The architecture of Japan

By Arthur Drexler

Author
Museum of Modern Art (New York,
N.Y.)

Date

1955

Publisher

[publisher not identified]

Exhibition URL
www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2711

The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition

history—from our founding in 1929 to the
present—is available online. It includes
exhibition catalogues, primary documents,
installation views, and an index of
participating artists.

MoMA © 2017 The Museum of Modern Art

Ubrarv
archive
m
The Architecture of Japan
The Architecture of Japan
BY ARTHUR DREXLER

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

Distributed by Simon and Schuster, New York
/Ho fv\A 5 5 i k>
^a

TRUSTEES OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

John Hay Whitney, Chairman of the Board ; Henry Allen Moe,
1st Vice-Chairman; Philip L. Goodwin, 2nd Vice-Chairman;
William A. M. Burden, President; Mrs. David M. Levy, Vice-
President; Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss,
Stephen C. Clark, Ralph F. Colin, Mrs. W. Murray Crane,*
Rene D'Harnoncourt, Mrs. Edsel B. Ford, A. Conger Good
year, Mrs. Simon Guggenheim,* Wallace K. Harrison, James
W. Husted,* Mrs. Albert D. Lasker, Mrs. Henry R. Luce,
Ranald H. MacDonald, Mrs. Samuel A. Marx, Mrs. G. Mac-
Culloch Miller, William S. Paley, Mrs. Bliss Parkinson, Mrs.
Charles S. Payson, Duncan Phillips,* Andrew Carnduff,
Ritchie, David Rockefeller, Mrs. John D. Rockefeller, 3rd,
Nelson A. Rockefeller, Beardsley Ruml, Paul J. Sachs,* John
L. Senior, Jr., James Thrall Soby, Edward M. M. Warburg,
Monroe Wheeler.
*HONORARY TRUSTEE FOR LIFE

DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN

Arthur Drexler, Curator
Mildred Constantine, Associate Curator of Graphic Design
Greta Daniel, Assistant Curator
MUSEUM COMMITTEE ON ARCHITECTURE
Philip C. Johnson, Chairman; Pietro Belluschi; Philip L. Goodwin,
Wallace K. Harrison.

Copyright 1955. The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-5987
CONTENTS

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS page 6

CULTURAL BACKGROUND page 9

STRUCTURE AND DESIGN page 41

BUILDINGS AND GARDENS page 75

SUPPLEMENT: JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE page 262

 PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is concerned with architecture in Japan from an

cient times to the present. The first section is devoted to the
environment and some of the religious beliefs which have
influenced all Japanese art. The second section is concerned
with general principles of structure and design peculiar to
Japanese architecture, and the third section is devoted pri
marily to buildings considered masterpieces by the Japanese
themselves. Gardens in Japan are a separate art form, but
because they play a part in Japanese architecture so much
gi eater than in our own they have been treated here with
appropriate detail.
A supplement, beginning on page 262, is devoted to the
Japanese Exhibition House built in the garden of the
Museum of Modern Art and open to the public during the
summers of 1954 and 1955.
Farm houses, castles, and folk architecture in general have
been included only incidentally. However beautiful such
buildings may be, they convey inadequately the power and
subtlety of the art of architecture in Japan. The selection of
buildings for detailed presentation has also been influenced
to some extent by considerations of their relevance to con
temporary Western architecture.
The relevance of Japan's architectural tradition to contem
porary Western building is well known. Modern Western
practice, with its general use of the steel skeleton frame, has
developed effects known to Japanese architecture at least
since the eighth century. Walls which do not support a roof
but are instead hung like curtains on a structural framework
are today a commonplace of Western building. Before 1900
Frank Lloyd Wright made fundamental to his work a Japa
nese respect for the beauty of natural materials, as well as
the hovering, insistently horizontal roofs essential to the
Japanese conception of a house. Open interiors and plain sur
faces, as in the work of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier,
are other ideas characteristic of Japan which we have been
developing in our own way.
Japanese culture has been altered by industrialization
even more drastically than has the culture of the Western
world. The ordinary problems of industrialization, com
pounded with conflicts between Eastern and Western cultural
values, have been resolved in Japan largely by the conscious
acceptance of two different and sometimes opposed ways of
life, one traditionally Japanese, the other more or less West
ern. Although some architects never entirely abandoned the
old principles of building, modern architecture in Japan has
evolved, perhaps of necessity, primarily along Western lines.
Only recently have their traditional values begun to attract
the sympathetic study of Japan's younger architects.
 The art of building will of course continue to develop, in
Japan as in the West, as the expression of attitudes toward
life in the twentieth century. A part of that life is the growing
exchange of ideas between the East and the West. Japanese
architecture conveys the attitudes and the aspirations of its
country with a complexity surpassed only by its beauty.

