kamoi

Without these photos I wouldn't notice a lot of the incremental changes, and probably wouldn't remember the process a few months from now. The photo above is from two weeks or so ago, and the one below from last week. Suzuki-san, the master carpenter, has put in the kamoi, the lintels that will form the frame of both the ranma, the horizontal transoms above them, and the shoji doors below that will enclose the tatami room. He seems to spend most of his time working on all the fine parts of this room, while the apprentice is finishing up all the plasterboard installation in the rest of the house.
Ranma can be very elaborate; some in old temples and other buildings feature intricate carvings, and more simpler ones are just latticework. Ours--the ones we're using from the old house--are even more simple, built of horizontal shoji frames that can be opened or closed, in the same dimensions as the doors below them. But they still work the same way, helping with air circulation and light. The windows to the right will also have sliding shoji so the room will be bathed in the softest possible light when they're all closed. (Protective padding has been placed on all the posts and beams that will eventually be visible to prevent any accidental damage.)

Another view of the very temporary color of grey undercoat for the exterior mortar, this looking up from the beach.

monkey see, monkey ignore

Over Silver Week, which is the name that's been given to the five-day holiday this September, we went up to Hotaka in Nagano prefecture to visit M's parents. The weather was spectacular, and highlighted the Northern Alps rising over the lush, golden rice fields, which--like this field here--were heavy with the rice heads, or already being harvested. We ate plenty of great food, checked on the progress of M's parents' apple tree, which will be ready for picking very soon. It's hard to believe that it's almost been a year since we picked all those apples last November.
M's dad had spent the last month training kids to play the traditional flute for the local shrine festival, and he rode in the fune, the boat-shaped float, with the kids and taiko drummer. We couldn't see him inside the red and white bunting without going up and poking our head inside, but the flutes were in rhythm and pretty much in tune. It was a perfect local festival: very small and intimate, with three or four food stalls, a karaoke contest, farmers and local dignitaries in their suits and ties that hadn't seen the light of day since the last festival. We hung around a while until it got too cold and walked back through just-cut rice paddies back to the house.
m took lots of photos of the little frogs that were everywhere--most of them bright green except for this little guy in camo--around the rice fields. They don't bother anyone, unlike the monkeys that come down from the forest and scavenge their way through the farms. They even eat the blueberries off the plants of M's parents' garden. When we were looking at the orchard, you could hear the farmers setting off what sounded like M-80s in steel pipes to scare them off. I guess the guy at the top of this post, who we found stacked against the wall of a farm shack, had been retired in favor of the fireworks. I don't know about those monkeys, but he looks pretty spooky to me.

plastered

The Darth Vaderesque black facade is gone, replaced by a basic gray. The sakanya, or plasterers, have finished two applications of the mortar on the outside of the house. There are three of them, a father and two sons, and they get along so well that they work twice as fast as other teams. When we were there, they finished the entrance, the sea side wall and the bottom of the L where M's studio will be (above), and only had half of the side wall to go.
The first application just covers the asphalt felt and screen--and you can still see the screen pattern through the mortar layer. The second time they go over it results in a smoother, more finished look.
The next step is the rough, off-white, or cream final layer that goes over this gray. It should be done in the next few working days. It won't be too long after that that the scaffolding will come down, and we'll find out how reality meets with what has been in our imaginations all this time.

I've taken my summer vacation days over the last week, and M and I spent most of one day at a lighting showroom choosing fixtures. LEDs are still way too expensive to consider, so we ended up with all fluorescent lighting, which isn't quite as efficient as LEDs. We have very few ceiling fixtures other than downlights, unlike most Japanese houses, and we'll be using a lot of floor lighting, but it was still a shock to see how many lights we use: 41 fixtures, and it wasn't until the next day I realized we'd skipped a few. Still, the fluorescent downlights, for example, are all 15 watt fixtures, instead of the 60w or 100w halogens.

ben's gifts

My photographer friend Ben, who also lives in Akiya (and other places), was kind enough to shoot a lot of the old house just before it was torn down. This is a view I've never really seen, a long-lens shot of the house from the pier. It was a unique bit of construction, with two layers of roof: a shingled layer topped by tiles in the same brick coloring. I love this shot of the late afternoon light on the wave-like tiles.

hidden fruit

Three p.m., September 12, 2009. Two feet of surf. The sun is making its way back across the horizon to its winter position smack in front of the window. 7/eleven is selling oden simmering stew bits. It’s fall.

