The house is so different to ours. Nothing can surpass, I would almost say approach, the spotlessness of a Japanese home of the better class, but you must think of…
From: 1914 C.E. To: 1918 C.E.
Location: Tokyo, Japan
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From Japan at First Hand by Joseph Ignatius Constantine Clarke, 1918.
One often wonders on meeting foreigners long resident in Japan how little familiar intercourse they have had with the Japanese. They may have a quite wide business acquaintance with native business men, but Japanese home life is almost a sealed book to them. There is, for one important item, the linguistic barrier. The foreigner, daunted by the difficulties of Japanese to the outsider, early decides not to study the language seriously, but picks up just enough of the idiom to "get along" with servants, porters, rickisha men, hotel landlords and railroad folk—and "lets it go at that," withdrawing so far as he can into some foreign group that speaks his own language.
With foreign ladies it is much the same, although in their case communion with Japanese homes and home bodies is likely to be limited to native ladies who from residence abroad or attendance at some of the high schools in Tokyo—Miss Tsuda's fine school, for instance—can converse somewhat in English or French. Even then intercourse is restricted, for Japanese women, except among the very rich, have little time for the paying of visits or receiving them.
But outside of this there are obstacles in the nature of things. The two civilizations have run so far apart in home architecture, home fitting and furnishing, in house custom and etiquette, in meals and meal service that, with the best will in the world on both sides, there must be considerable gène.
The house is so different to ours. Nothing can surpass, I would almost say approach, the spotlessness of a Japanese home of the better class, but you must think of a summer pavilion to get an idea of how a private house in Tokyo differs from an American or European house. It does not stand on the street, but back from it behind a wall with a simple gate or gate and portico in the centre. Then there is a house portico and an open door under it. Nowadays there is an electric bell to summon the servant, who appears on her knees with bowed head to take your message and your card. There are usually some flowers or greenery in front, but the garden is at the back. The house is built of wood on a brick or stone foundation, and its rooms through the use of sliding doors or "fusumas" may be opened one into, or cut off from, the other in a way we never attempt, except such exclusion as we get with folding doors or the use of portieres.
The stairs—most of the better houses are two-storied and no more—are apt to be very steep, slippery and narrow and without hand rail or balustrade. The steepness of the stairs comes from the immemorial habit in Japan of making the rise and tread of each step of equal height and width—generally six or seven inches. Originally, no doubt, they were just squared six-inch logs. I always dreaded them, and it in nowise cheered me to see my short-legged friends—men, women and children—skip up and down with ease and even pleasure.
There is seldom a room that is exclusively sitting room, dining room or even bedroom except where there are grown daughters. A man possibly eats as well as sleeps in the sitting room. Then the house is entirely bare of furniture, as we understand the word—no chairs, stools, tables, sideboards, bedsteads, desks, hat-stands; no gilt-framed pictures on the walls. The latter are bare, and inside the framework of pale-yellowish fine-grained hinoki wood the large panels are covered with heavy paper in monochrome—like our cartridge wall paper—generally of grey tint—oftenest light, occasionally dark.
Sometimes, as in the case of the house of a multimillionaire I visited, the walls of a couple of parlours are covered on two or even three sides with great pictures by an old master in black and white and grey—landscapes, mountain, valley or river or sea—with finely wrought effects of cloud and rolling mist. The gentleman in question told me that he had designed the house to enshrine the pictures fitly. Of course, in his large house there are more separate bed-rooms, but they stood bare of furniture for inspection.
In the principal rooms there is an alcove or recess called the tokonoma, with its floor slightly raised above that of the room. It is divided into two parts by a pillar of fine dark wood and the recess on the right generally holds a Japanese cabinet of finely fashioned wood, inlaid perhaps with mother of pearl and supporting a single art object; it may be a bronze statuette or a marvellously carved box in the famous red lacquer. In the recess to the left hangs on the wall the kakemono, or scroll, which generally depicts a mountain scene or sea picture, and at its foot stands a vase with oftenest a single flower, sometimes with two or three sprays, but always in artistic balance. To vary frequently the scroll, the art object, the vase and the flower is the pride of the lady of the house.