I wish to thank the many people in Japan and the United

States who assisted in the preparation of this book. Above all
I am grateful to Ryuichi Hamaguchi for accompanying me on
my travels in Japan, and to Junzo Yoshimura for his en
lightening comments. The authorities of Ise Shrine, and
Nagakage Okabe, Director of the National Museum of
Modern Art in Tokyo, made it possible for me to see the inner
most buildings of the Shinto Shrine at Ise Naiku, before the
latest reconstructions were consecrated, and subsequently
to publish here the first authorized photographs. Harumichi
Kitawo has kindly permitted the use of drawings from his
fifteen volume history of Shoin-zukuri architecture. I have
also drawn from books on Japanese life and architecture by
Jiro Harada, Sutemi Horiguchi, Tetsuro Yoshida, Shinze
Koike, A. L. Sadler, Edward Conze, and Alexander C. Soper
III. No student of Japan can fail to be grateful to Sir George
Sansom; I have drawn especially from his Japan , a Short
Cultural History, and The Western World and Japan. Alex
ander C. Soper III has very generously given his time to
reading the text and making many valuable suggestions.
Translations of Japanese texts were made by Yoshinobu
Ashihara and Tamiko Niwa; Chisaburoh Yamada provided
additional information. Philip Johnson assisted with editing
the text, and I am grateful to Mildred Constantine for her
assistance on all phases of the preparation of the book.
On behalf of the Museum I wish to thank most especially
Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd. Their generous contri
bution and enthusiastic interest made possible the size and
scope of both the book and the exhibition.
A.D.
 1
Japanese creation myths describe the primeval chaos as an
ocean of mud. From this darkness celestial deities sprang
forth spontaneously, among them Izanagi and Izanami, the
male who invites and the female who invites. At the com
mand of the celestial deities they descended to produce the
terrestrial world. First of all they gave birth to the Japanese
archipelago, then to waters, winds, mountains, fields, food,
fire, and mist. And then they gave birth to the rulers of the
world.
The rulers of the world, the creation myths continue,
are Amaterasu O-mi-Kami, the Heaven Illuminating God
dess whose domain is heaven and earth and whose home is
the sun ; Tsuki-yomi, who rules the moon and whose domain
is night; and Takehaya Susanowo, the Valiant Swift Impetu
ous Hero, the God of Storms who lives in the ocean and rules
the domain of hidden things. Control of the world soon
passed to Susanowo and his sister, the Sun Goddess. Bright,
beautiful, and meek, she constructed canals to irrigate the
rice fields and she organized religious rites-especially those
pertaining to purity.
But Susanowo longed for his mother, who was now the
evil genius of death and darkness. In his rage he destroyed
the canals his sister had made in the fields, and when finally
he profaned her religious observances her exasperation was
so great that she withdrew into a cave, taking with her the
light of the world. Then eight million deities assembled at
the doors of the cave, persuading her to come out by danc
ing and reciting charms. Her curiosity was aroused. She
peeked out of the cave to watch the dancing, and immediately
strong deities forced open its doors and pulled her out. Light
and order were restored. The eight million deities gave such
a shout of joy that heaven and earth trembled—as they still
do, from time to time.
In fact the earth trembles in Japan about twelve times
a year in seismic shudders sufficient to crack windows and
make roofs collapse. According to contemporary accounts
of creation, the Japanese archipelago is one of a series of
submerged mountain arcs lying off the coast of Asia. Rising
from the Manshu Deep to summits four and five thousand
feet above sea level, it was formed by violent block faulting
and volcanic activity. Of Japan's one hundred and ninety-
two volcanos, fifty-two have been active within historic
times, and the Japanese islands owe their abrupt jagged
configuration to crustal foldings and upheavals so recent,
as geologists measure time, that the land has not yet been
eroded to smoothness. Physically, economically, and cultur
ally the Japanese mainland is Honshu. North of it lies Hok
kaido, with a landscape like that of Maine. Clustered at the
 U.S.S.R.
SAKHALIN

