The Real Thing

Our original plan was to to keep as much of the old house as possible. The main tatami room--eight mats plus a four-mat sized engawa--has everything that makes the perfect Japanese room. All the colors are variations on earth tones, from the tatami to the wood to the paper shoji doors that absorb the light and pass it on, slightly softened, to the opposite side (which side depends upon the time of day and where the light is coming from). All the walls are shoji or the wooden fusuma, so the room changes its configuration as people open doors or close them. We sleep in the far room on futon and feel spacious in the summer with all the doors open, or cozy in the winter wrapped in a closed door cocoon.

Unfortunately, three different contractors and carpenters told us that the foundation was too weak to build on. We could raise the whole house and put in a new foundation, but the wood columns and walls weren't strong enough to hold a second floor, and reinforcing them would cost a small fortune. We're trying to stay small, under 1500 square feet, and without adding a second floor we'd have to use all the garden space, and having a garden was one reason for moving in the first place. So, after much soul searching, we decided to build new, with the one absolute being that the main tatami room would be copied so carefully that we'd feel just as if nothing had changed. All the architectural plans began around that.

Death of the Emperor

We were going through the obaachan's prefab place last weekend, seeing if there was anything to keep. You can see how small it is in the photo--basically two stacked six-mat rooms with a kitchen and bath. It will be the first place we have to tear down. There's really nothing to it, but it has steel beams, so they'll have to get that small back hoe in and just pull it over.

Just out the upstairs window was this scene of neighboring ruins. When we were getting the land registrations for the bordering properties in order to figure out our boundaries, we found out that this once belonged to Charles E. Tuttle, of Tuttle Publishing. Not much is left holding up the tile roof, though the garden, which is twice the size of our whole property, is in amazing shape. The local contractor told me that old man Tuttle left it to his maid and his gardener or driver (I can't remember which), but they don't like each other and can't agree on what to do with it. So they've built two tiny pre-fab houses in the most distant corners of the lot and let the sprawling old place disintegrate. It looks very much like it was built around the same time as my old place. You can tell by the stove pipe coming out of the roof that this was once the bath house.

We couldn't find anything of use in the obaachan's place other than the washing machine, which we can salvage with some cleanser and a new drain tube. In the bedroom upstairs there was a yellowed newspaper announcing the death of the Showa emperor wrapped in plastic, lying on the floor under this light.

How Do You Like Them Apples?

The highlight of a fine weekend spent half at the beach and half in the mountains was harvesting the apple tree that M’s parents “rented,” from an orchard not far from their house. The orchard, like their house, is located at the foot of the Northern Japan Alps, and we could see snow clouds in the upper peaks above us. But it was a very warm day, and we ended up in our shirt sleeves. The orchard people said it was good that M’s folks had rented one of the trees close to the farm house: the ones further up the slope are often targeted by hungry monkeys and bears. This tree had been targeted by hungry birds—but only a few by the look of it. I don’t think there were more than twenty or so damaged apples.

Some of the apples were as big as little m’s head, and she had a hard time getting her mouth open far enough to bite into one. With the four of us taking our time picking (twist, twist again, pull up), we had the tree bare in thirty or forty minutes, and while we didn’t count them, I’m guessing there were at least 350 apples from that one unassuming tree. Another family, who was picking further down the slope, said they got over 700 from their tree, a large, very old one with stanchions holding up branches that spread ten meters and more from the trunk.

I drove the car up a deep rutted track to the tree so we could load the boxes. I had no idea that apples could weigh so much. The car sank so low on the axles that I had to drive back down to the road with the left tires way up on the inclined side of the road. All the pickers stopped what they were doing to watch, wondering if we were going to topple over, but little m, riding shotgun, thought it was awesome. She wanted me to keep doing it, even after we got down to the paved road.

I don’t know what M’s parents are going to do with all those apples, though they make great gifts. They’re organic Fuji apples, which must be the best apples in the world, and when you snap your fingernails against them they give off a great “thock” sound, like you're hitting a bongo. They gave us one whole box, so you won’t see any doctors around our house for a while.

Fold in Your Mirrors and Pray

A three-day weekend, which we'll be spending partly down at Akiya, partly up in Hodaka, at the foot of the Northern Alps, where M's parents have retired after building their own place. We've got to go to Akiya and start going through things that can be saved and stuff that will have to go. By February or March they'll start tearing down the pre-fab structure where the obaasan, our landlady, lived next door. It's part of the property, an unremarkable place, and pretty ugly, but it will be even hard to see that go.

Three years ago, when Akakura-san was 94, she finally allowed her sons to talk her out of living alone and moving into a home. When we heard that, our first thought was, "Why?" She was still getting around, even putting make-up on every day to go down to the bus stop and take an hour roundtrip ride to do some grocery shopping. Our second thought was, "Well, that's the end of our weekends at the beach." We were sure that her sons, who she told us were not at all interested in the property, would want to sell it, and we knew that market prices were way beyond our reach.

But thanks to her, they were pretty much told to try to sell it to us at what we could afford, and we ended up doing the buy directly, even dodging the need for a real estate agent.

The prefab house is basically two rooms and a kitchen and bath. But it's got steel beams in its structure that will have to be struggled with. The one drawback of the property is a very narrow driveway. I mean, "fold in your mirrors and pray" narrow, so it's going to be hard to get much bigger equipment than the smallest back hoe into the space. That means destruction by hand, and loading and unloading trucks parked in the street, and that's also added cost to the whole operation.

