kitchen and passages are not matted, but have a wooden floor, which is kept brightly polished. But the passages are few in a Japanese house, each room opening as a rule into the others on either side.
When a house has a second storey, this generally covers but a portion of the ground floor. The steps leading up to it resemble a ladder rather than a staircase. The best rooms in a Japanese house are almost invariably at the back, where also is the garden; and they face south, so as to escape the northern blast in winter and to get the benefit of the breeze in summer, which then always blows from the south. They generally have a recess or alcove, ornamented with a painted or written scroll (kakemono) and a vase of flowers. Furniture is conspicuous by its absence. There are no tables, no chairs, no wash-hand-stands, no pianoforte,—none of all those thousand and one things which we cannot do without. The necessity for bedsteads is obviated by quilts, which are brought in at night and laid down wherever may happen to be most convenient. No mahogany dining-table is required in a family where each member is served separately on a little lacquer tray. Cupboards are, for the most part, openings in the wall, screened in by small paper slides, not separate, movable entities. Whatever treasures the family may possess are mostly stowed in an adjacent building, known in the local English dialect as a "godown," that is, a fire-proof storehouse with walls of mud or clay.[1]
These details will probably suggest a very uncomfortable sum total; and Japanese houses are supremely uncomfortable to ninety-nine Europeans out of a hundred. Nothing to sit on, nothing but a brazier to warm oneself by, and yet abundant danger of fire, no solidity, no privacy, the deafening clatter twice daily of the opening and shutting of the outer wooden slides, draughts insidiously pouring in through innumerable chinks and crannies, darkness
- ↑ "Godown" (pronounced go-down, not god-own) seems to be a Telugu or Tamil word, which passed first into Malay, and was adopted thence into Asiatic English. See that most delightful of dictionaries, Yule's Hobson-Jobson.