10
 southwest tip of Honshu are Shikoku and Kyushu ; between
these three is the Inland Sea, dotted with hundreds of
smaller islands of a beauty which makes them comparable
to that fabled island in the Japan Sea—Sado—''where even
the grass would prefer to grow." No farmer can be more
than forty miles from the sea, but visually the character of
the landscape is determined by mountains. Less than one-
seventh of Japan is level, and an area of 20,000 square miles,
equal to about half the state of Ohio, accommodates most of
the population of 80,216,000. The greatest contrasts are up
and down rather than north and south : farmers look up from
rice paddies to snow fields and the tree line. Orchids and
palms, cryptomeria, oak and maple, pine, plum and cherry
trees congregate in a climate like that from Maine to Geor
gia, although the humidity is constantly higher. Hot and
moist masses of air from the tropical Pacific begin to drift
over the islands in June, bringing the gentle "Plum Blossom"
rains and a stifling mist which makes the Japanese remove
and store away the exterior walls of their houses. In winter
there are cold dry winds from Siberia, against which far
mers on the western shores protect their buildings by weight
ing the roofs with stones.
The remote ancestors of those farmers, in the uneasy
time before history begins, most probably came from a cen
tral point on the Asiatic mainland, possibly in South China
or Indo-China, from which they emigrated to the southern
Pacific islands, Korea, and Japan. There is no archeological
evidence to support the belief that much of the Japanese
population has its origin in the southern islands, despite
the predominance and the continuing reassertion of archi
tectural forms peculiar to the tropical Pacific, as well as
the strong Malay cast of feature and bodily structure of
much of the present population. The earliest remains are
of the Jomon people, and they suggest a northern continental
or Caucasian origin. The Jomon people were also similar to
the Ainu population which they eventually displaced. Named
for a kind of pottery decorated with a rope or coil pattern,
Jomon culture was itself succeeded by a people whose arti
facts resemble those found in Korean excavations. This sec
ond phase of Japanese culture is called Yayoi, after the place
in southern Honshu where most of its remains have been
unearthed. The Yayoi succession was aided by fresh waves
of cultural influence transmitted from the continent through
Korea. Both the Jomon and the early Yayoi cultures were
neolithic, but when it displaced or absorbed the Jomon peo
ple in the southern and western parts of Japan the Yayoi
culture was about to pass into a metal phase. China's age
of bronze was extended to Japan by the Yayoi people, but
 RICE FIELDS
With less than one-seventh of the land level, farmers must terrace
the mountainsides for the cultivation of rice. Stone retaining walls
are used when the terraces are small and close together, but usually
the walls are of earth cut and smoothed with a trowel.

