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.

Just Enough: Sales Pitch 1

I’m having a wonderful time these days editing a book by Azby Brown, a good friend and professor at Kanazawa University. And I wouldn’t bring my work into this except that the same grains of thought that resulted in the book idea were very much responsible for this house-building project and leaving Tokyo.

The book is called just enough: lessons in living green from traditional japan. I think it started (and Azby can correct me if he ever stumbles across this blog) at a bar that we got together at on the way to join M and m in some grilled squid and a beer at a local festival. We’d been batting ideas back and forth and I was waxing hops-fed poetic about the Akiya house and the comfort zone of traditional houses because I know Azby is one of the few people I know who knows exactly what I’m talking about. (He’s the author of some amazing books including The Genius of Japanese Carpentry, about a temple carpenter, Small Spaces about how Japanese use space, and The Very Small Home: Japanese Ideas for Living Well in Limited Space.) And Azby took that idea and came back with the idea for this book. It’s about how Edo-period people lived, and lived fairly comfortably with very little impact on the environment.

It was while we were putting together the outline for this book, as Azby took me deeper and deeper into the mindset behind Edo-period life, that I realized how much the Akiya house—though built some sixty years after the period met its demise—reflected those same values. The title, “just enough,” came from the period thought of finding value and method in minimalism; of treating things with long-term caring—mainly because it was drummed into the society for survival’s sake. The beauty of it is that what started as political dogma for survival’s sake became an aesthetic that permeated society. It’s not only the basis of all the industry that developed during this period, but led to the melding of industry and art in the craft of making things of great usefulness. (I think the West also has this ideal, but here it’s as if the Puritans had several centuries of developing without the religious restrictions turning them into sex-starved wackos.)

I haven’t included any footnotes for the above paragraph, and if any academic reads this and grows a six-inch goiter on their neck from irritation with my research methods, they’re welcome to write to the folks at the neojaponisme web site, or the prime minister’s office. It’ll have the same affect.

But the chance to try to experience living with some of those traditional values in a way that just can’t be done in Tokyo—say, building in local woods, making a compost, using a wood stove, or looking for healthy compromises of traditional methods and contemporary conveniences—has me hooked. And I’ve got pages and pages now of Azby’s prose—as well as sketches of everything from toilets (and oddly smirking people squatting on them) to an entire breakdown of rice planting and thatch roof-making to keep me happy.

Got to go. Little m wants a story and is not appreciating my pontificating. But trust me. My bedtime monogatari, or bedtime tales, are not nearly as windy as these blog entries.