JAPANESE MINKA LXXVI - INTERIORS 17: SLEEPING AREAS 4

The small, close bedrooms discussed in the last few posts, though certainly ‘specialised’ as sleeping spaces, were also commonly used as storerooms for valuables, and sometimes this was their primary role; from the very first time rooms were partitioned off from previously single-space dwellings, there has been a close association between sleeping and storage. Even in the ancient residences of the nobility, the shinden zukuri (寝殿造り), a corner of the dwelling would be enclosed into a nuri-gome (塗籠), a storage room for valuables that was also used as a bedroom. The name nando (納戸) today refers to a storeroom or ‘walk in robe’; but it once also referred to a bedroom of this type. Often the only partitioned room in the dwelling, with solid, windowless external walls on two or three sides, an equally solid partition wall, often of thick timber boards, on the other interior sides, and a single small entrance, these rooms were the obvious choice for the role of ‘safe room’.

An illustration showing a nurigome (at lower left) in a classical shinden-zukuri residence. The design of the partition wall of stout battens and boards, and the closed board door with its kururu-gi bolt and hole to receive the ‘key’, and keyhole, are clearly visible.

The security of these rooms was completed with a type of lock (kagi 鍵) that adds a ‘key’ known as a kururu-kagi (枢鉤, ‘pivot hook’) and a keyhole (kagi-ana 鍵穴) to the basic sill bolt (otoshi-zaru 落し猿, ‘dropping monkey’; or, in this application, kururu-gi くるる木, ‘pivot timber’). The otoshi-zaru is perfectly adequate for locking a room or house against intruders from the inside when people are home, but it can only be operated from its side of the door, so can’t be used to secure an unoccupied room or house when one goes out; further, a ‘snib’ piece called yose-zaru (寄せ猿, ‘closing monkey’) is required to stop the otoshi-zaru from dropping into its sill mortise accidentally when the door is closed, potentially locking the inhabitants out. In the kururu lock, this drawback is turned into a feature: the yose-zaru is omitted and replaced with the kururu-kagi, so that when the door is closed it locks automatically, but the otoshi-zaru can be lifted, and the door opened, from the outside, at least by the person who has the kururu-kagi, but not by anyone else.

A sliding door with three timber bolts: top, an age-zaru (上げ猿 or 揚げ猿, ‘raising monkey’) with yose-zaru (寄せ猿, ‘closing monkey’); middle, a yoko-zaru (横猿, ‘side monkey’); and bottom, an otoshi-zaru (落とし猿 ‘dropping monkey’) or sage-zaru (下げ猿, ‘lowering monkey), with yose-zaru.

An otoshi-zaru bolt in open position. The otoshi-zaru is raised, but the yose-zaru hasn’t been drawn across to hold it in the raised position, suggesting that this door is open and the bolt is being held up by the sill. If someone closed the door from the other side without remembering to draw the yose-zaru across, the otoshi-zaru would drop into its sill mortise, potentially locking the person out.

An old kururu-kagi (枢鉤) on the left, and on the right a diagram showing how it is used to lift a sill bolt (kururu-gi 枢木) from the other side of the door. Also labelled is the door rail (san 桟) which holds the upper part of the bolt.

A scale model showing the inside face of a hinged door with an otoshi-zaru and ‘pivot lock’ (kururu-kagi 枢鉤) coming through the keyhole (kagi-ana 鍵穴), surrounded by an escutcheon (kagi-ana-tate 鍵穴盾). The end of the kururu-kagi has an elbow, and fits into a hole in the otoshi-zaru.

The outside face of the door, showing the handle of the kururu-kagi inserted into the keyhole. When the bent tip of the kururu-kagi is inserted into the hole in the otoshi-zaru and the handle of the kururu-kagi is rotated clockwise, it lifts the bolt out of its sill mortise (visible in this photograph), allowing the door to be opened.

Unlike a modern key, whose uniqueness lies in the arrangement of its teeth, a kururu-kagi is distinguished from other kururu-kagi by its length. Another random kururu-kagi might fit in its keyhole, but if it is too long or too short, it won’t engage with the hole in the kururu-gi. Though kururu-kagi are simple objects, fabricating one would require the skills of a blacksmith, and to make an effective copy a thief would need to know the distance between the keyhole and the hole in the kururu-gi.

The kururu-kagi normally stayed in the possession of the husband and wife; entrusting their daughter-in-law (yome 嫁) with it was an indication of their recognition of her ‘housewife’s rights’ (shufu-ken 主婦権).