In the daughter 's room there may be a swinging mirror, whose lower edge is six inches above the floor, and in one or two other rooms a little stand or two for books and writing material, and in another room there may be a chest of drawers for fine kimonos, but that is all. The rest of the house furnishings and utensils for eating, drinking, reading, sitting, sleeping are kept out of sight in capacious closets about three feet deep that are concealed by the fusumas. The things are only brought out as wanted for immediate use and are religiously dusted, folded and put away.
In every Japanese house, from the highest to the lowest, there is a family shrine. With the very rich it is at times in a separate little temple building standing in the garden, but with the fairly well off it is in a closet in the wall, and often of the costliest kind of carved and gilt metal work and held sacred from passing eyes. It contains the tablets of the honoured and beloved dead of the family, and every morning the first duty is to place there an offering of rice and sake or water as a spiritual refreshment to the souls still hovering nigh.
Halls, passages and stairs in the houses of the better class are of dark-brown natural wood—no paint or varnish, indeed, tolerated anywhere—shining like glass, spotless, dustless from continuous polishing. All the rest of the floor space except the kitchen is covered with springy, soft, finely woven grass matting of pale-gold tint about two inches thick and generally edged with black. It is laid down in "mats" and "half-mats," the mat measuring about six feet by three. A room is spoken of as three mats, four mats, six mats, up ordinarily to ten or even twenty mats. There is a room in a Kyoto abbot's palace of a thousand mats.
Now, it is the mat that makes all the difference between the Western house and the Japanese—the mat and the square flat cushion covered with silk or cotton in scarlet or purple or some rich colour. No heavy Western boot or shoe or high-heeled bottine or even heeled slipper may touch that mat. Apart from the soilure of mud or dust it might bring from the street, the polished floor would be marked and the fine mat cut by the heavy Western heel.
When you enter the house you must take off your shoes. A Japanese lady wears clogs in the street and her feet are encased in white kid gloves or white cloth stockings with a divided great toe, of plainer covering, so she drops her clogs at the door, slips her feet into flat slippers and walks straight in. Some hosts provide heelless cloth slippers for foreigners which slip on over the shoes, but they leave you with a guilty barbarian feeling as you tread the mats within. Better far have double or thick stockings and take off your shoes like a brave man. My toes not being prehensile, I wear the house slippers precariously, generally leaving one or both midway if I attempt to go upstairs or down—to the embarrassing amusement of servants and fellow guests. Mine host is too polite to be other than sympathetic—which is just as bad.
This is the beginning only of the trouble. Nothing seems easier than to sit on a nice cushion on the floor, but to our "Western" knees and anatomical flexures generally a period of helplessness, of extraordinary and particular fatigue in unaccustomed spots—backs, ankles, and what not—soon arrives. Cushions upon cushions and then more cushions barely mitigate it. You can cross your legs Turk-like for about ten minutes; but to kneel and sit back on your heels, the choice Japanese position which they gracefully assume for hours, why, pains, cramps and a fierce desire to lie flat on your back at whatever cost to the etiquette of the situation follow in short order. I can, of course, only speak for myself. Ladies may get along better.
While on this point I may digress far enough to say that a good way to experience all the effects—sitting, eating, sleeping in the same room without furniture—is to pass twenty-four hours in a first-class Japanese inn. As for me, after a stretch of backache I piled up cushions in the tokonoma and then sat some ten inches above the floor and placed my dinner tray on top of an upturned leathern hatbox. When the maid returned with sake or something she went down on her knees at the door and bent to the mat. Raising her head slowly she looked for me in the place where she had left me dejected in the middle of the room. Upon seeing me joyous in my new position her eyes grew large and looked startled, then she burst into a roar of laughter and ran out crying "Dai Bustu!"—which is the style and title of a great statue of Buddha at Kamakura forty-nine feet high. Within five minutes there were four merry maidens on their knees ministering unto me to their interminable joy.
