A house organized around the floor
A traditional Japanese house is easiest to understand if you start at floor level. People walk on it in socks, sit on it, eat at low tables set on it and sleep on bedding laid across it. Many of the features that look unusual to visitors, such as the raised entrance, the straw-mat floors and the lack of large furniture, follow from that one decision to treat the floor as a clean, shared surface.
This article gives a general picture. Homes differed a great deal by region, climate, income and period: a merchant’s townhouse in a city, a thatched farmhouse in a snowy region and a warrior family’s residence did not look alike, and most people in Japan today live in modern apartments or houses that borrow only some of these ideas.
From the entrance inward
The home begins at the genkan entrance, a small area of bare floor at a lower level than the rest of the house. Shoes are taken off here and left behind, and a step up marks the point where outdoor space ends and the living space begins. A shoe cupboard often stands beside it, and guests may be offered slippers for the hallways.
Past the step, the main living and sleeping rooms are traditionally covered in woven rush-grass mats. These are laid over a wooden subfloor and form the surface of what is called a washitsu, or Japanese-style room. The mats are also the usual way rooms are measured, so a room is described by how many mats fit in it. Corridors and service areas such as the kitchen are generally wood or, in older farmhouses, packed earth.
Rooms that change their purpose
Rather than assigning each room one function, a traditional house leaves most rooms open to several uses. The same room might be used for a family meal at midday, for receiving a visitor in the afternoon and for sleeping at night. Low tables and cushions come out when needed, and bedding is folded into a closet in the morning. This habit is a large part of what people mean by floor living, and it helps a small house feel less crowded.
The rooms themselves are divided by sliding panels rather than hinged doors. Translucent panels covered with paper are called shoji screens, while opaque, often painted ones are called fusuma. Because the panels can be slid aside or lifted out of their tracks, two or three rooms can be joined into one larger space for a gathering or a ceremony and closed up again afterward. Walls that hold up the roof are fewer than in many other building traditions, which fits the long history of timber framing and nail-free joinery found in Japanese architecture.
The place of honor and the veranda
In the best room, which was used to receive guests, one wall often includes a recessed display space. This is the tokonoma alcove, where a hanging scroll, a seasonal flower arrangement or a single treasured object is shown. It is treated as a quiet focal point, and the seat nearest to it is traditionally offered to the guest of honor.
On the garden side, many houses had a narrow wooden veranda called an engawa. It works as a corridor, a place to sit and a buffer between indoors and outdoors, with sliding shutters that can be closed at night or in storms. Garden design in Japan often takes into account how the garden will be viewed from such a veranda or from the main room.
Household shelves and everyday routines
Many homes also keep a small religious space. Some have a household Buddhist altar for remembering ancestors; others have a shelf for a Shinto talisman. How common this is varies by family, region and generation, and it is not universal.
Other daily customs are practical in spirit. Bedding is aired in the sun, cushions are moved to where people sit, and toilets and bathrooms are often separate small rooms. In a traditional bath routine people wash outside the tub first so the water stays clean for everyone, a point that is also central to onsen culture. Greetings when leaving and returning home are part of the same sense that the house is a shared space with a clear inside and outside.
Seasons and the sense of space
Houses were traditionally built with summer in mind, since heat and humidity are a challenge in much of the country. Open sliding panels allow air to move through the building, and deep eaves shade the rooms. In cooler months, panels are closed, heavier bedding is used and a heated table with a quilt over it, called a kotatsu, may become the center of family life. Some families also change the look of a room by season, swapping screens, floor coverings or the items shown in the alcove.
An appreciation for emptiness is part of this design. The concept of ma, the meaningful gap or pause between things, helps explain why a room may be left nearly bare, and the quiet, worn look of an older house has often been linked to wabi-sabi. These ideas are interpretations rather than rules, and individual households live in very different ways.
Old and new together
Modern Japanese housing usually combines styles. A typical apartment may have a chair-and-table living area, a bed in the bedroom and one small mat-floored room kept for guests, prayers or a child’s play. Shoes still come off at the door. The old pattern survives less as a strict design than as a set of habits: keep the floor clean, keep rooms flexible, and notice the season.