Читать книгу Japanese are Like That - Ichiro Kawasaki - Страница 9

2 Paper Houses, Bathhouses, and

Teahouses

TO say, "Japanese houses are made of wood and paper," and let the statement stand, perpetuates a widespread misconception. They are certainly more than that! It is true that most Japanese houses look extremely flimsy to Westerners, especially those small houses which were built by the thousands in the bombed-out urban areas after the war. They are mostly of wooden construction, since timber is used extensively because of its easy availability. But our houses have beams and walls just like wooden houses in other parts of the world. Also, most windows and even sliding doors have glass panes, not just paper and wood. In general, I would say that a middle- or upper-class dwelling in Japan is not much flimsier than a California bungalow.

Several years ago an enterprising American trader started importing prefabricated houses to Japan, thinking that such imports would fulfill a need in this war-ravaged country. Contrary to general expectations, this enterprise did not do at all well. One of the many reasons for the failure was that the standard parts prefabricated in the United States were not suitable for house-construction in Japan. Japanese houses require many extra supports in order to make them earthquake-proof, and this factor was not taken into consideration by the American manufacturer.

The roof of the average Japanese house is quite solid, with thick, well-baked, and often gracefully-curved tiles dovetailing into each other. I have not seen wooden houses in other parts of the world with roofs built in such elaborate and substantial fashion. The roof of a California-style bungalow would not withstand the violent typhoons which sweep our country from time to time. As a matter of fact, after the war the United States Army requisitioned a number of purely Japanese-style houses in many parts of the country and made good use of them as living quarters, with very little alteration.

In the construction of Japanese houses, much attention is paid to ventilation in order to protect against the extreme dampness and sultriness of summer—wide windows, walls of small area, easily-detachable paper partitions, and a floor elevated high off the ground. One unfortunate result of this construction is that it makes Japanese houses extremely cold in winter.

In Tokyo and throughout that half of the country which lies north of it, winter is quite severe and lasts for perhaps six months of the year, from November to April. This is true in spite of the fact that northern Japan lies at a latitude from 38 to 45 degrees north, almost the same as northern California in America, and extending as far south as Spain and Portugal in Europe. Being situated this far south with its shores washed by the warm Japan Current, Japan should be much warmer in winter than it actually is. The reason that the country is unduly cold in winter months is because of the bleak cold wind which blows from the Siberian wilderness; furthermore, these winds are exceedingly damp, making the cold much more penetrating. However, the sky is usually very clear in Japan in the winter, and the sun is quite warm; so much so that Japanese houses have long been constructed in such a way as to take in as much sunshine as possible. All farmhouses in the Kanto plain north of Tokyo, where it is extremely windy during the winter months, have a very tall hedge grown at the back, or north side, of the house, which completely shelters the house. Each house has a spacious veranda facing due south, so as to obtain a maximum of the sun's warmth. In fact the entire house serves as a sunroom, so that the occupants can dispense with any heating arrangement. This ingenious system applies in varying degrees to the construction of almost all our houses.

At night and on cloudy or snowy days when there is no warmth from the sun, the people usually seek the warmth of their kotatsu, a small, square charcoal stove placed on the floor and covered with a wire netting, over which is spread a thick cotton-padded quilt. Several people squat around it and put their legs underneath the quilt, by which means the meager heat generated by the charcoal brazier, or hibachi, keeps their feet and bodies sufficiently warm. In most houses the brazier is built a good foot or so below the matted floor, so that one can sit and stretch his legs toward the brazier without the discomfort that squatting on the floor entails.

Although the exterior of Japanese houses is quite picturesque, especially those in the countryside with thatched roofs, it is the interior of the house which is most striking to Western eyes. The interior of our houses, especially from the point of view of a foreigner seeing it for the first time, is quite bare. The rooms are almost entirely devoid of furniture, the only ornaments being the kakemono, or hanging picture or calligraphy scroll, and perhaps some sprays of flowers arranged in a vase in an alcove. Many Westerners look upon this simplicity as something of a virtue, embodying the refined taste of the Japanese. This simplicity is, in fact, a keynote of all things Japanese. The floor of a Japanese room is covered with thick straw mats, called tatami. They are immaculate and a delight to walk on. Doors and partitions are all sliding ones, primarily in order to save space. Shoji, or detachable partitions, are truly made of "paper and wood," and are strikingly beautiful. They consist of wooden frames with many symmetrical sections, covered with white paper of exquisite quality. Many Westerners are quite entranced with them. On my recent visit to the States I saw that some of my American friends were using shoji which they brought back from Japan in their living rooms as screens, with very pleasing effect. This novel idea, I found, was greatly admired by their neighbors.

