Two ceremonies mark stages in building a Japanese house. The jichinsai, the ground-calming ceremony, is held before construction begins. It asks the guardian deity for protection.
The jōtōshiki, the ridgepole ceremony, comes in the middle of construction. It is held when the frame is finished and the ridgepole has been set in place, to celebrate that stage.
Taian, the tea room at the temple Myōkian in Ōyamazaki, Kyoto Prefecture, has a seating area of only two tatami mats. With its anteroom and service space, the area is only about four and a half mats. It is a National Treasure.
According to the temple’s tradition, Sen no Rikyū built it in the camp of Hashiba Hideyoshi, and it was later taken down and moved to the temple. The attribution to Rikyū rests on that tradition.
The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Ginza, Tokyo, designed by the architect Kurokawa Kishō, was completed in 1972. Its 140 capsules were attached to two main pillars. Each capsule was a dwelling of about 10 square meters. The building was demolished in 2022 because it had aged.
Japan’s first capsule hotel, Capsule Inn Osaka, opened in Osaka in 1979. Kurokawa designed it as well.
In October 1966, the architect Azuma Takamitsu completed Tō no ie, Tower House, in Shibuya, Tokyo. The site measures 20.56 square meters.
Three floor plans adopted in 1951 were called 51A, 51B and 51C after the year. The 51C plan had a floor area of only about 35 square meters. It came to be regarded as an excellent and highly functional plan, and later apartment layouts took it as their prototype.
The designer Suzuki found that a larger kitchen could also serve as the place to eat. The bedrooms could then be divided, while eating and sleeping still happened in separate rooms. This is said to be the origin of the Japanese dining kitchen, the DK.
Around 1212, Kamo no Chōmei completed Hōjōki, An Account of a Ten-Foot-Square Hut. The hut he describes measured one jō, about three meters, on each side, and was seven shaku, about two meters, high.
The pillars were joined with tenons, and the walls were held with latches. The hut stood on a base frame instead of posts set into the ground. An architectural study of the hut notes that this structure assumes the building will be moved. Its materials were carried on two oxcarts.
In a traditional Japanese house, fusuma and shōji are removable partitions. A booklet of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism on Japanese houses describes the tsuzukima, rooms that connect to form a hall. With good use of the partitions, it says, they can serve gatherings of every size, from many people to a few.
A suikinkutsu, water koto cave, is a jar with a hole in its base, buried upside down in a garden. Water drips into it, and the sound echoes inside the jar. Shinagawa City says its history is said to go back to the Edo period. Some sources credit its invention to the tea master and garden designer Kobori Enshū, but this too is only said.
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 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.