December 24th~26th
Christmas was spent in our flat, the last Christmas as such.
The Japanese do celebrate Christmas but in a rather strange pastiche a bit like a person who finds some unfamiliar foreign clothes on the beach and puts them on as they think they have seen in an old half forgotten postcard. It’s rather characteristic of the Japanese way with foreign things. I remember being fascinated with an account in Ivan Morris’s The World of the Shining Prince of a Chinese diplomate visiting Hiean-Kyo (present Kyoto) around 900 and describing it as a strange China of 200 years ago that never was, everything slightly distorted.
So Christmas in Japan amounts to eating fried chicken and flavourless strawberry sponge cake on Christmas eve.
Strawberries are big news at Christmas with many restaurants bringing out a special menu of strawberry desserts. I haven’t been able to confirm this yet but I imagine that strawberries, the quintessential summer fruit in the UK, were featured in a clever marketing scheme at some time by which they became the perfect indulgent Christmas treat with a suitable air of the foreign.
They are no doubt farmed in temperature controlled poly tunnels in many other places beside Japan but it strikes me as rather perverse to celebrate how f#cked up the notion of seasonality in produce has become as to roll them out in the middle of Winter.
December 27th~ January 5th
After Christmas with no sign of my grave-yard cough improving I decided it was wiser to take it easy,stay in the flat and try and recover as much as possible before the spring term starts and I’m back to shouting at the schoolkids again ! After all a period of inactivity can be very productive in the long run.
So most days were spent with my sketch book close at hand finally getting my head around the interior of the house and in particular the sticky problem of how to effectively use the big traditional Japanese room as a living room.
Fundamentally, while Japanese rooms are exquisitely beautiful, living in them correctly, by which I mean in a way that doesn’t deter from their beauty, is highly demanding. It’s a bit like that video by Jamiroquai where all the walls are shifting and he and the sofa are moving around in limbo. How do you place furniture in a space that has no walls only screens that can be opened in both directions or removed altogether ? The only solution to avoid it looking like a jumble sale is to have only furniture that also disappears when not in use, which is exactly what the Japanese did except for a few very choice, key items. The reality of life for modern Japanese families living in traditional houses is usually
far from this ideal aesthetic that we sometimes see in the movies. It’s a jungle of clutter, laundry, screens that open onto the back of the wardrobe in the next room and kids studying in makeshift spaces in corridors with relatives clambering over them to get to the kitchen.
I don’t have such a big problem to address since only the living room is a true traditional screened room and I’m planning a whole room on the first floor to be nothing but storage for all the ’stuff’ that accompanies modern life. No, the key problem I was thinking about was with the proposed living room being such a long space I need to divide the space into 2 areas or more precisely ‘areas of use’ and have a full understanding of how those areas are used. Then I can design to accommodate those uses while dealing with the previously stated inherent problems with retaining the traditional interior.
Well, to start with, one use/area is clear enough: tv watching. Since excess light doesn’t seem appropriate to that use that goes to the North side of the long room leaving an equal space in front, facing roughly South and opening onto the garden. It’s clear that front space should take advantage of the light and view, maybe it’s just a space to relax and look out at the garden when the weather’s too inclement to actually get out there.
Or a library? So close to the tv-watchers though?
An open central fire place to sit around in Winter?
The Japanese have something called an ‘iori’ that is an open fireplace set in level with the floor, food is cooked over the embers and eaten on the wide wood hearth that surrounds it. Mmmm..great in the cold months but for the remaining 9 months ??
No there has to be more, or at least a change of use built into it.
It converts into an open water pool in the hot months ! The Arab nations new the cooling effect of water in the house.
But with kids and possibly a cat on the scene ?
The central space becomes an ‘ikebana’ flower display, interesting though hard work since no-one in the family has the faintest knowledge of flower arrangement and we already have a beautiful wooden ‘tokonoma’ (display space) in the room.
With so many ideas but all of them cr#p it’s definitely still work in progress. 