12
was so rapidly overtaken by the Chinese iron age that Japan
can not be said to have had a true bronze culture.
"In that land," says the Nihon-shoki (the Chronicles of
Japan compiled in A.D. 720), referring to the time when
the founders of the nation contemplated descending to earth,
"there were numerous deities which shone with a lustre . . .
and evil deities which buzzed like flies. There were also trees
and herbs which could speak." Men, animals, plants and
rocks, all things animate and inanimate, had speech and
were kami ; whatever evoked a thrill of awe, mystery, or
affection, whatever possessed superior merit, was in some
sense miraculous and therefore sacred: kami. The feeling
of communion with nature which inspired this response was
so deeply rooted that its picture of what the West calls the
world beyond, but in Japan was regarded as the world within
the natural world, evolved without a rigidly conceptualized
theogony. The attributes of individual deities remained to
a large degree interchangeable. Worship of these deities was
only given a name-Shinto, The Way of the Gods-to dis
tinguish it in the eighth century from the newly imported
teachings of Buddhism. In a universe neither friendly nor
hostile to man, and in which divinity was manifested in all
things, the earliest teachings of Shinto described the soul
as consisting of two parts: the first, Nigi-mitama, is mild,
refined, essentially happy, and associated with health and
prosperity; the second, Ara-mitama, is rough. It is also ad
venturous, dashing, and sometimes even evil. Since the soul
was associated with breathing, to die was the departure of
breath. The soul was a substance. Precious, round, and glow
ing, it could sometimes be seen lingering in the darkness, a
pale ball of fire. It might or it might not go away: it did
become kami , and it was necessary to prepare for it the
appropriate accommodations.
The practice of building large burial mounds for the rul
ing class seems to have been economically feasible by the
third century A.D., but after numerous Imperial proscrip
tions limiting the size of the mounds according to rank, and
then altogether forbidding the aristocracy to continue in
what had become a ruinous extravagance, it appears finally
to have been abandoned around A.D. 600. Many of these
burial mounds survive in central Japan, greatly modified by
time and the weather. The extraordinary sculptures they
contained reveal the foundations of a style volition peculiarly
Japanese, by which subsequent inundations of Indian,
Chinese, and, to a lesser extent, Western culture have all
been transformed.
Of the four types of burial mounds that can be distin
guished, two occur frequently enough to be taken as charac-
 teristic. In plan the first of these types is round; the second
is roughly squared in front and rounded in back. Although
in most cases they are now covered with trees and shrubs,
originally these artificial plateaus were closely paved with
thousands of white cobblestones. From one to three moats
further isolated them from the landscape, and probably
accounts for their having been called Elysian Isles. The
largest of the mounds was made for the Emperor Nintoku,
who died in A.D. 425. Ninety feet high and 1620 feet Iong,
it has a rounded back 816 feet in diameter. Both sides of this
mound have eroded, so that in plan it now presents a figure
somewhat like a keyhole. The burial chamber of Nintoku's
tomb was proportioned like a corridor 8 feet wide and 20
feet long, the walls and ceiling being built of great stone
slabs. The tomb was surrounded by three moats, and both
the mound and the area around the moats were fenced with
stakes made of clay, called haniwa—literally circles of clay.
These cylinders were placed close together and half buried
in the ground, presumably to keep the mounds from being
washed away by the rain. Eventually they acquired a sym
bolic content and were made not as unadorned cylinders but
as men and women, warriors in battle dress, children, and
animals. An agreeable legend, but probably an apocryphal
one, relates that the slaves of Prince Yamato Hiko, on being
buried alive with their deceased master, moaned and cried
so movingly that the Emperor Suinin asked a court official
if it were not possible, henceforth, to substitute symbolic
statues of clay for living sacrifices. Emperor Nintoku's
tomb, some two hundred and fifty years later, was arrayed
with 11,280 cylinders deployed in three "man fences." Forty-
eight hundred haniwa were outside the moat and 6480 were
on the mound itself.
In contrast to the art forms of other cultures in a compa
rable stage of development, the esthetic characteristics of
the haniwa figures seem motivated less by fear than by the
Yayoi craftsmen's ineluctable urge to render more elegant
the world of their experience. Brutality and the grotesque
gave way, we may suppose, before a world whose population
of deities represented indifferent trees, rocks and fireflies at
least as copiously as storms, disasters, and unnatural evils.
Many of the haniwa sculptures look as though they were
made by rolling a sheet of clay into a cylinder and then clos
ing it at the top. The force of the design is sustained chiefly
by the taut linear quality of rounded openings cut sharply
into the sides, to indicate eyes, nose, and mouth, and the
preoccupation with line is echoed in contours which seem
drawn rather than modeled. Suave and often witty, the
haniwa images are fashioned with a repressed energy that
TOMB OF EMPEROR NINTOKU
Begun c. A.D. 425, near what is now called Osaka. Occupying 80
acres, Nintoku's tomb is an artificial mountain surrounded by three
moats. Indentations at both sides of the mound are attributed to
erosion.

15
:

Head of a girl. Nara, c. A.D. 300

<

HANIWA SCULPTURE
Right: Two dancers. Saitama Prefecture, c. A.D. 200. The difference in height
distinguishes the man from the woman; the man is 17 inches high, but when
placed in the ground only the upper part of the figure is visible.

