The corridors of the Ninomaru Palace at Nijō Castle in Kyoto squeak when someone walks on them. The floor is known as uguisubari, nightingale floor. The sound comes from metal clamps that rub beneath the boards.
It is often said that the floor was a kind of alarm, so that an intruder would be heard at once. No official source found for this post confirms that the sound was intended.
In In’ei raisan, In Praise of Shadows, the novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō writes that he likes, above all, the weight of the soup felt in the palm when he holds a bowl of clear soup, and its lukewarm warmth. He also describes listening to a faint hum from the bowl, like the sound of a distant insect.
Kansei kōgaku, kansei engineering, is defined by Nagamachi Mitsuo, professor emeritus of Hiroshima University, as a technology that turns kansei, human feeling and sensibility, into concrete design content. The Japan Society of Kansei Engineering was founded in 1998.
On September 1, 1989, Mazda launched the Eunos Roadster, an open two-seat sports car. Its developers set the keyword jinba ittai, rider and horse as one, and aimed for a car that responds honestly to the driver.
The engine and transmission came from Mazda’s mass-produced units. They were greatly improved to give a pleasant shift feel.
Honda paid attention to the sound of the closing door on its kei car, the N-ONE. In a statement quoted by the news site Norimono News, Honda recalls the saying ii kuruma wa doa no shimaru oto ga chigau, a good car has a different door-closing sound. It adds that the sound may also be a barometer of quality.
Another Honda statement in the same article says that even in a kei car, the sound of the door is one of the points that affect customer satisfaction, although it cannot be expressed in numbers.
In tatamiwari, a way of planning a traditional Japanese house, rooms are laid out from the size of the tatami mat. The kyōma mat measures 6 shaku 3 sun by 3 shaku 1.5 sun, about 1.91 by 0.955 meters. The smaller inakama mat is generally about 1.76 by 0.88 meters, although sources give different figures.
Kiwari sets the proportions of the parts of a traditional Japanese building, the size of each member relative to the others. Shōmei, a manual of the Heinouchi family, master carpenters to the shogunate, records the kiwari for gates, shrines, Buddhist temples, pagodas and buildings in the shoin style. It is dated 1608.
Japan’s national standards for products are JIS, the Japanese Industrial Standards. The law behind them provides both for setting the standards and for running the JIS mark system.
On July 1, 2019, a revision of that law took full effect. It changed the Japanese name of JIS from Nihon Kōgyō Kikaku to Nihon Sangyō Kikaku, from industrial standards to standards for industry as a whole.
Japanese paper comes in A and B sizes. The standard JIS P 0138 defines a B series of its own, separate from the ISO B series. JIS B0 measures 1,030 by 1,456 millimeters, ISO B0 1,000 by 1,414. In Japan, paper in the B series follows the JIS sizes more commonly than the ISO sizes.
Japan laid its first tactile paving blocks, tenji burokku, in 1967. Over about twenty years, they spread to railways, roads and public buildings. Blocks laid in those years came in many shapes and sizes.
In 2001, the standard JIS T 9251 unified the shape and size of their raised dots and bars.