Shit

Let’s talk toilets. I don’t suppose you’ve ever had a real frozen butt unless you’ve spent time on the toilet of an old Japanese house in mid winter. That wasn’t as much of a problem with the traditional Japanese toilet since you squatted over it with your ass never touching the fixture, but the first moment of contact can be a bit painful on something like our present toilet seat in Akiya (above). Those very nice windows I love have no fastener, so there are huge gaps where the sliding pieces meet. And, if you look closely, you can see the opening at floor level behind the toilet, which also is made up of a sliding glass window, but it is basically a funnel for wind to blow up the back of anyone sitting on the throne.

If you haven’t read Junichiro Tanizaki’s amazing work on the Japanese aesthetic, In Praise of Shadows, I beg you to abandon reading this simpleton’s blog in order to go out to find a copy, which you must read immediately. You will thank me for it. Not only does it describe with great passion and complexity things like tatami, Japanese food, pottery, and most of all, the importance of the opposite of light, but it has a wonderful section on the Japanese toilet—including a mention of that low window behind the bowl—that is a mind-boggling work of critical acumen and great humor.

From next winter, however, our derrieres will stay toasty, and the winds will never flutter our shirt tails as we concentrate on the task at hand. We’ll not only have double-paned windows and insulated walls, but we’ve ordered the tankless toilet model made by Inax . . . wait for the drum roll . . . the Satis Eco-6. Eco-6 refers to the goal their engineers have reached after years of research in cutting water usage. Successive models have cut the average 13 liters of water used for each flush a few years ago down to 6 (5 if you use the “small” urine only flush). That’s enough to fill a bathtub with your savings every two days, or a financial saving of 12,000 yen a year. Equally satisfying is that now we have a Satis Eco-6 toilet to go with our Intrepid II wood stove. I'm looking forward to strutting around the house saying things like, "Hmmm, a bit cool isn't it? Time to break out the Intrepid, don't you think?" or "You look a bit full. Would you like to have a go with our Eco-6?"

But I’ll never ever again be able to say, after someone who has read In Praise of Shadows inevitably brings up the section on Japanese toilets, that I have that little window at the floor level in my own toilet room, and watch their eyes bulge in wonder and disbelief. Shit.

Bones of the dead(ly tasty)

The benefits of Akiya life. M's parents had come down to spend some time at the house for the last time before it gets leveled, and since they live in the mountains we decided to go with the sea for meals. On Friday night, we ate at a local restaurant in the next town of Sajima run by one of the fishing unions. We all went with the sashimi teishoku set for ¥1500, with all the rice you can eat. We stuffed ourselves on maguro, hamachi, squid, tai, etc., etc., etc. (It's quite a deal, though you can get the same set for only ¥1000 at lunchtime.) On Saturday we made the rounds of the various markets. Got plenty of fresh spring cabbage and broccoli at a stall next to a local farmer's field before going to the fish market, where we picked up some large, freshly caught hotate scallops and sanma, Pacific saury for ¥80 each (above). That choice forced us to go back to the farmers' market to get some daikon to grate for the sanma. The scallops we barbecued in their shells with butter and shoyu. The saury we just grilled with salt and dipped in the grated daikon and ponzu, the shoyu and vinegar sauce. We talked about what a feast Mario would have with the left-overs, but unfortunately for him, we did a good enough job on the fish bones to turn them into cartoon-level leftovers and he was left with canned cat food.

The wrath of the acorn people

I'm sure that, like myself, many have wondered what kind of damage can be done to a traditional Japanese house by 13 four- and five-year-olds. Several weekends ago, we invited m's entire class, the Acorns, from the day care center to visit. The parents sat outside and we barbequed up a feast, while the kids played pretty much unsupervised inside, since it had gotten pretty windy on the beach. (We would never have been so forgiving, of course, had we not known that this was all scheduled for destruction.) Above is the aftermath of two kids going on a deliberate paper poking session with the shoji doors. I do offer in their defense the fact that we already had a few holes that we had not repaired, so it may have looked like the proper thing to do, and most of the kids, unfortunately, had no idea what shoji is. On the other hand, it did get me to start thinking that with the same number of kids a few years older, we might be able to save a huge amount of money on tearing this place down.

Necks on the block

We have a plan! On Saturday, the Kagatsuma contractor came over with the plan and a final estimate. And, after discussing several points--such as a plan to stain the wood columns, ceilings and floors--we wound up with an agreement and a fairly stable timetable. We are now looking at reality in the face, and committed to getting this done by the end of the year at the very latest.

