all the wall-to-wall carpeting, even the highest modern residential apartment block may not be as thoroughly western as it first seems: living spaces within will usually contain at least one Japanese-style room—distinguished by tatami mats.
"Upon these mats the people eat, sleep, and die," wrote the American Japan-scholar Edward Morse in the 1880s, "they represent the bed, chair, lounge and sometimes table, combined." Though many families nowadays prefer a kitchen table, they will always dine around a low table on the tatami mats when there are guests. Western beds are becoming common, but many people still roll out futon bedding (see overleaf) straight onto the floor. Tatami mats are also resilient, which is why foreigners often find sleeping on a comparatively thin futon far more comfortable than they anticipated.
Popular among the aristocracy during the 8th century, tatami mats were originally used as beds. In a world without chairs, the thin matting hitherto partially covering floors did little to alleviate the discomfort of hard wood, so tatami gradually came to be used as flooring too. Rules came about governing the size—the thickest being an Imperial preserve—but from the Edo period (1603-1868), tatami came to be used increasingly in ordinary homes.
Tatami mats each consist of thousands of stems of a rush called igusa tightly stitched together. Covered with very dose-woven matting, tatami feel smooth to the touch. The sides are trimmed with thin decorative strips of fabric—the quality varying according to the price. Filling the house with a scent like new-mown hay, tatami are a light greyish-green when new, fading to warm yellow as they age. About 10 cm (4 in) thick, tatami are disposed according to set patterns; with eight mats and more, they describe a spiral around the central pair. Tatami mats absorb moisture, providing welcome coolness during the muggy, hot summers; another remarkable property is the recently discovered capacity for absorbing air pollutants such as exhaust gas.
The size of a Japanese room is expressed in terms of the number of tatami mats, running from two, three to four and a half, then six, eight, ten mats and upwards, following the twice-times table. The yojōhan (four-and-a-half mat room) is an exception devised because the Japanese shun the number four on its own. The number four is considered unlucky as the character to describe it can be pronounced 'shi', a homonym for the Japanese word for death.
Tatami sizes are standardized, but there are regional variants, Kyō-ma (from Kyoto) being slightly larger than the smallest Kantō-ma (Tokyo), with Chūkyō-ma (Nagoya) in between. When real estate offices advertise properties they often refer to the Kantō mat, 176 cm x 88 cm (5 ft 9 in x 3 ft), which is now pretty well the national standard—a sign of the current premium on space.
Until very recently there used to be a tatami maker in every neighbourhood but, in the wake of so many cheaper imports from Taiwan and China, their number is decreasing, but not dying out. The mats are generally imported bundled and stitched, but the cutting, covering and custom trimmings are mainly undertaken in Japan—where this beautiful and remarkably practical flooring concept is likely to remain in vogue for quite some time.
Futon
布団
futons
I was forewarned that I would be sleeping on a mattress on the floor when I first went to Japan in 1979, but it didn't bother me over much. The night I first entered my apartment, however, I was a little shaken. There was a bright red plastic television and pristine tatami matting, but nothing else at all—let alone a mattress. Sliding back the paper doors from the cupboard, to my relief, my friends took out a rolled-up mattress and quilt, and promptly made up the bed on the floor. This is the futon, loosely used to refer to bedding as a whole, but actually referring only to the mattress. Though the latter was only 12 cm (5 in) thick, it was cushioned by the resilience of the tatami matting and the arrangement was comfortable.
The futon had by then been through centuries of evolution in Japan. My futon was not, in fact, much like the original thing at all. Cotton on the outside, it was stuffed with a mixture of both natural and synthetic fibers—a combination that made it lighter and warmer than its all-cotton parent. The quilt was essentially a Western duvet. That said, the main ingredient of nearly all today's better futons is still cotton down—as it had been almost exclusively until after World War II, when there was a sharp increase in Western concepts and materials. For a while, until they became standard, my kind of mattress was briefly called yōfuton (Western futon).
Even now, in some traditional inns you can find thin yet fairly heavy cotton futon—much as they were between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They are only slightly better than sleeping right on the floor, which is why people often use two. In the Yoshiwara red-light district in the 1890s, the better class of demi-mondaines liked to boast about using several. To prove it, they would have the maids ostentatiously air them on the brothel balconies alongside quilts made of silks and satins. Today, bedding is still regularly festooned from Japan's more mundane window-ledges and balconies; humidity causes down to be compressed and lose its fluffiness, so futon need to be aired about once a week.
The futon originated in the 17th century, when the wealthy began using mattresses stuffed with cotton down. Everyone else had to make do with bags stuffed with flax, hemp, straw or rushes. In some fishing villages they stuffed their bedding with seaweed. Until quite recently, thickly padded and capacious garments with sleeves were worn in winter instead of quilts or coverlets. These days, over a third of futon in Japan and almost half the quilts are imported—both mainly from China.
Irori
囲炉裏
iron hearths
I remember a country-style tavern in a western suburb of Tokyo. Being directly beneath the elevated train tracks, it was none too bucolic, but although the trains rumbled intermittently overhead, it was hard to tell that you weren't in alpine Nagano prefecture. Wearing a rustic kimono of indigo cotton, Mama-san sat surrounded by a low, square counter of dark polished wood, pouring sake and taking orders as her husband toiled in the kitchen behind her. A long pot-hook hanging from a beam beneath the ceiling supported a large white metal tea-kettle. It was being heated over an irori fireplace—a square-shaped hearth just next to her. Close at hand she kept an oblong box of stainless steel, with four holes devised for heating flasks of sake. The box is actually a tank, filled with water kept constantly heated by the fire just next to it. It was very similar to the one in an illustration of an irori in Edward Morse's Japanese Homes and their Surroundings and captioned "The Best Fireplace". That is apparently how they rated the irori back in 1885; those contemplating the few still extant today would concur.
But in the rustic tavern in suburban Tokyo there was no fire, nor even embers. The sake-warming box was electric. All was artifice. It was just another of those countless city furusato (home-sweet-home) restaurants evoking a lost, idyllic rural past usually fondly imagined rather than actually remembered by the countless legions of urbanites of rural descent. This wasn't a real irori at all—the pot hook hung over a gas ring.
Real irori are still to be found above all in old houses in towns and villages in mountainous districts, and in farmhouses in particular. Houses like this often have very high roofs. There is no chimney, the smoke goes straight up and out in a hole at the top. The floor is raised like a platform and the irori, always square, is sunken into the planking. The base of the hearth is sand, mixed with fine ash, so that it is a uniform grey colour. The fire is concentrated in the centre. Made of wood or iron, the pot-hooks come in several different configurations, often dangling from a chain, which may also be fitted with a rack for smoking fish. Although places still having one today
