Читать книгу A Lateral View - Donald Richie - Страница 13

THE JAPANESE appear to regard their homes in a manner somewhat different from we in the West. In the United States there is the tradition that a man’s home is his castle, much is made of the homemade meal, and it is agreed no other place is like home. In Japan, a man’s castle is usually his office, the simply homemade is often garnished with the more elegantly store-bought, and there are many places which are like home and are treated as such.

With so little attention being paid to home, it is not surprising that Japanese dwellings suffer by comparison. Foreign diplomats even call them rabbit hutches. This description is perhaps occasioned by the fact that Japanese homes are small and crowded and not, as it would first appear, that they are units used mainly for sleeping.

The living space is much less than that enjoyed by those of equal income in other countries. Whole families are crammed into one or two LDKs—the abbreviation for living room, dining room and kitchen squeezed into single or multiple units. The units themselves come in various sizes, none of them large. A san-jo is a three tatami-mat room, a hachi-jo is eight. Tatami mats used to be six by three feet in area, but the newer apartmentsized mats are much smaller. Thus a family of four living in a roku-jo (six-mat) LDK does enjoy a somewhat rabbit-like intimacy.

In the old days before Japan became affluent, four people could perhaps have coped with such restricted space. Bedding and clothing were put out of sight in closets and the tokonoma alcove would hold a space—suggesting flower arrangement. Now, however, the Japanese have become the world’s foremost consumers and buying begins at home. Thus into this room is stuffed the washing machine, the fridge and the freezer, the color TV set, the children’s bunk beds, the piano and anything else which the family has been induced to buy. A consequence is that space is much restricted and a somewhat hutch-like appearance results.

Another consequence is that space has become the greatest luxury to which a Japanese can aspire. It used to be time. Anyone well enough of T not to work on Sundays was considered a kind of temporal millionaire. Everyone else, the temporal poor, worked every day with just one day off a month. Now in the new age of affluence, none (except store employees, and they get a compensatory weekday off) work on Sundays and progressively fewer work on Saturdays as well. Affluence and leisure are now enjoyed by a majority, except that now if you stay at home there is no space in which to enjoy either.

I am, to be sure, describing city conditions. In the country, one might afford a larger apartment or perhaps a house or maybe even the greatest of contemporary luxuries, a garden. But now well over half of all Japanese live in cities and the kukan mondai or space problem affects a majority. Space in any quantity is not to be had except at the most extravagant of prices.

The cost of housing is mainly due, of course, to the postwar rush to the cities, but this has occurred in other countries as well, with results not so spectacularly cramped as those of Tokyo or Osaka. There would perhaps have been ways of using the available land so that more attractive if not more spacious living units could have been created. But the apartment block with its thousands of square little rooms was the design decided upon and some of the results in suburban danchi (housing developments) are more chicken coops than rabbit hutches.

Perhaps one of the reasons for this is the attitude which the Japanese have toward their dwellings. Far from being a castle, a Japanese man’s home often seems merely a place where the wife and kids are kept. It is a kind of base for the husband to operate from, a place where he stores his clothes and where he sleeps. Though consumer interests have tried to make something profitable out of the less proprietary My Car, My House (in that telling order, incidentally) even the use of the gregarious “my,” instead of the egotistical watakushi no (my own), has failed to reverberate except for a time among the very young and the newly married. Tradition, a certain kind of tradition, remains strong, and home is still merely father’s home base.

As a consequence, the Japanese male rarely complains about rabbit-hutchery. He is there only a third of a twenty-four-hour day and unconscious during most of that time, and he also has many alternate homes. The one who really suffers is the wife. She is stuck in her crowded roku-jo day in and day out and can rarely leave her claustrophobic danchi dwelling except to join the throngs at the supermarket. If she seldom complains, it is only because Japanese women seldom complain about anything.

The Japanese male attitude toward the home (and there are many telling exceptions to these generalizations I am strewing about) is that it is but one of the many stations in his busy day (and night). He spends much more waking time at the office than he does at home (which does not say, of course, that he does not also catnap at the office) and, since so much Japanese business consists of businessmen entertaining each other, he spends an unusually large amount of time in bars, night clubs, cabarets and the like.

