The Japanese Fan.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLVIII, Issue 13, 25 September 1912, Page 59

The Japanese Fan.

nET me try to introduce the reader to a Japanese tea-house, says Mr William Archer in an interesting article in the f *l)aily News.” Or I should rather say to an inn; for it appears that the term “’tea-house” is not properly applied to places where you put up for the night. There are, of course, many hotels in Japan constructed and conducted in European fashion: but as soon as you leave the beaten track of the globe-trotter you must be content with the Japanese hostelries.which I am about to describe. They are all of one invariable type, though they.differ very much in size, cleanliness and style of appointment. ti As there are no, walls to a Japanese house, there arc naturally no doors. Your rickisha deposits you under some sort of porch, verandah, or shelter, and you forthwith sit down on the edge of the platform, eighteen inches high, which forms the ground floor of the building, and proceed to take off your phoes. Various “nesans” (waitresses —• the word means literally ‘’elder sister”) kneel around you and make smiling obeisances almost to the ground. W hen your shoes are removed, and you stand on the ‘’tatami,” or mats, you are provided with heelless slippers, unless, perchance. you wear ‘digitated” socks, which enable you to put on the sandal of the country, with its double thong inserted between your great toe and its neighbour. As the heelless slippers are designed on a strictly Japanese scale I very soon abandoned the attempt to wear them, and resigned myself to living in my stocking soles. This is, in truth, no great hardship, for the Japanese mat is a soft and springy pad about an inch and ahalf thick, on which one can walk barefoot without discomfort. Each mat is

made to a regulation size of six feet by three, and the area of a room is measured by the number of mats it requires. Here you are, then, on the mats of the ground floor, if you peer around you will probably descry, in more or less dim pcrspoi tive. the kitchen, the living rooms of the family, and, very likely, a small courtyard with a few dwarf trees, a little rockery, and some sort of running water either a small fountain or a mere spout trickling into a trough. The Simple Infe. But the ‘banto,” or manager, is meanwhile making his obeisances, and inviting you to come upstairs and inspect your apartments. The stairs arc apt to be more of a ladder than a stair case, in our sense of the word, their bare boards polished by the contact of innumerable bare and stockinged feet. Aloft, you find yourself in a narrow gallery running round the courtyard,, with perhaps three rooms opening oil’ it on each side." At present all the paperwalls (shoji) and partition-panels (karakami) being withdrawn, each side of the courtyard seems- like one long apartment: but when each member of the party has chosen his or her room some barbarian instinct of pi ivary.leads you to close the partition-panels and pretend for a moment that your room is really your own. The first, thing you realise is that you have nothing to settle down upon except your own portmanteau or tlm floor. The loom is absolutely without furniture. There is no dressing table, no chair, no lied, no chest of drawers, no washing-stand, no looking-glass. Or, rather, I am wrong; in most rooms you will find in one corner a high towel horse of black lacquer, which usually conies to pieces when you touch it. What use the Japanese make of it I do not

know; they certainly Jo u<>( hingiowvtt <»H it. Moreover, unless the inn is highly Europeanised, there are no peg* on which io hang any garments, or even your hat. You are fortunate if. on close scrutiny, you can detect an odd nail in the lintel of the partition panels to which you can attach your razor-strop. There may not improbably be a screen somewhere in the room; and practice has made me an adept in the difficult are of balanu ing a small handmirror on the top of a Japanese screen. The Call to Tea. For the rest, there is almost ceitaiu to be a shallow alcove in the back wall (if wall it can be called) wherein hangs a single kakemono sometimes quite a good one. but very often a mere sped men of Chinese caligraphy, a text from Confucius or something of that sort. In front of it there probably stands a pm eelain jar, some three feet high, with a lovely' branch of azalea most ail’slically disposed in it. 'this is all wry pleasing; but as you have probably l»vc:i tramping for hours ah.ng mountain side* simply ablaze with azaleas, sou feel that a wash-stand or even a chair would r»-» more to the immediate purpose. To complete the inventory of the loom, I must add that in the middle of the tloor there is doubtless a handsome brass or bronze vase (possibly only a wooden box) filled with tine sand, in which the ‘hiesan,” entering anon, will delicately' deposit certain pieces of glow ing charcoal, on which she will place >« beautifully-modelled tea kettle. Then she will bring a lacquer tray with a tiny teapot and three or four exquisite little porcelain bowls. You say ”(> cha” (hon ourttble tea) without even raising your voice, and the other members of the party, hearing as clearly as if the par titions were non-existent, slide back their panels and gather to tea. The kneeling ’’tiesan” pours the clear green fluid into the little bowls, and very likely hands round along with it a lacquer box containing either sponge cake or some sort of sweetmeat. You squat either on the mats or on square cushions not more than a couple of inches thick, and con sole yourself with the reflection that even Japanese Iva is better titan n > tea. at all. But though there i<. from oar |x>int of view, no sort of comfort or convenience in this room, it is apt to be extremely beautiful, 'I he partition panels, generally faced with some sort of pasteboard, are decorated with drawings, either in colour or in black an i white, which are often conventional and com monplace enough. But the woodwork i* always charming. Even the “shoji” (the paper walls) are so neatly finished Unit their clean-cut rectangular pattern gives pleasure, to the eye.. II almost always happens, too, that sdmcwheie about the room (livre will be some subsidiary ope iing perhaps a ventilator in the fixe I partition over the sliding panels Hile I wit h delicate lat tied work, so minute an I accurate in its finish as to make of mere carpentry a fascinating tine ait. th - , pos sibly, the quarter inch board of this partition will be pierced with some pictorial design a. few bol l lines suggest ing Fuji with a tree in the foreground, or, it may be, a. Hight of half a-dozeii birds, plover* or . young <piails. The ceiling is often composed of squares of wood, of \ery 'beautiful grain. '.l’here is seldom a.iy carving, properly so called: and there is never a. single spot <»f paint on any of the woodwork.