It’s also only three months until the big move, which is hard to believe. Working out whether time is going incredibly fast or inordinately slow is a real problem: it’s like trying to find the value of everyday things in Bali, where people seem to pull prices out of a very confused hat, and just when you think you’ve got the hang of it, someone says, “Oh, that piece of fruit you just bought? I’ll sell you one for one-tenth the price.” Or “one-fifteith the price.” Or, “five thousand times the price.”

At the end of the day, you have five pieces of fruit. You’ve emptied your entire savings and pulled the museum-quality Nirvana t-shirt off your torso to purchase one of them; in another pocket is another piece that is not even microscopically different than the one responsible for your nakedness--and it was given to you free by a woman hawking massages from a hut the size of a paperback edition of Lord of the Rings. There’s really nothing to do but pop both of them in your mouth, and chew.

But, oh yes, I was talking about time. I’ve got a problem dealing with it, and artisans in the Japanese carpentry business once spent years of it, honing the skill of shaving incredibly thin and miraculously accurate slices of wood and weaving them into an intricate type of wickerwork called ajiro. We have an old shoki-dana kitchen piece that features it on the facade, and today I was caught by surprise when I poked my head into the tokonoma alcove, and there it was on the ceiling. It's made by machine these days, and I'm sure it takes much less time and effort.

The ceiling of the tokonama is a place that rarely sees the light of day or an appreciative eye. Unless a guest gets really drunk and topples over into the alcove yet stays awake long enough to stare skyward, no one outside the family will probably ever see this, unless I drag them over and point it out.

outside work

The asphalt felt has been layered over the wood slats and most of it has been covered by the wire mesh that will hold the layer of mortar. Suddenly, the friendly looking woody exterior has been replaced by this ominous Darth Vaderian black. It's a strange sight looking up from the beach at this, and I overheard a couple of people walking on the beach. Some were shocked by the choice of a black house. I was shocked by one guy's comment that it looked cool. Things are moving quickly.

upstairs work

The plasterboard is going up in the main bedroom. The doors are to the walk-in closet (center) and the study and the windows on the left will overlook the small atrium and the sea. The beams at the top of the photo crisscross the vaulted ceiling.

rail work

The rails for all the sliding doors and windows are now finished. The rail here is for the three sliding windows of the bedroom that overlook the small atrium facing seaward. The windows have been saved from the old house, and we're holding our breath that they will fit snugly. In the old house, the rails had warped with age and the windows would rattle mightily in the wind, but we shouldn't have that problem now. The windows for the other two interior sides of the atrium have to be made, but they'll follow the pattern of the old ones that we took down (below).

in the closet

A lot of the plaster boards are installed on the second floor, the kitchen, and M's massage therapy salon, which has given the rooms a sense of reality. Here, though, in the tatami room, there's still a lot of detail work to be done. When we visited yesterday, Suzuki-san, the master carpenter, was finishing up this closet interior on the right. While we were there, he finished building a shelf at waist level and, he assured us, it was strong enough to hold the weight of an adult, though we will probably just use it for futon for guests.

The tokonoma is to the left of the closet, and shoji doors, shoji transoms, and shoji window frames will enclose this room in translucency when they're closed. This is exactly the same layout as the old house, and since we're going to use everything from the old house, the height of the closet is about 177cm, or 5'10"--probably a decent height for Japanese when the doors were made in the early 20th century. All the doors from the old house are the same, so anyone over that height will have to duck on entering this room--and, in fact, the main entrance.

Suzuki-san was laughing because he's 175cm tall, and he stood inside the door frame to show how perfectly he fits. I joined him to show him that I just barely don't; I'm a hair under 178cm and I have the scars on my skull to prove it. But I like the idea of having to bow slightly on entering; a frequent lesson in humility (and sometimes scream-inducing pain).