The place where the sole or primary irori is located in the minka is the place of everyday family activity. This room or space is called the joi (常居), chanoma (茶の間), daidoko (台所), idoko (いどこ 居常) and the like; it is the ‘gathering room’, the place of dining (shokuji 食事) and danran (団らん or 団欒, lit. ‘group-harmony’), a word without a satisfying English equivalent, meaning ‘sitting in a circle’, as a family. The room with the irori corresponds to the modern ‘dining-kitchen’, usually placed immediately beyond (oku 奥) and ‘upwards’ (kami-te 上手 or uwa-te 上手) of the earth-floored utility area (doma 土間) that contains the main or everyday entrance (о̄do-guchi 大戸口, lit. ‘big doorway’) through which the inhabitants enter the dwelling. In cold regions, there may also be additional irori in the part of the doma used for cooking (suijiba 炊事場), in the board-floored room (ita no ma 板の間) that functions as the ‘kitchen’ (katte かって), and in the façade-facing formal room (dei でい or 出居) used for receiving guests (о̄setsu 応接). Irori may also vary in size and location depending on the activities of the household, for instance in the minka of farming families engaged in supplementary activities like growing tobacco (which must be dried) and raising silkworms (which require a certain minimum temperature).
A family sitting around the irori engaged in danran (団らん), ‘family togetherness’.
In addition to its obvious practical roles in cooking (suiji 炊事), heating (saidan 採暖), drying (kansо̄ 乾燥), and illumination (shо̄mei 照明), the irori is also the locus of ceremonies associated with year’s end (saimatsu 歳末), the new year (shin-nen 新年), childbirth (o-san お産), and other rituals and ritual-like events. Indeed, the irori is perhaps less often written about in an architectural context than in a folkloric one, and it is deeply interesting in this regard.
As the place of the central fire, the irori is regarded as sacred, and actions such as spitting in it or burning impure items in it are taboo. In this light, customs such as smoothing down the ash with a trowel (kana-gote 金鏝), or making patterns in the ash using a metal comb (hai-narashi 灰ならし, lit. ‘ash smoother’), as in the gardens of Zen temples, can be interpreted as functioning to preserve of the purity of the irori.
Image of an irori showing the perimeter area of the pit, the roen ろえん), always kept clean with a straw broom (wara-bо̄ki 藁箒), and the central ‘pit within pit’ part, the hodo (ほど), which contains the fire.
Patterns raked into the ash of an irori.
A metal comb (hai-narashi 灰ならし) used to make patterns in the ash (hai 灰) of the irori.
Kawashima Chūji writes of visiting villages deep in the mountains and often hearing inhabitants claim that the ‘hearth fire’ (ro-no-hi 炉の火) of their house hadn’t once been extinguished since the minka was built. True or not, these stories indicate the importance in the distant past of keeping the ember (hidane 火種) alive at all costs, when starting a fire was an onerous thing. Today we can effortlessly provide every room with light and a heat source, but when the irori was the only source of light and heat in the house, the gathering of the family around the fire carried a different significance. The famous book The Age of Fire (Hi no Mukashi 火の昔) by the Japanese folklorist Yanagita Kunio (柳田国男, 1875 – 1962) goes into great detail on this subject.
The word irori itself is much younger than the thing it describes, first appearing in the Muromachi period (Muromachi jidai 室町時代, 1336 - 1573). Before then, firepits were called hitaki (比多岐), among other names. Unsurprisingly for such a universally distributed and commonplace object, there are a great many regional and local dialect names for the irori, and for its constituent parts. Some of these names are thought to be etymological derivatives of ancient words that are no longer in use (shigo 死語, lit. ‘dead word’). The modern distribution of dialect names is highly complex and confused, and clear classificatory statements along the lines of ‘name x is mainly used in region y’ are difficult to make. There are instances where the same word is used in two regions very distant from one another, and instances where different words are used from village to village and even from house to house in a single region.
Etymologically, most dialect names for the firepit derive from words meaning either ‘place of people’ (hito no i-basho 人の居場所) or ‘fire place’ (hi-sho 火所). Irori can be written 囲炉裏: literally ‘surround-furnace-lining’, meanings which when taken together bear some relationship to the object itself, but they are actually ateji (当て字), characters chosen primarily to represent the phonemes of a word rather than its meaning; irori in fact belongs to the former group of names, with the sense of ‘a place where people are’.
Other dialect names for the firepit with the sense of ‘place of people’ or ‘sitting place’ (za-suru basho 座する場所) are iroi, iruri, irui, iri, ijiro, yururi, yurui, yurori, yuriba, yurube, yurugi, and yurii. Of these, yururi and yurui are in use over a relatively wide area. On the other hand, names for irori that mean ‘fire place’ (hisho 火所) include hidoko, hihodo, shiboto, hibito, hijiro, hijiri, hibata, jiro, and jiru. The jiro in these names has the sense of ‘place’, and is cognate with the shiro of ajiro (網代), a mat of woven flat strips of timber or bamboo, and nawashiro (苗代), a rice seedling nursery. Other names for the irori include hinata, in-naka, en-naka, hen-naka, en-nata, and henaka.
Names for the central part of the irori where the fire burns include hodo, hodonaka, kamado, etc. The perimeter timber frame is variously called the irubuchi, jirobuchi, doenbuchi, hinota; the earthen part within the frame goes by roen, doen, etc., and the perimeter is called the jironohata, robatana, and so on.