A Japanese room is bare mainly because it has to be used not only as a living room but also as a dining room, and often, too, as a bedroom. At night a whole set of bedding is taken from a closet and spread out on the matted floor. In the morning the bedding is again tucked away in the closet. For eating, we take out a small table about a foot high, around which the members of the family squat without chairs. When the meal is over, this table is again placed in the corner. With the room thus bare, it can be used for other purposes. Visitors may be shown into the same room and offered the zabuton, or cushion, to sit upon. Thus a large number of people can live in a comparatively small house, making maximum use of all available space.

I once rented a two-storied Japanese-style residence of medium size in Tokyo. It was a house which normally could have housed five or six members of a Japanese family, living quite comfortably in Japanese fashion. However, I did not care to live in Japanese style, so I furnished the whole house in Western style, by converting and arranging the rooms into living room, dining room, and bedroom. Then much to my surprise I found the house too small even for myself alone! The minimum number of pieces of Western-style furniture I brought in were crowding each other and took up so much space that the whole house looked like a second-hand furniture store.

As I have travelled about various parts of the globe, I have realized what little room the average Japanese needs in his daily living; and thus how eighty-eight million people have managed to live in a country not larger than the single state of California, and furthermore with only eighteen per cent of its total land area being arable. Simplicity, then, by necessity, is the keynote of our living.

My countrymen, if they could afford it, would prefer living in the more comfortable, Western-style houses. In the late 'twenties and all through the 'thirties, when the Japanese economy was on the upgrade, the fashion for a middle-class man was to build his house with a special foreign-style annex. The average house in those days, especially in urban areas, had this extra room, built entirely in the Western style, in which tables and chairs and other Western furniture were placed. This room was used mainly for receiving visitors, so they would not have to go through the ordeal of crossing their legs and squatting on the floor.

The Japanese habit of taking a communal bath is well known. For the sake of the uninitiated, however, a native bathhouse may be described as something like a miniature gymnasium within a wooden building. The bath establishment is divided into two sections, one for men and the other for women. The customer enters the building and takes off his geta, or wooden clogs, and pays a fee of ¥15, or about four cents, at the counter. Then, on a spacious wooden floor, he strips himself and puts his outer garments and underwear in a wicker basket provided to each individual by the bathhouse. He then walks into the bathroom proper, which is partitioned off from the dressing room by glass windows.

In the communal bathroom there is a rectangular wooden or tile tub about twelve feet long, ten feet wide, and three feet deep, which can accommodate from ten to twenty persons at one time. The tub is brimming with hot water, which is usually so exceptionally hot—over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in many cases—that no Westerner with fairer skin would be able to stand it. The prospective bather first washes his body thoroughly with hot water, provided in taps along the walls of the bathroom proper, before he steps into the tub, for he does not dare to pollute the water. My countrymen are most fond of a really hot bath; they immerse their bodies in the deep tub so long that they come out colored as red as lobsters! They then set to rubbing their entire bodies with soap and hand-towels or sponges, all the while helping themselves liberally to warm tap water provided from the outlets along the wall. The floor is spacious enough so that twenty to thirty people can easily squat on it to scrub their bodies and wash their hair. All these washings are carried on outside the tub.

The public bathhouse is most crowded in the evening when most people have finished their day's work; perhaps fifty to one hundred people may be taking a bath at the same time. I should say that while my countrymen display considerable shyness in exposing their bodies in public, in the bathhouse they shake off their diffidence entirely and turn the whole bathhouse into a kind of nudist club! I have said that the communal bathhouse is separated into two sections for segregation of the sexes. This segregation is complete with only one exception: in the bathhouse for a few extra yen one can hire a sansuke, a husky young man to scrub your back. Quite a few bathers ask for the service of this professional man, for he not only scrubs your body but also kneads the muscles of your neck and arms in the bargain. It is certainly pleasing to have one's body massaged by this youthful masseur. Unlike other bathers he appears for his duties with a type of swimming trunks on. Now this male sansuke also performs the same service for nude female bathers in the women's section. Strangely enough, there are no female sansuke in any part of the country.

The Japanese do not share the American's liking for a shower bath. They seldom used it before the Occupation, nor do they particularly like it now. Their idea of a bath is not confined to cleaning the body, for their conception goes beyond this basic operation. They soak their bodies thoroughly in the deep bath and enjoy the pleasant feeling which overheating the entire body gives. To most of my countrymen a shower bath is unsatisfactory in that it does not provide the same enjoyment that is obtained by deep immersion in the tub. A friend of mine, a Japanese, after intensive house-hunting in San Francisco some years ago, finally found a very attractive house for rent. The bathroom, however, contained only a shower, so my friend gave up the house, a very desirable one in every other respect, simply for lack of a bathtub.