JAPANESE MINKA LXXV - INTERIORS 16: SLEEPING AREAS 3

As we have seen, the oldest and most primitive minka either had no bedrooms at all, or, particularly in cold-climate regions, contained small, cell-like rooms that were used exclusively as bedrooms, and the room itself was the bed. Likewise, the inhabitants might have had no bedding other than the straw laid down to sleep on, or only thin boro-boro (暮露暮露, patchwork) or even nettle blankets. In these houses there were no rooms laid with tatami mats, and naturally no closets (oshi-ire 押入) or other facilities for storing bedding either, since none were required: trunks or chests of drawers were enough for the long-term storage of valuables and clothes.

Below are the floor plans of two minka that are representative of bedroom arrangements in cold-climate areas of the country. The first is from a mountainous district in Fukui Prefecture: there are two bedrooms (ne-doko ねどこ), one for the ‘head couple’ (kachо̄ fūfu 家長夫婦), and the other, next to the stable (maya まや), for the young husband and wife; this room sometimes goes by the name umaya-nando (うまやなんど, ‘stable bedroom’). Other than the later addition of a small window, there are no external openings to the main room (de で) whatsoever. The small, windowless bedrooms are dispersed, and occupied according to the composition of the family. While most minka are dark inside, it is only on seeing an interior like this that one truly appreciates the fact that these farmers’ dwellings were, other than for meal-taking, really just for sleeping in.

Plan of the Higashi (東) family house, Fukui Prefecture, is representative of bedroom arrangements in cold-climate minka. The small, windowless bedrooms are dispersed, and occupied according to the composition of the family.

The second plan is from a minka from Tamugimata (田麦俣), Yamagata Prefecture 田麦俣. The o-heya (おへや, ‘honorable bedroom’) is the bedroom of the master and his wife, and the de-beya (でべや, ‘projecting bedroom’) is that of the young couple (waka-fūfu 若夫婦). The subfloor space under the de-beya is used as a chicken coop (tori-goya 鶏小屋, ‘chicken hut’) — perhaps this pairing was to ensure that the young couple rose early. The ko-beya (こべや, ‘small bedroom’) next to the earth-floored niwa (にわ) is the servants’ bedroom.

Another cold-climate minka, the Shibutani (渋谷) family house, Yamagata Prefecture.

In Akita Prefecture, the room behind the chameya (the chanoma 茶の間, ‘tea room’) is the patriarch’s bedroom; the kojiya in the chūmonbu (中門部, the short leg of the L in the L-shaped chūmon zukuri 中門造り minka) is for the young couple, and the ina-beya (稲部屋, ‘rice room’) next to the doma is for the servants.

In the Tо̄hoku region there is a tendency to partition the rear of the interior into multiple cell-like bedrooms, as shown in the example plan below, a magari-ya (曲り屋, another type of L-plan minka) in Iwate Prefecture.

This magari-ya (曲り屋) minka in Iwate contains five bedrooms, each about two jо̄u (帖) in area. The portraits of the occupants are shown above each bedroom: in the first bedroom (A), the ‘head couple’ (kachо̄ fūfu 家長夫婦) — the master of the household (chichi 父, ‘father’) and his wife (haha 母, ‘mother’) — and their younger daughter (shо̄-ni 小２, ‘elementary school second year’); in the second bedroom (B), the master’s mother (obaa オバア, ‘grandma’); in the third bedroom (C), the young couple — the head couple’s oldest son (otto 夫, ‘husband’) and his wife (tsuma 妻, ‘wife’) — and their baby (mago マゴ, ‘grandchild’); in the fourth bedroom (D), the master’s unmarried sister (oba オバ, ‘auntie’) and the head couple’s older daughter (chū-ni 中２, ‘middle school second year’); and in the fifth bedroom (E), the head couple’s three sons: kо̄-ni (高２, ‘high school second year’), shо̄-roku (小ろ６, ‘elementary school sixth year’), and shо̄-ni (小２, ‘elementary school second year’).

The family tree is shown to the right of the portraits, with the composition of each bedroom indicated by the five bubbles (A to E) drawn over their respective occupants.