Unlike China's Ming ch'i statues, which were representations of animals and men
16 placed in tombs for eternal service to the deceased, haniwa images are often in full
ceremonial dress and seem designed primarily to commemorate high rank.
TATEANA DWELLING
The oval pit was protected by a cone-shaped roof covered with bark
 takes them, sometimes, to the edge of caricature. But they
are not so much portraits of people as of attitudes and
gestures.
Besides the haniwa figures, tools, and ornaments, the
sepulchral mounds have yielded many clay models of dwell
ings and shrines, and there survive pictorial records en
graved on clay tablets, the backs of mirrors, and in one case
on a bronze bell, of building types thought to be among the
earliest in Japan. There also remain a few actual sites
pressed into the ground like footprints, where marks of
posts, hearths, and entrances describe in vague and fading
relief the techniques of building in a most ancient time.
The first dwellings were natural caves ; then, near springs,
cave dwellings were excavated in soft ground at the side
of a hill. But the proper record of architecture begins with
what remains in eastern Japan of the shallow pit dwellings
now called Tateana. Conjectural reconstructions of these
dwellings suggest that they coincided with, or even preceded,
a simple gable roof resting on the ground, called Tenchi-
gongen. And with them all in a realm of speculation are
dwellings of a somewhat later period supposed to have been
built on posts over water; though similar buildings can be
found throughout the south Pacific, there is no evidence of
their having been used widely, if at all, in Japan.
Tateana sites were roughly rectangular in plan, but with
well-rounded corners transforming the rectangle into a
crude oval about 17 feet long. The earth floor was from 2 to
3 feet below ground level, the sides of the pit forming a low
vertical wall. In the middle of the floor an open hearth was
either excavated or marked off by small stones. Inside the
pit four posts were planted directly in the ground; four
beams were laid across them. The arrangement of the posts
coincides with the ground plans of huts built at a much later
time for smelting iron sand, in southwestern Japan, and since
these huts probably evolved from the earlier Tateana pit
dwellings they provide some indication of how the roof was
constructed. Rafters, springing from the ground outside the
pit, rested on the beams and projected several feet above
them. Single rafters centered on the narrow ends of the rec
tangular superstructure changed the perimeter of the roof,
at ground level, into a circle rather like the base of a cone-
shaped tent. Covered with bark, leaves, or grass, this roughly
textured lid was given an additional sculptural quality by
the ridge pole, which was made to extend well beyond the
points at which the rafters supported it, thus forming a
triangular peak on two sides of the roof. In time there de
veloped some heroically massive versions of such roof for
mations. The triangular openings served for ventilation, but 19
 apart from its practical origin this ancient combination of
shapes, found in Malay and the Celebes as well as in India,
signifies to the Japanese today a warrior's helmet (the
peaked upper section) and its neck guard (the circular
base) .
Dark and damp, the pit dwellings had at least the merit
of maintaining a more equable year round temperature than
did natural or artificial caves. In the next phase a floor at
ground level counteracted dampness: of such houses, called
Hirachi, the best preserved sites are those in which the floors
were paved with stone ; no example of the superstructure
survives. And finally, when the floor was raised off the
ground entirely, in the building type called Takayuka, Japa
nese architecture struck its characteristic and most endur
ing note. A drawing on a bronze bell of the first or second
century A.D., found in Shikoku, shows a Takayuka structure
with a gabled roof. Access to the raised floor is by means
of a ladder placed at the narrow end of the gable. The ridge
pole, no longer supported by the rafters as it was in the pit
dwellings, is instead carried by two columns independent of
the rest of the structure. A curious convention of perspective
in the representation on the bronze bell, and in other draw
ings, makes the rafters seem to be flying away from the
ridge pole rather than to be resting on it; what the drawing
presumably intends to emphasize is the projection of the
rafters above the ridge pole, where they cross each other
and form twin decorative combs along the top of the roof.
There is no particular structural justification for this detail,
unless it be the provision of extra weight to keep the ridge
pole balanced in place; but the decorative motif, called chigi ,
survives as a single pair of crossed rafters at each end of a
building. It can be seen in shrines at Ise and elsewhere in
Japan. Similar forms may be found in the southern Pacific
islands and in southeastern Asia, where the crossed rafters
sometimes are carved and painted; today there exist com
munities in India where, in the absence of wood, or perhaps
simply out of preference for an exotic material, a kind of
chigi are carefully cut from sheets of corrugated tin.
The early Takayuka dwellings were single cells of space.
Isolated column supports for the roof were placed at each
corner of this empty cube, and were structurally independent
of the walls which completed the enclosure. The simplest
way to amplify and extend this space was to place a column
in the center and a column between each of the corner posts,
implying a division of the single volume into four distinct
cells. In farmhouses today the division of a square plan into
four areas is often effected with four partitions which, radi
ating from the central post, reach halfway to the exterior
 TAKAYUKADWELLING
An engraving on a bronze plaque of the first or second century A.D.
shows an elevated building called Takayuka. Two independent col
umns support the ridge pole; rafters rest against the ridge pole
and project beyond it, forming decorations called chigi. Access is
by a high steep ladder, suggesting that the building type may
originally have been devised as a granary.