We'll drive up to Hotaka tonight, after the Akiya chores. It's going to be cold, I'm sure, but the wood stove keeps the big house comfortable, and I'm going to try to get M's dad to give me tips on how to keep a wood stove operation affordable, since we're going that route in Akiya as well. He gets a lot of his wood from the apple orchards that surround his place, and the winters there are so cold that the wood stacks run almost all the way around the house. But it's a beautiful place, built in a kind of Nagano style, with 10-meter ceilings and dark beams everywhere. Hearing about their experience building it did get us thinking of doing something similar.

Swim, Shower, Shit and Shove Off

I don't have any photos of when I first started sharing this house--with a German-Swiss windsurfer and his Austrian friend, but it didn't look like this. It had been in the hands of Western weekenders for many years (I heard the German ambassador for a while), and the house was obviously just a place to swim, shower, shit and shove off. There was carpet tacked into the straw of the tatami--red, I gathered, from the few threads that weren't completely worn down to the backing. Four huge heifer-hued faux leather chairs obviously pilfered from someone's boss's office sat around the living room like a posse of 19th-century robber barons. The wooden floors of the hallways were black from water stains and shoe soles. On one whole side of the house, the wooden storm panels had been nailed shut over old windows. None of the sliding shoji or wooden doors slid. Someone had nailed plastic boards over places in the wall where the original earth-and-bamboo wattling had eroded.

For the first year or two, I used the place like everyone else. I'd drive down on Saturday morning, hungover as hell, and undergo the ocean cure of swimming, barbecuing and lying passed out under a beach umbrella. Often, also like everyone else, I wouldn't even bother opening up the house, which does entail a rather complex series of sliding recalcitrant storm doors into their respective boxes.

One day, bored from a Robert Parker novel that I was sure I'd read five or six times before, I found an old handleless claw hammer poking out of the rubble under the veranda, and started pulling the nails out of the storm doors that covered the southeast side of the house. I slid them into their boxes, and went inside for a drink. Just then, the mid-afternoon sun hit the window glass--and suddenly I could see the texture of the water surfaces on which they had been made. I rubbed the glass and scratched enough grime off the wood lattices to see the signs of a beautiful piece of craftwork. The liberated windows not only brought a whole new time of day into the room, they showed me that there was more to this place than a beach shack for sweating out the excesses of the week.

I bought a sander, a real hammer, a Japanese saw and garbage bags, big ones.

Standing Rock

"Standing Rock" is the literal translation of Tateishi, the name of a fifteen-meter tall rock formation leaping out of the sea just a hundred meters or so north of the house site. (You can see just the edge of it on the far right of the photo at the top of the page.) It's been there long enough for Hiroshige, the famous Edo-period woodblock artist to do a print of it (no doubt with Mt. Fuji in the background). I say no doubt, because although every mention of the rock includes that fact, I haven't been able to find a copy of the print anywhere. Not even on the internet, so I'm beginning to doubt it exists.

The name of the village where the house is located is Akiya, or more poetically in English--"Autumn Valley"--which is not an image that immediately comes to mind when one thinks of beachfront. Phonetically, it can also mean deserted house, which does come to the mind of many people when we tell them we have an old place in a former fishing village or show them this picture.

The front windows face southwest. A little to the right, over the water looms Mt. Fuji, which can be disconcerting, since all our senses tell us we should be looking toward Hawaii when we're actually gazing in the direction of Shanghai. Across the bay lies the long arm of the Izu Peninsula, where I first fell in love with beach life back in 1972, while working as a day laborer on a construction team digging huge holes in the jungle floor for resort hotel hot spring tanks. (¥3000 per 10-hour day with all you could drink--and a bath. Not a hot spring bath either, but a cold hose and a barrel half.)

Walls of Seaweed or Hemp?

We've decided on the komuten,the "carpenter/contractor," signed the architect's contract, and the basic plan is pretty far along. This idea of building a new house in the spot where our Taisho-era beach house has been standing for 80 years has taken on its own life, and I have no choice but to follow it.

Today was spent going over the plans at the komuten's office, but first visiting several of the houses they've built in the last few years to get a feel for various materials, mostly wood (cedar or pine?) for the flooring, and wall material (shikkui or keisodo). We went with the cedar for the softness and warmth under your feet, and the keisodo, which is supposed to absorb humidity. Shikkui is made of lime, hemp, and seaweed. Keisodo is made of seaweed, and earth. Both are biodegradable, and have their nuances but the keisodo's rougher texture seems better suited for the beachside.

Ike-chan, the just-out-of-architecture-school-but-hasn't-passed-his-architecture-exam assistant, had just finished the model of the house, and presented it to us with so much care and deference that, when he lifted the roof to show the inside and it fell to the floor and broke in half, we all stood and stared down at it, hands clasped before us, as if before an open coffin.

He did the ceiling of the tatami room and the beams in a wood-pattern, just like it will be. It shows clearly in this photo, but the model is so small you can just barely see the ceiling from the outside. It reminds me of Japanese chefs spending enormous time and energy cutting vegetables with great care and precision, knowing they're going to be dumped into a larger dish where no one will notice. I tell myself that I will peek into the tiny windows and look at this from time to time in appreciation.