The family structure and sleeping positions are shown in the diagrams; to quote from architect and scholar Nishiyama Uzо̄ (西山 夘三, 1911-1994):

“In these hiya (ひや, bedroom), slightly larger than one tsubo (hito-tsuba 一坪, roughly 4m²), futon are laid out over the whole floor; they are of course permanent beds (man-nen yuka 万年床). Around the perimeter of the futon are kept changes of clothes, laundry, small sewing boxes and old chests of drawers. The floors of the hiya are a step higher than the uchi (うち) and niwa (にわ); in this, they resemble the nuri-gome (塗籠) of the shinden zukuri (寝殿造り, villa) in which the nobility of the early Heian period lived; on opening the door to enter one of these hiya, more so than entering the typical bedroom, you have the sense that you are entering a sleeping place. The walls and low ceilings are neatly lined with wallpaper (kabe-gami 壁紙), probably to prevent drafts. Because the hiya are only a bit more than two mats (ni-jо̄ 二帖) in area, once they are occupied with chests of drawers, clothes trunks, and so on, there is barely enough room for a person to lie down. Two or three people sleep in these bedrooms. In this particular house there are comparatively many hiya, but not all farmhouses have this kind of bedroom arrangement. There are even examples where five or six people sleep in a single, terribly overcrowded hiya. Adopting this form of bedroom, in which people sleep packed together in such a tight space, is thought to be partly to prevent cold.”

Below is a photograph of the interior of one of the bedrooms (o-heya) in the Shibutani (渋谷) family residence in Yamagata. When a bedroom lacks a high sill to retain straw or husk bedding, as in this case, timber members called ‘straw stops’ (wara-dome 藁止め) may be used instead. They are arranged in a square or rectangle on the floor, then straw is laid down in this ‘bunded area’ to form the bed. In Japanese, railway sleepers are called makura-gi (枕木), ‘pillow timber’, but the wara-dome at the head of the bed was literally that: its upper side was planed into a ‘fish cake’ (kamaboko 蒲鉾) profile and used as a pillow. In the houses of landholders and others, multiple servants would sleep on such a single, long wara-dome, and it is said that in the morning the end of the wara-dome would be struck with a wooden mallet to get them up.

The head ‘straw stop’ (wara-dome 藁止め) set on the floor of a bedroom. It is about 15cm square in section, with its upper face planed into a rounded profile, indicating that it is used as a pillow. Another wara-dome stands upright against the entry door. Yamagata Prefecture.

A ‘fish cake’ (kamaboko 蒲鉾).

As in the layout common in Akita Prefecture mentioned above, there are regions where a bedroom takes up a corner of the earth-floored utility area (niwa にわ). Often this bedroom is in the position where the stable (umaya 厩) would be, or next to the stable, and is called the mukou-zashiki, niwa-zashiki, shimo-zashiki, etc. It is the bedroom for the young couple, for ‘retired’ grandparents, or for servants. Other somewhat ‘out of the way’ or low-status locations for sleeping included the magi (まぎ), a bedroom above the stable for wakaze (若勢, agricultural indentured servants), and the upper floor of the chūmon (the short leg, usually containing a stable) of a chūmon-zukuri (L-plan) minka, which contained a shishi-mado (獅子窓, ‘lion window’, found in the thatched roofs of farmhouses in Akita and Yamagata that functioned both to admit light and allow smoke to escape, named for its supposed resemblance to the head of a lion), and was a sleeping place for children or servants.

The image below shows a bedroom in the Wakayama family (Wakayama-ke 若山家residence, a gasshо̄-zukuri (合掌造り, ‘praying hands construction’) minka in Shо̄kawa village (Shо̄kawa-mura 荘川村), Gifu Prefecture. In addition to the head couple’s bedroom (chо̄da ちょうだ) at the rear of the dwelling, and the chо̄da for female children, the upper part of the enge (えんげ), a dialect name for a hiro-en (広縁), a deep ‘verandah’ (engawa 縁側) on the south side of the dwelling, has been converted into a low-ceilinged mezzanine-type floor (chū-ni-kai 中二階, ‘semi second floor’), which served as the bedroom (shown in the photograph) for the young women of the household. In this region, only the oldest son and his bride were permitted an official marriage; others entered into an arrangement known as tsuma-doi kon (妻訪婚, lit. ‘wife visit marriage’), a form of marriage in which the husband and wife do not cohabitate; instead the husband ‘commutes’ to the wife’s place of residence. This custom is thought to have influenced the location of the bedroom, chosen so as to make it directly accessible from outside.

A bedroom (chouda ちょうだ) in the residence of a large family in Shо̄kawa village (Shо̄kawa-mura 荘川村), Gifu Prefecture. The room is spread with bullrush (gama 蒲, Typha latifolia) mats (mushiro 莚) called gama-mushiro (蒲莚), and contains a trunk (naga-mochi 長持), lantern (andon 行燈), sewing box (hari-bako 針箱), wooden pillow (ki-makura 木枕), and other items, lending it an antiquated atmosphere.　