Haniwa representation of a dwelling or warehouse. Details of the wood framework

are necessarily distorted in this clay model, but the cylindrical weights along the
ridge and the heavy gable ends are rendered more accurately.
IZUMO SHRINE
The main building of Izumo Shrine is an elevated structure approximately
feet square without its verandas. First built prior to A D 550 the
present reconstruction dates from 1744.
 walls. It seems most probable that the original impetus for
this spatial and structural elaboration-if there can be said
to have been any single dominating impetus—was the desire
to make some qualitative distinction, in shrines, between
the space reserved for the deity as symbolized by an object
associated with its powers, and the space reserved for
priests. An example of one of the earliest usages of the four-
celled plan is the shrine at Izumo ; its arrangement reveals,
in a state untutored by other cultural influences, the Japa
nese proclivity for asymmetrical composition. Entirely
raised above ground level and surrounded by a veranda, the
building is reached by a high steep stair whose off-center
placement gives to the south facade its chief architectural
interest. In this building the deity is enshrined in the north
east compartment, facing toward the west. Entrance to the
building is through the southeast compartment. The only
interior partition is that which screens the deity's cell from
the adjoining entrance area: the two remaining units of
space, on the west, are thrown together. The west elevation
of the Izumo shrine faces the sea, presumably so that the
deity, or the priest who sat at the deity's shrine, was able to
gaze outward in placid contemplation.
Shrines are built to protect an object inhabited by a spirit.
It is not the object itself which is the focus of worship, but
the kami that has made the object its resting place. Features
of the landscape like unusual stones and trees are in this
sense kami, and were the original objects of worship ; some
times an entire forest, or a mountain like Fujiyama, was thus
revered. But usually the holiness of an individual tree or
stone was acknowledged by circling it with a wood fence.
Artificial objects were also attractive to kami: the three
sacred treasures of Japan are a jewel symbolizing knowl
edge; a sword, symbolizing authority; and a mirror that by
the purity of its reflections symbolizes justice. Given by the
gods to the remote ancestors of the Japanese, the mirror is
perhaps the most important of the three great treasures, and
the Emperor, as the chief intermediary between his people
and the spirits, is custodian of the Sacred Mirror at Ise.
Ise, in southwest Honshu, is the most holy center of the
Shinto religion, and the complex of buildings and fences
which together constitute the shrine is perhaps the most
impressive example of all Shinto architecture. Ise Naiku
(the Inner Shrine, as distinguished from Ise Geku, a group
of buildings three miles from it, erected in 478 for the grain
goddess Toyouke-no-Okami) was founded late in the third
century A.D. and is dedicated to the Sun Goddess Amaterasu
O-mi-Kami. The site is in a forest of giant cryptomeria bor
dering the Isuzu River. What is properly called the shrine
 ISE SHRINE
The prayer ^
"r'd.atined
te 24 !^ fence c with whi silk, is
the furthest point in the enclosure to which visitors may approach!
ISE SHRINE
Torii between the second and third fences. The structure in the background is a gate.
ISE SHRINE
The Shoden or main building, containing the sacred symbols of
ohintoism ; m the background is the west treasure house. The cov
ered entrance is a detail added in the Meiji Era (1868-1912) to
protect the steps.
 comprises four rectangular buildings on a level clearing 55
yards wide by 127 yards long. Four fences, one within the
other, completely enclose this site. The Shoden, or main
building, and two treasure houses are located behind the
innermost fence ; a meeting hall for the priests lies between
the second and third fences. The major axis of the site runs
north-south, and it is from the south that visitors approach.
At numerous small shrines and pavilions specifically set
aside for the purpose visitors are required to wash their
hands in a brief ritual of purification, and at the flight of
steps that leads to the enclosure there is another open pavil
ion, sheltering a granite basin, where they again rinse their
hands in clear cold water. If it is winter and they happen to
be wearing western clothing they remove their overcoats.
(It is rude to indicate discomfort by wearing an overcoat
indoors, and in a sense the entire precinct, not the Shoden
alone, is the home of Amaterasu O-mi-Kami.) The Shoden
and the gates in all but the first fence lie on the same axis :
to align everything perfectly would be to flaunt a perfection
appropriate only to the handiwork of the spirits; so it is
better, Japanese carpenters believe, to include a deliberate
imperfection like an off-center gate, which also has the
merit of conforming to the Japanese taste for informal,
intuitively balanced composition. Between each fence is a
post and lintel structure— a doorless gate—called a torii. The
two columns of these gates are joined at the top by two hori
zontal members, the upper one often exceeding the actual
span by several feet. The torii symbolizes Japanese archi
tecture much the way a Doric capital summons up a Greek
temple; but unlike a Doric capital a torii is an independent
decorative structure whose meaning is clear and complete:
it signifies a holy place. (Japan has more than 140,000
Shinto shrines, and each of them has at least one torii.)
Strips of white silk curtain the second gate, revealing, as they
flutter in the wind, another torii and beyond that another
fence. Approaching this gate worshippers bow, clap their
hands to announce themselves and attract the attention of
the spirit, and then, after a few moments of silent prayer,
withdraw to one side where they may admire the surround
ing forest and what little may be seen, above the fence, of
the sacred inner precincts. The atmosphere is calm, purpose
ful, but not exalted ; it is rather a purification and heighten
ing of an experience of nature accessible in Japan wherever
the landscape has not been touched by industrialization. At
Ise, perhaps, the landscape has an extra beauty because of
the huge ancient cryptomeria. There is also a disturbing
silence, broken sometimes by the abrupt sound of clapping
hands and the distant thin music of temple dancing.
 ISE SHRINE
The Shoden Raised approximately 7 feet above the
ground the building stands in an enclosure entirely
surfaced with white gravel. Columns and plank
6
S,
T islfSt P yeI1 hinoki (^Press) ; the roof
-hatch f ^ Flame-shaped ornaments on the bal
ustrade are red, yellow, black, and green lacquer
ze on bronzy a" other ornaments are gilt bro„
the decorative cross-piece called chigi and the
hts
nJ^ mavo^pt wei ? the roof, called katsuogi,
may once have been tie members for the ridge pole.
 * * 2

