a work of art or a flower arrangement beneath it.
As each family is affiliated to both the local Shinto shrine as well as a Buddhist temple of one sect or another (not necessarily the local temple), one will find both Shinto household shrines and a Buddhist household altar in the same house.
The Shintō household shrine or kamidana (literally, "god shelf") enshrining the household gods (kami) is traditionally located either in a room near the entranceway (genkan) or the main living room. There will also be a small shrine in the kitchen, for the kitchen gods.
The Buddhist household altars (butsudan) in the countryside are usually very large and elaborate and because of the craftsmanship involved cost many thousands of dollars. Usually a special room is devoted to the butsudan, the design of which, and the image enshrined therein, will vary according to the sect to which the family belongs.
Entering a Japanese house at ground level, there is a small vestibule (genkan) from which one steps up a step and into the house proper. It is here that one removes one's outdoor shoes and, stepping up into the house, dons a pair of slippers, at least as far as the threshold of a tatami room, where even the slippers will be abandoned as they are only worn on the hard floors of the house.
Traditionally, a country house would have had at least one room in which there was an open square-shaped fireplace set into the floor, called an irori, over which cooking would be done, and around which the family and guests would sit. Generally speaking, this room would have no floor above it, and the smoke would exit through a vent in the roof.
Sadly these days, although some still retain a working irori, in one room of most old houses in the village there will be a dip in the tatami, rather like the shallow depression left by a pauper's grave. This is the site of an irori that has been abandoned and covered over with tatami. The main reason for this is that there are now much safer ways of heating and cooking in buildings that are very prone to the risk of fire.
The disappearance of hearths in Japan, however, as in other parts of the world, apart from any environmental considerations or safety precautions, is also, I believe, a symbolic indication of the direction that our sophisticated, so-called civilized cultures are taking us. It has always struck me that the word "hearth" looks as though it is composed of the two words "heart" and "earth," and the world over, the fire used to be the heart of the home and was originally built simply on the earth (Scotland and Ireland often burned earth in the form of peat). These days we are forgetting both heart and earth in our haste toward haste.
♦ The Storehouse (Kura)
Apart from barns and outhouses, it is common for a house to have a special storehouse (kura) close by, or sometimes adjoining it. These buildings have a distinctive design and structure of their own and somewhere on their exterior (a shutter or gable end) bear the family crest. The kura is used for storing furniture and domestic items that are not in use during a particular season. Traditionally, furnishings, such as sitting cushions (zabuton), futons and covers, karakami, pottery, lacquer ware, hanging scrolls, pictures, etc., along with seasonal clothing, will be changed according to the time of year. The furnishings, decorations, and even eating utensils will reflect colors, images, and themes of the seasonal landscape and farming activities outside the house. As in the winter, materials will tend to be heavier and more solid, to create a feeling of warmth within the house, and at the same time often carry images of winter; so in the summer, things will tend to be made of materials light in terms of both weight and color in order to create a general feeling of coolness and airiness during the hot, humid months. At the same time, different utensils and furnishings might be used for special occasions—weddings, funerals, etc.— and need to be stored when not in use. Foodstuffs, such as rice and miso, are also stored in the kura, which is built with thick walls of clay or stone that maintain a stable temperature and humidity throughout the year's seasonal extremes. Of prime importance, of course, is the fact that they are fireproof.
In addition to the kura, in a village like Sora where each household is engaged in either farming or fishing, or often both, there is also at least one barn or outhouse attached or in close proximity to the house. In the case of our own house, there was a barn adjoining the back of the house, with access to it internally from the kitchen, as well as from the outside.
Up until the fifties, each household kept a bullock which was used for a variety of tasks throughout the agricultural calendar. Since then, farmers began to buy gasoline-engined cultivators and, later, small versatile tractors. These tractors consist of an engine on two wheels, with long handlebars for steering and on which the controls are mounted. This two-wheeled tractor is made stable by a variety of combinations—tractor and trailer, tractor and cultivator, and so on.
The bullock and the cadence of its movement—the rhythm of which impressed itself not only physically in the shaping of fields and tracks but also on the temporal frame of work and life—its body temperature, its smell, and voice like the working horse of Britain, has vanished from Noto and the rest of Japan. But now and then, a hint or shadow can be detected in a neglected byre-end of a barn, the grease on the side of a doorway or wall, the warm patina on an old hitching-place, or glimpsed in the minds of the aged in the warmth of his or her voice when reminiscing around the fire or beside the stove on a winter's night.
♦ The Bath (Furo)
Most of our neighbors still heated their baths by burning wood. Some of these tubs were made of cast iron with the fire built directly beneath them. This entailed the installation of a wooden pallet on the bottom of the tub to prevent the bather's lower body from getting burned. But the more traditional types of tub were constructed of cypress wood, with a section built into the bath, incorporating a cast-iron firebox into which the wood was placed for heating the water.
Between 4:30 and 5:00 in the afternoon, depending on the season, when villagers returned from the fields, and before they had their evening meal, the first clouds of blue smoke from their baths would drift between the houses, or lift like a spirit-form of the tree that the wood had once been, into the sky, perfuming the village.
Passing by a house, you would hear the distinctive sounds of water being lifted from the tub and poured over the bather's body with a wooden scoop or plastic bowl, and the "clop" sound as it was replaced on the floor after the ablutions were completed. The bather then stepped into the tub to soak. These sounds would echo and be magnified by the bare walls of the bathroom, as would the voice, often sweetened with saké, of one of our neighbors, the headman on a late summer's night in the bath after a night's drinking.
Regrettably, our own bath had been converted so that the water was heated by a kerosene-fired heater in a system separate from the bathroom and located in the barn, while the kerosene tank was secured to the outside wall just below the window of the bathroom.
In the old days in the village, only certain houses possessed a bathroom, so that those families that had none were invited to bathe in a neighbor's house. In some houses, as many as forty people might have bathed in one tub of an evening.
Generally, the bathroom floor is tiled or is made of concrete with a wooden deck. Sometimes the tub is sealed into the floor which has a drain, and often in older bathrooms there is a pit beneath the tub where a drain is situated. It was in just such a pit beneath the tub in an old house we lived in, in Tokyo, that I discovered a dead rat. The smell had been getting progressively worse each time we entered the house over the period of a week, until the molecules it was borne on began to describe precisely the shape of its origin and its location. One evening I looked beneath the tub with the aid of a torch, and there it was, at the far end. I cut two long, thin pieces of bamboo from our tiny garden and, using them like chopsticks, tried to extricate the corpse, which had by now, in the warmth of spring weather, decomposed and was merely assuming its former shape and offered nothing substantial to take hold of. It simply became rat puree at the ends of the bamboo! I finally had to flush it out