JAPANESE MINKA LXXIV - INTERIORS 15: SLEEPING AREAS 2

The evolution of Japanese sleeping spaces is perhaps counter-intuitive from a European perspective, where private, specialised bedrooms are seen as the natural developmental end-point. As we will see, in Japan, the general sequence of development has been: single-space dwellings → small, closet-like dedicated bedrooms → larger, more open multi-purpose rooms; and today, with the Westernisation of Japanese dwellings, a return to private, dedicated bedrooms; but this latter development is beyond our scope.

The first houses humans built were built as ‘lairs’. Of all the functions of a dwelling, its most important is as a sleeping place. Primitive Japanese houses were such enclosures: the whole interior was a single space, and the whole space was for sleeping. So long as a degree of inconvenience and discomfort can be endured, all activities other than sleeping can be undertaken outdoors, but for restful sleep, it is absolutely necessary to have a space with an enclosed perimeter, to protect the body against external attack, predation by wild animals, rain, and cold.

Around the Tempо̄ (天保) era (1831 - 1845), the Edo-period merchant and essayist Suzuki Bokushi (鈴木牧之, 1770 - 1842) travelled to Akiyama-gо̄ (秋山郷), a mountainous district straddling Nagano and Niigata Prefectures, an area of extremely remote rural villages where many old customs survived until relatively recently. Suzuki recorded his impressions in the best-seller Hokuetsu-seppu (北越雪譜, Hokuetsu Snow Notes), published in 1837. Hokuetsu (北越) refers to the west-coast ‘snow country’ (yuki-guni 雪国) region, roughly comprised of the current-day prefectures of Fukui, Ishikawa, Niigata, and Toyama. Suzuki writes:

“The people of Akiyama all sleep in their clothes. They have nothing in the way of bedding. On winter nights they build a big fire in the irori and sleep around it. When it is very cold, they gather straw from other places* and make bags with it to sleep in. Those with wives make bigger bags, and husband and wife go together into the same opening.”

*Farmers in this area practiced slash-and-burn cultivation, so had to source their straw from the plains (hirachi 平地).

As various other domestic activities were gradually brought inside, the first thing to be partitioned off from the rest of the space was the bedroom (shinshitsu 寝室, ‘sleep room’), though these rooms also functioned, sometimes primarily, as ‘safe rooms’ for the storage of valuables. In the Japan Open-Air Folk House Museum in Toyonaka, Osaka Prefecture, there is a minka from Akiyama-gо̄, the former Yamada family (Yamada-ke 山田家) residence. This L-plan (chūmon-zukuri 中門造り) dwelling, unlike the one described by Suzuki above, has a bedroom. It is a hiroma-type three-room layout (hiroma-gata san-madori (広間型三間取り), but the interior is largely open: the nakanoma and dei are only divided by sills, and the bedroom (heya へや), though enclosed with board walls, has a mat (mushiro 莚) hanging over it its entrance in place of a solid door. The dwelling itself has reed-thatched exterior walls, and there are no raised timber floor areas; the earth floor of this ‘earth-sitting dwelling’ (土座住まい) is spread thickly with reed heads and varieties of straw. While this minka is still fairly primitive, it at least has a bedroom with solid, carefully built walls, such that the room could have also been used to store valuables, with the addition of a proper door.

Exterior of the former Yamada (山田) family residence, built in 1776.

Interior view of the Yamada family residence, taken from the niwa looking across the living room (naka-no-ma なかのま) towards the bedroom (heya へや) on the left, with hanging mat over the entrance and high sill, and the open formal room (dei でい) on the right.

Plan of the former Yamada family residence. The bedroom (heya) へや) is at the top right.

Bedrooms of this type, which were still being used even into the 1970s in villages in remote or cold regions, were usually extremely ‘close’ and dark, with solid walls on all four sides, broken only by a small entrance. In warmer climates such as that of the Kinki region, they might have been relatively large, perhaps around six tatami mats in area (9.9 m²), but in cold regions like Tо̄hoku, many are as small as two mats (3.3 m²). Such small, dark sleeping closets were thought effective for peaceful rest, to prevent cold, and to protect against the danger presented by bandits and others.

