In the rooms there are neither tables nor chairs. The floor is covered
with most beautiful mats, as white as snow and as soft as a cushion, for
they are often a couple of inches thick. They are woven of fine straw,
and on these the Japanese sit, with their feet tucked away under them.
At dinner-time small, low tables are brought in, and when the meal is
finished, the tables are taken away again. Chairs are never used, and the
Japanese who wishes to follow Western ways has to practise carefully how to
sit on a chair, just as we should have to practise how to sit on our feet
as he does at home.
When bedtime comes, there is no change of room. The sitting-room by day
becomes the bedroom by night. A couple of wooden pillows and some quilts
are fetched from a cupboard; the quilts are spread on the floor, the
pillows are placed in position, and the bed is ready. The pillows would
strike us as most uncomfortable affairs. They are mere wooden neckrests,
and European travellers who have tried them declare that it is like trying
to go to sleep with your head hanging over a wooden door-scraper.
As they both sit and sleep on their matting-covered floors, we now see why
the Japanese never wear any boots or clogs in the house. To do so would
make their beautiful and spotless mats dirty; so all shoes are left at
the door, and they walk about the house in the tabi, the thick glove-like
socks.
CHAPTER VII
IN THE HOUSE (_continued_)
Even supposing that a well-to-do Japanese has a good deal of native
furniture--such as beautifully painted screens, handsome vases, tables of
ebony inlaid with gold or with fancy woods, and so forth--yet he does not
keep them in the house.
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