Shōji
障子
sliding paper screens
One of the most defining things about the Japanese traditional home is the shōji. Either a paper sliding door or a sliding paper screen, it shouldn't be confused with the fusuma—a sliding paper door of a different kind. Covered with thick paper, the fusuma are opaque and their function is as room dividers or cupboard doors. Often magnificently adorned by master painters in the past, today they are still often quite prettily decorated.
The shōji on the other hand are absolutely plain. Consisting of panels of latticed wood covered on one side with thin white paper, the shōji slide in grooves and are placed immediately behind the windows of a house. A traditional Japanese room thus requires no curtains. Fitted with solid wooden panels at the bottom, shōji are also used as doors to rooms facing a corridor with windows; many traditional Japanese houses have a corridor running around the front and sides of the house both upstairs and down. The shōji date back to a time when there were no window panes, so having the rooms set back from the windows via a corridor ensured one could stay dry in all but the most severe weather.
In fact, until glass came to be adopted increasingly from the end of the 19th century, the shōji were what would be described in the west as windows. The Japanese word mado (window) really refers only to the window cavity. The shōji were placed inside or just behind it; the windows along the corridor would thus be fitted with shōji just like the doors facing them. To prevent getting the outer shōji wet if it rained hard, one had to slide the amado, a solid wooden shutter, closed in front of the window. The pre-modern Japanese must have spent a lot of their rainy days in semi-darkness.
In fairer weather, the shōji imbue a room with a lovely diffuse light as white as that reflected from snow. Even after window glass had become widely adopted, frosted glass was often used in the outer shōji to achieve the same effect. Window glass in traditional Japanese houses is otherwise perfectly transparent, the window frames frequently being shaped exactly like the shōji of old.
Tending to yellow fairly quickly, the paper used in these screens ideally needs replacing about once a year. Shōji are also notoriously fragile and are forever being torn—especially in households with small people with busy little fingers. If one can't be bothered to replace the entire panel, the alternative is to stick a little square of shōji paper over the hole. About a century ago the repair was a little more elaborate; people would often cut out the replacement piece in a variety of shapes—often birds or animals for the amusement of the perpetrators of the mishap.
Travelling around Japan in 1905, British photographer Herbert Panting aroused great curiosity in children in country inns. "Not only do Japanese rooms have ears," he commented about the flimsy walls, "but they have eyes as well. It is quite a common occurrence to see a human one peeping through some small hole in the shōji. Occasionally you may detect a finger in the act of making such a hole or enlarging one already made." And once, in the dead of night, he threw open the shōji "in time to see three pairs of heels flying down the corridor... while shouts of laughter filled the narrow passage from the inquisitive nē-sans (girls) who owned them."
Ukiyo-e
浮世絵
woodblock prints
Holding pride of place out of all things Japanese in western eyes, ukiyo-e were one of the items which no serious 19th-century travellers to Japan failed to bring back home with them. Ukiyo-e began not as woodblock prints as such, but as a style of painting in the mid 17th century. Melding the styles of the Tosa school (purely Japanese genre painting) and the Kano school (Japanese reworking of Chinese painting) together, the exponents sought subject matter for their e (pictures) in the ukiyo (the floating world)—the term coined for the urban pleasure quarters grudgingly conceded by the dictatorial Tokugawa shoguns, the rulers of Japan between 1603 and 1867.
Combining all the provinces of pleasure of Edo (Tokyo) together—Kabuki theatre, tea-houses, taverns, restaurants and brothels—'the floating world' was the haunt of high fashionistas and constituted a crucible for Japanese culture. Focusing on subjects like geisha, prostitutes, Kabuki actors, erotica and aspects of contemporary life, ukiyo-e also embraced historical subjects, landscapes, ghost stories, naturalism and still-life. Lasting some 150 years, and still highly collectible today, the genre still presents us with a window on a vanished world.
The popularization of ukiyo-e is generally attributed to Hishikawa Moronobu (1618-94), a prominent book illustrator who pioneered the single print. Many of the books of the day (for example, warai-bon; laughing books) were designed for the titillation of the townsman; much of the output was graphically erotic shunga (spring pictures). The skills ukiyo-e artists displayed with using colour and texture to depict clothing found many prints dubbed 'brocade pictures'; these artists were nothing if not versatile. Dab-hands at pornography, Harunobu (1724-70) and his contemporary Koryūsai also made many charming prints of pleasure quarter girls doing more mundane things; the same applied even more to the great Utamaro (1750-1806) whose celebrated bijin-ga (beautiful person pictures) are masterpieces both of composition and technical skill. Capable of consummate depictions of anything and everything (including sex), the innovative Katsuhika Hokusai (1760-1849) also widened the horizons of the medium with many landscapes and travel themes, a genre greatly popularized by Andō Hiroshige (1797-1858).
Although some ukiyo-e had reached Europe earlier in the 19th century via the Dutch (the only people other than Chinese permitted to trade in Japan during the Edo period), it was in France that they had the most significant impact. Popular wisdom had it that the prints were used in Japan to wrap fish, and that they first came to the attention of French aesthetes because they were used to pack Japanese export chinaware. But the first of these notions is sheer nonsense, the second at best apocryphal. Opened in 1862 and renowned among connoisseurs of oriental art, a shop and tea salon called 'La Porte Chinoise' made its reputation above all from importing Japanese prints. The prints soon had a profound influence on French art, first of all on Manet and Degas, then on Toulouse-Lautrec, Monet, Van Gogh and the impressionists. Announcing bold new steps in design and asymmetrical composition, ukiyo-e changed the entire course of Western art and design.
The prints that were most popular abroad in the 1890s were already old as the great masters such as Utamaro and Hokusai had belonged to the century before. Produced in ever larger numbers and pandering increasingly to popular taste, ukiyo-e went into decline quite early in the 19th century. That said, there were still plenty of quality works around produced by 'decadents' such as Toyokuni and Kunisada. Although ukiyo-e declined as such with the demise of the eponymous pleasure quarters, the woodblock print remained a medium of choice for many significant Japanese artists well into the modern era.
Tatami
畳
tatami mats
Despite the westernization of architecture in Japan during the past century, postwar reconstruction and later building sprees, some things never change.
