p. 13 | Glimpse of a Japanese Home

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Apr 18, 1907

Glimpse of a Japanese Home

All Japanese houses are built of wood, and apparently of the lightest kind of wood. They all look from the outside like mere temporary, make-believe houses—a summer day’s play-place. But they have their solidities, as one soon learns through intimate acquaintance. They are almost always open on two sides at least, oftentimes on three, and sometimes on all four. That is, they are built in such a way that the side walls may be taken down entirely, leaving only the interior paper sliding walls, or shoji, which can also be slipped from their grooves and stacked away in their own receptacle, built for them at the corner of each room, thus leaving only the roof and upright supports, with perhaps the little exquisitely wrought ornamentations of oddly shaped apertures and wee side windows of finest white pine and oiled paper by which the structure is beautified. The roof is of gray tiles usually, in the better dwellings, and in less pretentious ones of heavy rice straw thatch, out of which grasses and wild flowers grow, to the intense delight of the humble owners. No Japanese house is ever furnished.

To people in the interior of the country, that which we call furniture would be the most remarkable collection of curiosities. They would not have the remotest idea what use to make of it.

It is all rather difficult to a foreigner at first. One must be trained from babyhood to sit upon one’s feet on the floor without discomfort; to eat off the floor without a single breach of “table manners;” to sleep on the floor without getting rheumatism or other aches and pains as bad, and all these things one must do in a Japanese home. And learning to “do without” things is a matter of some difficulty, too. One envies the native who has never learned to “do with” things. A knife and a fork, for instance, seem upon first thought to be a positive necessity. But how quickly one learns to use the dainty little “chop-sticks,” and how out of place knives and forks soon begin to look among the exquisite small bits of fine china on the little lacquer trays which No San carries in with such charming grace!

In the Japanese kitchen there are also interesting things. What a kitchen can be without a stove, without a chimney, even without pots and pans and kettles and big knives and chopping-boards and wooden bowls and flour-bins and rolling-pins and rattling coal-scuttles and things, that a Japanese kitchen is. All of these “conveniences” would be simple pandemonium to a poor little Japanese cook. He knows not the use of a stove. He has only a little hibachi, or earthenware fire-box, in which he puts live charcoals, and all his cooking utensils he could put into one of his big kimona sleeves. And yet what wonders he can perform! He can prepare a meal for twenty persons with less “fuss” than the ordinary cook from County Cork would make over a small luncheon for two; and he knows how to do everything at a minimum expense. Moreover, he is not always “giving notice,” and he is not lord of the premises. He is a servant in the finest sense of the word, as are the servants above and below him.

There is no “servant question” in this little empire of Japan, because the distinctions of caste are too well defined and too rigidly observed to make such a thing possible. Almost every servant has his servant, and when the “butler” gets scolded, he can go and scold the “boy;” when the cook does something he should not, he has a small helper to blame for it. When the gardener gets cuffed, he can cuff the little chap who keeps the weeds out and picks up fallen leaves and feeds the carp in the pond.—Leslie’s Weekly.