As discussed in a previous post, many of the dialect names for irori, including the word irori itself, express the meaning of ‘a place of people/a place where people are’ (hito no idokoro 人の居所); many others, such as hidoko (火所) and hodo (ほど), have the sense of ‘fire place’ (hi-sho 火所). There are places where these same names are used to refer to the kamado, and regions where the word kamado is used to refer to the central part of the irori; thus we can observe the same mixing and blurring of boundaries in the names for the irori and the kamado as we do in the geographical distribution of the things themselves.
In many regions, the kamado is called the kudo (くど), or less commonly the hettsui (へっつい); in Shiga Prefecture and elsewhere, it is called the fudo (ふど). Kudo and fudo are both cognates of hodo and so belong to the ‘place of fire’ group of names. Especially grand kudo can be found in Kyо̄to and Nara in the Kinki region, and the section of the doma where they are installed is called the kamaya (釜屋, lit. ‘pot house’), a name that originally referred to a separate building, and has survived the merger of this building with the main house. The kudo of the Kinki region have characteristically beautiful magatama-shaped (magatama-gata 勾玉形) plan-forms, and are carefully finished in fine plaster, sometimes into pillowy, marshmallow-like shapes.
A collection of magatama (勾玉),the curved, comma or embryo-shaped stone beads produced from the late Jо̄mon period (from roughly the 6th century BC) into the Kofun period (300 AD - 586 AD).
Smaller kudo might consist of just three pots, each with its own fire, pot opening, and ‘feeder opening’ (taki-guchi 焚き口, lit. ‘burning mouth’): the ‘rice pot’ (meshi-gama 飯釜), the ‘greens pot’ (sai-gama or na-gama 菜釜), and the ‘tea kettle’ (cha-gama 茶釜). The image below shows a three-burner kamado constructed in a shallow pit dug into the doma floor, an old method that is often seen in very old minka. Its perimeter would have been spread with nekoda (ねこだ, large mats of woven straw or rope) and a wooden bench (suwari-ki 坐り木) placed in front of it.
The older the style of kamado, the lower the ‘firebox opening’ is. When tending such a stove, one sits on the doma (on a stool or bench) with one’s feet in the shallow excavation; this style probably originated in the pit dwellings (tate-ana jūkyo 竪穴住居) of the Jо̄mon period. Former residence of the О̄ta family (О̄ta-ke太田家, originally in Ibaraki Prefecture, now in the Japan Open-Air Folk House Museum (Nihon Minka-en 日本民家園) in Kanagawa Prefecture.
To borrow a term from the modern gas stove, the largest stoves might have as many as eleven ‘burners’, each with its own fire, arranged in order of size in a curved enclosure that allows a single person to manage each fire and pot from a central sitting position.
In the ‘head house’ of the main family line (honke-suji 本家筋), one of these ‘burners’ will be of extremely large construction, and is called o-kama-san (おかまさん, ‘honourable stove’) or some similar name that conveys a sense of respect. These kama were not for daily use, but were decorated with pine branches or sakaki (榊, Cleyera japonica) cuttings, and enshrined the ‘stove gods’ such as Sanbо̄ Kо̄jin (三宝荒神, often simply Kо̄jin), the Japanese Buddhist deity of fire and the hearth. In Kyūshū, these kama are called doku-don (どくどん), ugama-don (うがまどん), or the like; don (殿, usually dono) is an honorific somewhat higher in respect than san, with the meaning of ‘lord’ or ‘master’. These stoves were only used for once-a-year tasks such as boiling the beans to make miso (味噌, fermented soy-bean paste) or the rice to make mochi (餅, cooked rice that is pounded into a smooth, glutinous, gel-like texture), or on formal ceremonial occasions. There was no real need for such a large kama in the houses of the branch families, as these families would gather at the main house to use its oya-kamado (親かまど, lit. ‘parent stove’), which had to be large enough to accommodate them all.
The image below shows the interior of the kama-ya of an old Yamato (current Nara Prefecture) family minka. Only the lower few kama are for daily use; the majority are о̄ya-kamado reserved for the public or communal events of the branch families of the village. As it is an eleven-burner stove, and tended by multiple people at once, the kamaya space in which it stands is also extremely large.
In the houses of district administrators/authorities (о̄jо̄ya 大圧屋) and other officials, there were ‘parent stoves’ (oya-kamado 親かまど) for use by the villagers (burakumin 部落) for formal events. This large eleven-burner kudo, built in the form of arc, stands at the centre of an expansive kama-ya. Nara Prefecture.
The are also examples of o-kama-san built as stand-alone ‘one-burner’ units, separate from the everyday cooking kudo. The image below shows a huge o-kama-sama in the Rakunan (洛南) area of southern Kyо̄to; it is around 140 cm in both height and width. It has grown to this size over the years as a result of the house custom of adding a coat of plaster to it at each year’s end.
A seemingly standalone o-kama-san used for ceremonial and special occasions. The stove has grown over time as it accumulates new layers of plaster year after year. Kyо̄to Prefecture.
In northern Japan, there are large stoves called to-gama (とがま) that are used for heating up horse feed, but when necessary the pot is changed out and they are put to serving the same functions as the o-kama-san.