The phenomenon of going out with the boys for an evening is also known in the West. There, it is greeted with some suspicion, if not cynicism. In Japan, however, it is known that there is no better way of cementing those all important inter/intra-office relations than not going home of an evening. Rather,a bit of night life is enjoyed together.

Back home the wife will already have made the supper (since the husband, traditionally at any rate, is far too busy to let her know whether he is coming home to eat it or not), and she and the kids will be consuming it.

It is here that one might remark upon a remarkable aspect of the attitude toward home: the Japanese male enjoys a plurality of homes. It is not only the roku-jo, it is also the office, the favorite bar, the favorite coffee shop. He tends to be “at home” in any of the many places he chooses to be.

This attitude, in turn, has created the thousands of bars within the cities and, one would think, the tens of thousands of coffee shops. These are places where business is discussed but they are also, for the time being, home itself. It is perhaps for this reason that the vast majority of bars are so-called “bottle-keep” establishments. That is, the known customer (and there are no unknown customers in the better Japanese bars) has a part of himself—his own private bottle, decorated with his name—in this alternate home. In the coffee shop he has his own favorite table, and the help had better realize this as soon as possible. He is, in other words, making his own a number of locations which the West does not regard as particularly homelike.

It is telling, I think, that the Japanese language does not have a word for “home,” or, at least, a word with such AngloAmerican associations. Ie means “house,” not home, and though uchi has homelike possibilities it does not invariably carry the warmer nuances of such redolent phrases as “home, sweet home.” Indeed, a Japanese cannot, strictly speaking, be homesick. He can only be hometown-sick, and the nostalgic word is not uchi but Juru-sato, the home town—again, a plurality.

The Japanese male’s attitude toward home has thus conditioned and created a number of urban attributes in contemporary society. The extended family (the in-laws) was sacrificed with an almost unseemly haste when the kukan mondai made the socalled nuclear family (papa, mama, two kids) the only economical unit. The necessary garden was similarly dismissed (along with the whole idea of Japan’s symbiotic attitude toward nature) when both space and economic considerations made it an impossibility.

On the other hand tradition, when it is useful, is maintained and even strengthened. The Japanese city has always had more bars than the non-Japanese city. These have proliferated to an amazing degree. The foreign visitor, surprised at the number of bars in the cities, wonders that any of them make any money, so fierce would seem the competition. They do, however, because half the population are customers and because these customers, having found a home, are loyal to it. And this was as true in Edo

as it is in Tokyo.

Though the ubiquitous coffee shop is largely a postwar phenomenon, it has been—as its sheer number indicates—incorporated into the home-away-from-home syndrome. It could even be called the daytime bar, serving as a home-substitute the same as its nocturnal equivalent, were it not that here—finally—the female, wife or not, finds her own piece of homelike territory. Though wives do often entertain other wives in their proper homes, the coffee shop offers an attractive alternative.

The coffee shop seems to know this. It is quite different from the European coffee shop. Always snugly enclosed (few open-air terraces in Japan), it contains curtains, easy chairs, personalized coffee cups, an array of newspapers and magazines, air conditioning, lots of green plants—in short, it contains everything the Japanese home is supposed to contain and, due to space limitations, often does not.

Here, as in eighteenth-century English coffee houses—more clubs than shops—men gather to discuss. And here, unlike the eighteenth-century English coffee houses, the women also gather. Each is finding solace and space. Each is experiencing that uniquely Japanese phenomenon (unique in scope at least): the alternate and substitute home.

It would thus seem true indeed that the Japanese regard the concept of home in a different manner. Home is regarded, if one cares to put it this way, in a creative manner. Since home itself is not actually lived in but merely visited by the male, alternate home-substitutes have been created along his daily path. The liability of rabbit-hutch homes has been turned, in a very Japanese manner into a kind of asset—a plurality of homes.

How destructive this is to wife, children and the concept of family—since home is, according to Western ideas, more than a place to sleep—is problematical. Byron has said that “without hearts there is no home.” He was thinking perhaps of the extended family; he was certainly not thinking of the Japanese nuclear family. At the same time, however, he was talking about closeness, family warmth and, I suppose, familial love. It is not that this does not exist in the contemporary Japanese family; just that conditions for its generation are no longer ideal.

—1980