The communal bathhouse in Japan has been a time-honored institution for many centuries. On an average, one thousand people a day visit one bathhouse. It naturally serves as a meeting place for the people in the neighborhood. Since my countrymen bathe quite often—some almost every day— they meet their neighbors and friends in the public bath and exchange greetings and gossip. In the large tub in which perhaps more than a dozen persons are enjoying soaking themselves at the same time, some people take advantage of the opportunity to advertise certain stores, boost certain political candidates, or worse still, spread communist propaganda. All these touts feign a casual tone of voice, so that their remarks may be believed by the other bathers.

The Japanese passion for hot baths can be explained by economic and physical reasons. The Japanese house has no heating arrangement in winter, save perhaps for a meager charcoal fire in a small brazier, which is kept barely alive and just hot enough to boil the water of a tiny tea kettle. Most of my countrymen are so poor that they cannot afford even a modest coal or gas stove, let alone a central heating system. As a result, the Japanese may be said to be half-frozen in winter. American officials during the Occupation were often surprised to find Japanese hands icy cold, when they shook hands with visitors arriving in the well-heated American offices in winter time. It is true that some of our office buildings and trains are now moderately heated, but you may count upon our houses being invariably cold. Under such physical conditions, a hot bath naturally provides a very desirable internal heating system for us. By a stay in a really hot bath for quite some time, our bodies remain warm for many hours afterward in chilly rooms, even in ones completely devoid of heat.

A further reason for this communal bath institution is economic. There is a tremendous saving in water and fuel when a thousand people can use the same hot water in a comparatively small tub, instead of everyone taking an individual bath at home.

This discussion of Japanese public bathhouses reminds me of a visit I made to a Soviet bathhouse when I was in Moscow several years ago. I was on the embassy staff there during the war years. I was very curious about many things the Russians did, for example, their not using paper at all after relieving themselves! I found that most Russians, like my countrymen, frequented a public-bath establishment, which was government-owned. My curiosity was aroused and I decided one day to visit a near-by bathhouse, defying the vigilant eyes of the secret police agents who always trailed me, sometimes secretively and at other times straightforwardly. After standing in a long queue, I entered the bathhouse, and upon payment of a few rubles at the counter, I was given a tiny cake of soap, which was about the same size as the free cake of soap given in American hotels. The interior of the bathhouse, both the anteroom in which you undress and the bathroom itself, bore striking resemblances to Japanese public baths. The bathroom, however, was devoid of a tub; instead, the whole bathroom was filled with warm steam vapor. There were the familiar rows of hot and cold water taps along the wall, as in a Japanese public bath. However, the total effect was like that of a Turkish bath. The way the Russians scrubbed their bodies squatting on the tiled floor was pretty much the same as in Japan. Both the Russian and the Japanese people are extremely poor, judged by American standards, and in order to economize both in fuel and water, they too must fall back on the public-bath arrangement.

Another reason for using such hot water for bathing is medical. The Japanese consume a great deal of salt in the form of shoyu, a soybean sauce, salted fish, and pickles. In fact, one of the characteristics of our cuisine is its almost complete lack of sweets. We are inveterate drinkers of unsweetened green tea—at home, in offices, and on trains. Most offices employ young girls whose only task is to make and serve tea to the office staff and to customers and visitors. Now this almost continuous tea-drinking habit is born of necessity. We have to drink copious amounts of tea in order to counteract the effects of the excessive salt we eat. I myself try to subsist on Western food, having been used to it for so long and not being particularly partial to shoyu or rice. However, once in a while I have to eat a complete Japanese meal, and then I become very thirsty and keep on drinking water for hours afterward. Many of my countrymen complain about American food being too sweet. I knew one Japanese admiral in prewar years who, while journeying on the American continent, always carried with him a bottle of soybean sauce and sprinkled it on whatever food was served to him in restaurants. Hot baths with their attendant perspiration serve as a natural antidote against too much salt in the body.

Oddly enough, my countrymen take equally hot baths in summer, for then the weather is not only very hot but also extremely sultry. A hot bath is thought to produce a reaction of cooling immediately after the bath. So there is a national indulgence in boiling hot baths all year round.

Not all Japanese go to a communal bath. The well-to-do have their own bathrooms in their homes. Here the bath is usually a wooden affair, but in some homes it is constructed of marble or tille. Members of a family immerse themselves in the same hot water in the tub, but they soap and scrub their bodies outside the tub, just as do the patrons of the public bath.

Hotspring baths are found almost everywhere in my country. There are actually more than 1,100 mineral baths, of which 656 are thermal springs. The temperature of these hotsprings ranges anywhere from 80 degrees Fahrenheit to 226 degrees. The hottest water used for bathing is that at Kusatsu, a small town one hundred and twenty miles north of Tokyo, where baths are taken at one hundred and twenty degrees, an almost unbelievable temperature for a bath.

