CHAPTER VI
IN THE HOUSE
A Japanese house is one of the simplest buildings in the world. Its main
features are the roof of tiles or thatch, and the posts which support the
latter. By day the walls are of oiled paper; by night they are formed of
wooden shutters, neither very thick nor very strong. As a rule, the house
is of but one story, and its flimsiness comes from two reasons, both very
good ones.
The first is that Japan is a home of earthquakes, and when an earthquake
starts to rock the land and topple the houses about the peoples' ears, then
a tall, strong house of stone or brick would be both dangerous in its fall
and very expensive to put up again. The second is that Japan is a land of
fires. The people are very careless. They use cheap lamps and still cheaper
petroleum. A lamp explodes or gets knocked over; the oiled paper walls
burst into a blaze; the blaze spreads right and left, and sweeps away a
few streets, or a suburb of a city, or a whole village. The Jap takes this
very calmly. He gets a few posts, puts the same tiles up again for a roof,
or makes a new thatch, and, with a few paper screens and shutters, there
stands his house again.
A house among the poorer sort of Japanese consists of one large room in the
daytime. At night it is formed into as many bedrooms as its owner requires.
Along the floor, which is raised about a foot from the ground, and along
the roof run a number of grooves, lengthways and crossways.
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