It is notable, however, that the richer Japanese more and more incline to have at least one "Western" room in their houses—that is, a room, generally a large one, with chairs, tables, console, couch and carpet, furnished in fact like a drawing room in which to entertain foreigners. At the home of the Marquis Mayeda not only furniture but modern oil paintings of the French school attracted the wealthy world-farer. Count Okuma, Viscount Makino, Baron Mitsui, Mr. Soyeda, Mr. Asano, Mr. Hayagawa are all cases in point where such examples are set; the lesser rich may be expected to follow.
In addition to these custom and habit drawbacks to interracial comradeship there is the sober fact that the Japanese wife has little time for outside social amenities. Simple as her house is in appearance, it will readily be clear that it is really complex and that managing it through its daily transformations is no easy matter. It calls for three or four servants, willing creatures, who work cheerfully and all the time when not eating or abed. The family garments are in the wife's charge, and as most of them have to be taken apart to be washed and have to be made up anew there is much starching and sewing to be super-intended or done. Her work and her care are endless, particularly if she has daughters. As she has little leisure and her husband and son are much employed outside at business or at school or college she reads little and hears little, and so misses much of that surface knowledge of things which makes five-sixths of our tea table and dinner conversation.
I am indicating that the distaff side of the family has little opportunity for paying visits or receiving them. She is particular too to be properly clad to greet her guests; hence one soon learns that a proposed call should be announced well in advance. Equally it is vain to expect her to return calls promptly. So language, attire, inability to squat gracefully and domestic preoccupation are natural deterrents to social intermingling. Among Japanese women themselves visiting is not over-frequent.
Curious as these differences appear to us, they do not interfere with the real charm of Japanese private life. If the husband gives a party to his male friends the wife seldom appears even when there are no foreigners, and does not expect to. If it is a formal affair a number of geishas are hired to wait at table and dance and sing when the meal is over. It is all a harmless proceeding; the dances symbolize some phase of daily life—the harvest dance or the gold washers dance, for instance—graceful, rhythmic movements to the jingling of a couple of samisen—nothing suggestive or remotely lascivious.
At one private dinner I attended—the first—I thought that the seven attendant geishas were house servants with easy and pleasing manners. They did not dance because, if you please, of the recent death of the Empress Dowager of Japan, so I was told afterward.
Since then I have attended many private dinners. Let me recall one. Mrs. S. was present, but not speaking English was quite silent during dinner, her house servants functioning perfectly without a word or even a sign of direction. After dinner we went to a large sitting room upstairs, and the men had cigars, I sitting, by the lady's special favour, on three scarlet cushions and with my back to a pillar—quite comfortable. The Misses S. her daughters, were introduced—two charming girls—the eldest of rounded oval type with refined features in a blue robe—a real picture of flowering maiden beauty and modest mien. The second, a glad-faced lively girl of twelve, wore brighter colours—orange and crimson.
Mrs. S., gracefully attended by her younger daughter, now performed the tea ceremony with great distinction. It has quite a ritual, every movement being prescribed. Tea is made successively with so many gestures for every guest, a deliciously aromatic and very strong powdered green tea being used. It is served in small bowls and is to be taken in three sips and a half. Then, at her father's request, the youngest daughter danced, using a fan, while one of the maids played on the samisen and sang a "utai" descriptive of the beauties of Kyoto. It was touchingly graceful and gentle. Not to be outdone one of our company sang “Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes."
Mr. S., thus challenged, as it were, sent for a case of books of the No Dance and selecting one sang a little tale of old Japan in a rich, round barytone. Mrs. S now ordered the doors to the room beyond opened and going in played with her elder daughter several melodious pieces on two "koto"—long, low Japanese harps with horizontal strings and played in the Japanese seated position. It was altogether a delightful evening and showed to a nicety the graciousness and sweetness of Japanese home life at its best.
Clarke, Joseph Ignatius Constantine. Japan at First Hand. Dodd, Mead and Company. 1918.
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