The whole floor of the bedroom would be spread thickly with soft straw, or, in mountain villages, some variety of rice husk (ine-kara 稲殻 or fue-gara). So that this material would not spill out of the room, the entrance sill was set 20 cm or more above floor level, and had to be straddled to enter. In some areas, this high sill is called haji-kakushi (はじかくし, ‘shame/embarrassment hider’); in other areas it is called hako-doko (箱床 lit. ‘box floor’), because the bed entirely occupies the space within the four walls. Often people would sleep on a thin woven straw sleeping mat (ne-goza 寝ござ) or a large hemp ‘wrapping cloth’ (furoshiki 風呂敷) laid on top of the bedding material, but children and others might sleep burrowed directly into the compacted straw. The term ‘permanent bed’ (man-nen-doko 万年床, lit. ‘ten thousand year bed’) is used in Japan today to describe futon that are ‘unmade’, i.e. not stored away every morning as is proper, but left permanently on the floor, suggesting laziness. Obviously loose straw, let alone rice husks, cannot be practically taken up and stored away every day, especially when there is no storage facility, so the bedrooms described above were true man-nen-doko, without the negative connotations implied by the modern usage of the term.

A negoza (寝茣蓙) sleeping mat.

People slept in these bedrooms completely naked (suppadaka 素裸), either covering their bodies with their day-clothes, or drawing over themselves a patchwork (boro-boro) blanket made of boro (襤褸), rags and ragged clothes, stitched together. This latter practice was common enough that there was even a trade in buying up boro in the Kansai region for bulk resale in the Kantо̄ region.

A boro ‘quilt’ from the 19th century.

Even where households had some form of bedding (in the village Suzuki writes of there were two such houses), it was reserved for guests. Suzuki himself was given the use of this bedding when he stayed a night at one of these houses: a thick cloth (tafu 太布) woven from nettle (ira-kusa 刺草, Urtica thunbergiana), which he soon discovered still contained traces of the stinging hairs (ira 刺). Suzuki gives us his thoughts on this experience, writing:

“I slept on this bedding, but that lint found its way into the folds (suso 裾) [of my kimono], and also much into the lining (awase 袷); it is not something that should be near the body.”

From Kantо̄ to the Tо̄hoku region, there were forms of bedding that differed from the simple rectangular blankets found in Kansai: sleeved yogi (夜着 ‘night gown’) that resembled kimono (着物), and another type known as yo-busuma or yu-bushima (夜衾 ‘night fusuma’). Fusuma (衾), not to be confused with the homophonic fusuma (襖), the opaque sliding door panels of traditional Japanese homes, is a type of bedding used to cover the body, first recorded among the nobility of the Heian period (平安時代, 794 - 1185). Later yogi and yo-busuma used by common people were somewhat different to the original aristocratic versions, but retained the names.

A winter yogi.

Kamakura Period (鎌倉時代 1185 - 1333) nobility sleeping on tatami mats under kimono.

JAPANESE MINKA LXXIII - INTERIORS 14: SLEEPING AREAS 1

It is well understood that the external appearance of any vernacular dwelling is an expression of the various factors that make up its local environment and culture, be that climate, material and technological availability, economic conditions, social and legal codes, and so on. Of course, the evolution of a dwelling’s interior is likewise influenced by the same things; but perhaps less often recognised is that the unfixed contents of the dwelling are also vessels of these factors, and so can have equally significant effects on the internal planning and ‘occupational style’ of the dwelling, even when they may have seemingly little to do with architecture.

These effects may be more evident in traditional or historical vernacular dwellings, but they are also present in our own modern houses, though over-familiarity might make them less obvious to us. Carpet, for example, is an ancient technology, but wall-to-wall fitted carpet only really became feasible after the invention of the vacuum cleaner. There is a modern tendency to think that our things are the way they are because we know better than the people of the past, when we are simply responding, often passively or reflexively, to the particular conditions of our time, just as our ancestors did. In the case of architecture, because buildings can become ‘stranded’ by lasting much longer than the conditions that gave rise to them, it is easy to forget that elements of their design that may strike us today as illogical or irrational probably made perfect sense when they were built. Conversely, the conditions of our own time have made possible certain designs and living arrangements that would have been impractical or nonsensical before these conditions existed.

The subject of the next several posts — the bedrooms (shinshitsu 寝室), sleeping spaces (nema 寝間), and sleeping places (shinjo 寝所) of minka — provides, in the story of the evolution of these spaces, an excellent example of the kind of effects that material and technological developments, as manifested in domestic objects — in this case bedding (shingu 寝具) — can have on the internal development of a dwelling.

Two futon laid out in a Japanese-style room (wa-shitsu 和室) in a modern dwelling.