The 3300-Year-Old Tape Measure

I love the fact that the measurements used by builders in Japan still are based on the shakkan-ho system that's been around since the 13th century BC. Japan went to the metric system in the 20th century (AD), and the shakkan-ho has been actually banned since 1961, but it's still firmly entrenched in building and real estate You can see the little arrows on my tape measure at 91 centimeters, which is three shaku. One tatami mat, or jo, is three shaku by six shaku (or one ken, or 182cm), and every measurement in our house plan is based around that. For the metrically challenged, one shaku is 11.93 inches, so think of a tatami mat as six by three feet.)

The plans are in centimeters, but every measurement you see is divisible by that 91cm measurement. The halls are 91cm wide (post to post); the kitchen is 2.73 by 3.64m; the dining room 3.64 x 4.55m. If you want to add something or cut something? You have to do it in increments of that scale.

The jo is a very human measurement. It is just the amount of space a person at rest would need, which is why, I suppose, we think of it as the size of graves. Though I suppose for people like my brother-in-law Jim, who at 205cm has grown beyond a size anyone imagined 3300 years ago, it might seem a bit small. One jo will also be the floor space of our toilet, the tokonoma, closets, the wood stove space. Two of them will make up the size of the bath, the stairs, etc., etc. Only the living room will actually have a tatami floor.

When I first arrived in Japan, tatami was everywhere. Many houses, if they had the space would have one Western-style room, with wooden floors, stuffed chairs covered in plastic, ugly throw rugs and a collection of kitsch. It was a formal place for visitors and was always chilly, as if they'd just dragged the entire room out of cold storage. It was where you'd be served coffee in dainty cups along with Western sweets. (If you were entertained more familiarly in the tatami room, it would be green tea and Japanese wagashi.) Now, it's the exact opposite, and in most houses--at least the ones that have them--the tatami room is usually the little-used one, where one drinks tea and sits uncomfortably in the role as "visitor" in a pristine time capsule.


I want our living room to stay the way it is now, a place to kick back on that soft surface, stretch out, roll around if you want. I want to watch people come into the room, sit around the low table, and slowly melt as they relax. M and I laugh about how often people have fallen asleep during afternoons of eating, drinking and talking. I want to keep experiencing those times when the tatami's just been redone, and you can breathe in the smell of the green rush straw as it slowly dissipates over weeks and months. The room is eight jo, plus a four-jo wood-floored engawa, and we're determined to keep the "human-ness" of this room in the new place. So, other than the sliding shoji doors, we refused to do anything--like the popular raised floor--that would set it off from the other rooms.

Damn You, Jun!

Our good friend and photographer, Jun, and his family visited a week ago. And he sent some shots that will help us remember how cool this old place was, as well as make it even more painful to think of tearing it down. This is the north entrance, the genkan.



And the east side (with the amado--the storm shutters--closed):



And the angle from the south:


Some afternoon light on m and Luna:


And some local wildlife:

Drop My Monkey (Part II)

I'm starting to feel sorry for our contractors. They finally got their plans down to our budget area, and come in with complete architectural plans, beautifully rendered on a computer with all the symbols for everything from water/electricity to windows, beams, posts and earthquake reinforcement (detail above). And, of course, just as they sit back feeling pleased with their endeavors, we throw back at them with a completely different second floor, ripping out walls, water systems, windows and flopping stairwells, which has T-san, the architect, scribbling like mad until he comes up with:

Ahh, much better, we say, as T-san holds his heads in his hands. Okay, so the post (or strut) runs up right through the middle of the master bedroom, which we've moved six feet away from the beach-side windows, and the study is now directly overlooking the sea (which means working will be an incredibly strenuous undertaking). But now m has her closet accessible from her room, we've ended up with a large (by Japanese standards) walk-in closet with a loft, and to top it off, I've just found out that T-san didn't know that the term for the sliding wooden locks on traditional storm windows in Japanese is "monkey."

But T is nothing if not forgiving, both me for my arrogance at cockily bandying about an obscure term that he hasn't ever had to know to keep his clients happy (until now), and us for wanting to get the best out of what we're putting into this house. So he grins and promises to have the new plans for us in "two weeks--maybe three." Meanwhile, we commit to the ultrasound check of our soil, and start talking about schedule. As our feet settle in the slowly drying commitment we're making to our lives, M and I turn to each other and shrug. We've got another couple weeks to think of more things to drive T crazy.

10 Months and Counting

The New Year holidays were spent looking at sunsets that seemed, each day, to outdo the one from the previous day. Or it seemed like that in the presence of an evening like the one above. Actually, they were pretty busy: we did the annual cleaning of the Tokyo house, drove up to Nagano for New Year's Eve with M's parents, then down to Akiya for three days. Tokyo was mild, Nagano was cold, but not as bitter as usual, and the days in Akiya were spent once again in shirtsleeves.

I fell out of writing for a while, since there hasn't been any particular movement on the house front, and I wanted to keep this based around that theme. We've got another meet with the contractor set up for next week, and we've sent several revisions based on the scaled-down plans to see what they'll come up with. One of them has the main bedroom moved off of the sea-side, though there will still be windows from the bedroom into the small atrium and beyond, so it will only be eight-feet away. The study would be on the ocean side, which I'm not sure is a good idea if we want to get work done.

Time is starting to become a major factor, which is not what we wanted and why we had started working on this last year with so much to spare. Now we have to finish the architectural plans for approval and start the process of tearing down the two present houses at the same time. We've gone ahead and asked to do the second ground test, this time using ultrasound technology.

The other thing that is starting to dawn on us is that, once the construction starts, it's the end of our weekends at the old house. That is very sad. It means fewer moments for a while of moments with friends like this:









or this:












or this (photo by m):