Hotspring baths are truly delightful, provided the temperature is not too hot. At many resort hotels, baths are built in a very elaborate fashion, usually with marble, stone, or fancy-colored tile. In these hotels abundant water from the hotsprings is conducted into the great bathroom, in which the big pool is very much like an indoor swimming pool. At the Fujiya, the internationally-renowned hotel in the mountain resort of Hakone, some seventy miles west of Tokyo, there are two strikingly splendid baths, named the Aquarium and the Mermaids. The former has glass walls and is surrounded by an aquarium, while the latter is decorated with fantastically-carved mermaid statues. Immersing oneself in the hotspring pool, which is welling up all the time, and gazing at the fancy goldfish dancing up and down in the floodlit aquarium, one forgets all his worldly cares and finds himself in a state of ecstacy. This is bathing at its best, and one can even imagine that he is bathing in one of those fabulous Roman baths in which many an emperor bathed during the heyday of the great Roman Empire.

Thousands of GI's, officers, and their families who have come to Japan since the end of the war have experienced our hotspring baths. Most of them seem to have enjoyed them very much.

In no other country in the world do the four seasons alternate with such clock-like regularity. It is a surprising fact, considering that Japan, though a tiny country composed of a chain of islands, extends for some 1,500 miles from north to south. European and other countries are subject to a very changeable climate. In the British Isles, whose geographical position is somewhat analogous to Japan, inhabitants often shiver in June and sweat in a December heat wave. Such atmospheric phenomena are utterly unknown in Japan. Punctuality of the four seasons is such that, throughout the country, people stop bathing in the sea abruptly at the end of August and begin again in the middle of July. Likewise, our worst storms seem to come on certain days each year.

Our popular pastimes, apart from baseball and other imported sports, invariably have something to do with nature, for which the great regularity of the seasons is in part responsible. In spring, cherry blossoms bloom early in April. There are many cherry groves, similar in size to the one on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C., to which many people in groups, both large and small, go on picnics. Under the gorgeous cherry blossoms, holiday crowds revel in drinking and other forms of merrymaking. In autumn, when the leaves of trees change color, maple-leaf viewing is the occasion for nation-wide outings. Among the various trees, the Japanese maple is by far the most striking and variegated in color. Here and there in the mountains there are maple groves to which the people flock to admire the autumn brilliance, when the leaves are at their most beautiful. Even bleak winter is not without its quota of nature-loving pastimes. Older people, especially, take delight in admiring snow scenery, when gardens and mountains are wrapped in this white garb. Gazing at the snow scenery from a veranda of a house or inn and sipping heated sake, a native rice wine, out of a tiny cup, has always been a favorite pastime. This type of enjoyment has always been considered highly esthetic by my countrymen. It is customary on such occasions for the participants in the gathering to compose poems. Here there is a joviality and a conviviality with a deeply satisfying inner feeling which gives us lasting pleasure. This type of pastime should have a universal appeal, for is it not friendship at its best?

Flowers, mountains and rivers, mist and rain have been the principal themes of our drawings from ancient times. Thus, early Japanese drawings and paintings were usually devoid of animals or human beings. This innate love of nature in the Japanese people has given rise to such time-honored customs as the tea ceremony, flower arrangement, moon-viewing festival, and the like.

As a result of this inborn love of nature, along with the fact that the Japanese have for centuries been confirmed vegetarians, due to the extensive influence of Buddhism, we are as a general rule not given to brutality. I have known many of my countrymen whose hearts grew faint while visiting the famous Chicago stockyards, and who could not eat meat for several days afterwards.

The Japanese, mainly because of overcrowding and the scarcity of natural resources, have been accustomed to perennial poverty from ancient times and have contrived various methods to compensate for it. Their efforts, however, have not been directed towards conquering nature, but rather in the negative way of making the best of what nature has to offer. They have tried to adapt themselves to nature, rather than to control or subjugate it. I have often questioned whether man can really control or subjugate nature.

Our people have never seriously attempted to utilize the abundant supply of hotspring water in order to provide heat for buildings and homes, even in a small commercial way. Years ago when I visited Iceland, I saw in the outskirts of Reykjavik a greenhouse in which tomatoes were being grown by using the water of a hotspring. Such an idea could be adopted to advantage in Japan, where thermal springs are found almost everywhere. I have told many people here about it, but apparently they are too conservative to utilize this wonderful source of heat. Instead, my countrymen seem to be content with sunshine and a tiny charcoal fire and depend solely on these for heating purposes.

Living like hermits for centuries in the narrow confines of their miniature land, my countrymen have learned to live in utmost simplicity and frugality, and to seek pleasure and contentment in that which nature freely provides.