I arrived in Imabari in late May, 2006. For the first six months I lived in a Leopalace. Like many westerners the shoebox sized (perhaps 220 square feet) studio apartment, with its single electric burner hotplate and a mini sized bar fridge shocked me. I found myself looking at rental ads, trying to figure out a: what are real Japanese homes like, and b: whether I could even vaguely afford to move into a bigger apato. I often complained to my long suffering Japanese teacher, Michie Yanagihara, at our Tuesday lessons.
One day, she pulled out an advertisement with a picture of a nice old Japanese house on it, and asked me if I thought GEOS would be interested in teaching classes there. I replied that, well, GEOS has its own classrooms, so, no, probably not…
A few minutes later I got the bright idea that maybe I could rent a room in said house…and, thinking it absurd, but what the hell, I brought it up. Michie surprised me by calling Yano-san on the spot. And Yano-san said she’d ask her husband, Hideho. And two days later I was asked when I could meet her to see the house. So Michie and Mayu, my manager, and I went to meet Yano-san at her house.
Everyone got along; Yano-san seemed very nice, and clearly wanted me to move in (no key money!). The rent she asked was less than I was paying at Leopalace. The house was empty and beautiful, all tatami and shoji, slightly ramshackle but generally in very good condition. It even had a western toilet.
The house is, according to Yano-san, an Edo era machiya. It was renovated in the early nineteen eighties, but never, or not for very long afterwards, really lived in; Yano-san raised her two daughters and son next door in a more modern and larger house. Yano taku seems to have been used for her koto and flower classes, and traditional family ceremonies. This is the gate, a feature of Edo era samurai and merchant houses (I think). The Yanos last year renovated it as Hideho's new office; he runs a construction business.
So in the middle of December, 2006, I moved in. One thing became obvious right away: there was no heat. There was an assortment of electric heaters ranging from the dangerous to the merely ineffective, which I immediately avoided, and, luckily, two toyu (kerosene) burning portable furnaces which I immediately put to use.
The formal sitting room.
Usually, in old (early Meiji or Edo) farm or townhouses there are small fireplaces in the middle of some rooms, called irori. These were the only sources of heat, and Yano taku’s irori were removed when it was renovated. Modern houses have large, electric, wall mounted heaters, which heat the air of a given room. There is no central heating. So Japanese houses, in winter, tend to be a clutter of heaters in closed rooms with unheated corridors, genkan and so on. Luckily the temperature in Imabari rarely drops much below 0°Celsius at night. I keep one of the oil burners in the kitchen, which is the coldest room in the house, and one in my room. I can maintain a temperature of about 12 to 15 degrees, which is quite comfy for me.
When I shut them off, the temperature falls quickly…the glass outer shoji tend to rattle in winter winds, but the paper shoji keep most breezes out and some heat in…I sleep on a futon on tatami with a heavy comforter and a heavy fleece blanket. Interestingly, tatami seems always somewhat warm on the feet; it has nice insulating qualities.
Room proportions are also based on tatami size. There are historically 3 different sizes…here it's one by two meters. This is the average space taken up by one person lying down, more or less. So rooms are, to western eyes, oddly shaped. Storage is a big issue; traditional houses have very little storage other than square closets intended for bedding storage. It’s hard to avoid clutter.
But living in this house is quiet (no tv!), and thanks to the surrounding garden and yard, and the location in a neighborhood rather than on a busy street, it actually feels like living in the country. It’s a quite wonderful, meditative space.
This is the tearoom, used for formal tea ceremony.
A tree climbing (?!) snail in the garden. There is a small traditional Japanese garden off the east side.
Minami has weekly flower arranging classes, and events which she holds in the genkan, the formal entrance room. These are easy enough to avoid; I usually schedule a bike ride for those days. The floor of this room, which must be 20 feet square, is mostly dirt, as is the back hallway floor. This is apparently traditional in country houses.
This is my room, in the north east corner of the house.
When I moved in, there was some local wildlife inhabiting the attic, notably a Japanese roof rat and, occasionally, a feral cat. The rat started coming into the pantry in the daytime so I trapped and killed it. The cat left forthwith. Around this time (it was June) I started sleeping with the shoji open (no aircon), and was visited by a four foot plus ‘Shima Hebi’ a bullnose snake. I scared him when I almost stepped on him in the morning, unknowing. He was probably looking for the rat.
Last summer the news was Mukade, large, very poisonous centipedes with notably bad temperaments. I killed five of them, and was quite lucky to avoid being bitten...which would have been extremely unpleasant. A bite on the leg could cause it to swell to twice its size, and take a week to subside...yuk. They can be quite belligerent; it is unwise to step on them, for example, as it won't kill them, and serves to make them angry. For the record, and for anyone looking, the best way of killing them seems to be carefully picking them up with the bar-b-q tongs I keep for the purpose, going to the kitchen, and boiling up a pot of water. Dropped in, they die immediately.
This mantis dropped by and lived in my room for about two weeks one summer. At night, it would sit upside down on the wall in front of my desk, basking in the light of my writing lamp, and watch me writing on my little laptop.
Siu Gyoza and the mysterious Chinese wet mochi with fruit, anko and strange dried things, which was sweet and very mild tasting.
After generous noshing and lots of compliments and so on, winners were announced and prizes given out. Such is the lamentable state of my Japanese, however, that I didn’t even realize we had won first prize til I was told later (!).