We also took a look at a few more parts of the old house that we want to use in the new one, and were hit by a small disappointment. We'd been hoping to use our tokobashira, the post at the corner of the tokonoma alcove, in the same place of the tokonoma in the new house. The post is not especially valuable or unique, but it has just enough character to be a humble part of the tokonoma. You can see in the photo at the top where the carpenters eighty years ago left just enough of the shape of the tree showing. What we discovered though is that it is cracked about eight feet up, and it looks like it goes all the way through. Since the placement is in the center of the house and it should be strong structurally, it looks like we'll have to give it up. Most of the other bits of the house that we want to use are about the same age. We won't really find out whether they're usable or not until we take it apart, and taking apart an old Japanese house is a real puzzle.


What I won't be missing is the present electrical system. When we were doing a slight reform of the kitchen a few years ago, I was climbing in the ceiling space with the electrician, and we found several of the ceramic pieces used for insulation would actually crumble when we touched them. We rewired a lot of it but there are still a few places like the connection in this photo which I'll be glad to see the last of.

Saving Inner Space

We have now gotten rid of the post in the middle of the bedroom, and the catwalk across the small atrium. (They're crossed out in the plan above; the sea side is at the top.) Both had been bothering me for some time—the post really intruded into the space where one would walk through the room, and the catwalk seemed awfully solid and heavy for something that would take up about a third of the atrium opening, blocking a lot of the light.

I had dropped by Azby Brown's art lab for a discussion about his book, Just Enough, and I showed him the plans for the house. An architect and professor, he zoomed in on both as problems almost immediately (“students lose points for something like the post,” he said), which convinced me to do something about it. When I brought up finding a way to dispose of the post at our meeting that night, T, the architect, immediately agreed, and chose to use a larger beam across the room to hold up the riser to the roof. He also admitted the catwalk was an irritation, but that he thought we’d need a way to clean and open the windows. He’s right, of course, but I’ll get a very tall ladder to clean them, and we can open them by reaching out over the atrium.

And with that, our final plans should be done on the 26th, ready to be sent out for permits. I'm still concerned about air flow and window placement, but I hope we can straighten the few small points out as we go. We're a month behind schedule, and we haven't even had one hammer on the premises other than my own. They say the permits will take a month at most, which gets us very close to Golden Week, the string of holidays at the end of April which will add up to eight days this year. I'd hate to see them tear the place down, only to have the empty plot sit there over the holidays, while we try to find something to do elsewhere.

Nice legs

In our last meeting with the architect and contractor, we ended up insisting on using the wood slab table that is now down at the old house as a counter between the kitchen and the dining room. It means cutting a section out of the table (about a fourth), but it’s worth it to have a place where this cool piece of wood can be part of daily life. We've been pushing this for the last month or so, and they've seemed reluctant. It doesn't seem to have any structural effect, so I guess it's just the idea of cutting into the wood.

We bought the table from an old man in Nagano who has a little woodworking shack in the forest on the side of the road going up the Alps. It’s a ramshackle place jammed full of slabs of wood that he’s in various stages of work on. You have to slide between, and almost crawl over, huge slices of nara, hinoki, cryptomeria, oak, and various pines. Scattered everywhere are figures that he’s sculpted out of the remains: from buddhas to forest animals. He works all alone and he’s getting pretty old.

We chose a slab of nara and he made the legs out of the outer part of the trunk. He formed them to the shape of the bottom of the table, so it just rests on them, with the weight holding it solid. They look great but don’t leave much room for human legs. If we use the table as a counter, we can’t use the legs, but I’m sure we’ll find some use for them.

A Glimpse of Fire

We got our first estimate for the wood stove, including the six-meter high exterior chimney and installation. It came in about 120,000 yen less than we expected, which is a thrill when everything else seems to be going up every time you turn around. It’s a very small stove—even with the warming shelves on either side it’s only 810 centimeters across. But it should easily do the job of heating the house except, very likely, M’s salon at the opposite side of the house down the hall. We don’t expect to be using the stove much on sunny days, even on the coldest days of winter, considering the huge windows. I heard from a friend nearby that they use theirs for a few hours in the morning, then let it go cold until the sun goes down.

The stove’s a Vermont Castings Intrepid II, which features a catalytic combustion system that burns the residue in the smoke from the first burn, so it’s very clean. I not sure about the name; it sounds like we’re going to war with the elements, and it makes me wonder what happened to Intrepid I. (I guess it’s a rugged New England thing: the Vermong Castings company’s other stoves include the Defiant, the Vigilant, the Resolute Acclaim. )

We’ve had all kinds of advice about the stove placement. The architect first had it in the middle of the dining room—the first thing you saw when you entered the house. M’s mom, without seeing the design, had the same idea. But we know how little we’ll probably be using it, and this is a beach house, not a mountain house, so it’s going in a corner—a prominent corner, but a corner all the same. I just can’t see making a heating system, no matter how appealing, the center of this place. I can appreciate the romance of a hearth but I’m more interested in its function. After all, we've got the sunset, all 6000C degrees of it, setting just out the window.