s ^ ;** £\ **> » r ,m m>

>4^Mr
_*gm,
> >V
 ISE SHRINE
The Shoden. Beams are at first supported only by
the plank walls. After a year the planks will shrink
and allow the beams to settle in place. Therefore
a small space, visible in the photograph, is left be
tween all columns and the beams they will eventu
ally support. Decorative strips projecting above
the ridge pole, which is carried by independent
columns, are believed originally to have been hung
with a number of whips signifying family rank.
Bronze covers protecting the ends of the beams are
of the Tokugawa age and reflect the influence of
Buddhist ornamentation. The slender rafters
which appear to support this roof are actually
hung from beams inside the roof itself. Two thin
layers of reed protect the exposed underside of
the thatch, which is first dried and colored dark
brown by smoking, then sewn into bundles, fas
tened to the structure, and trimmed to a curve
prepared on wood templates. The curve, which
occurs in cross-section only and not in elevation, is
itself believed to be an example of Buddhist in
fluence. 31
 Only the Emperor and the High Priest of Ise ever enter
the Shoden. For most Japanese it is not necessary to see
what is hidden behind the fences. "I know not what lies
within, the Priest Saigyo declared in a famous poem, "but
I am in tears with gratitude." Certainly the fundamental
effect of Ise's plan is its air of mystery, and the four fences
which consecutively enclose the buildings are a solemn archi
tectural version of the magic circle. Ise's buildings are a rela
tively late type in the evolution of Shinto architecture.
Shimmei, its style designation, refers to modifications of
earlier roof designs, the most important change being the
placement of the entrance not at one side of the gable end,
as it is at Izumo, but in the exact center of the long side
of the building. Although they vary in size and placement
each structure is almost identical in detail and spatial con
ception. All the buildings are essentially variations on a
single architectural theme, and the effect they produce is
that of a series of photographic enlargements and reduc
tions, juxtaposed in such a way that the landscape itself
seems to have been alternately stretched and condensed to
accommodate a sudden shift in scale. Raised above the
ground, the building type represented by the Shoden has an
independent column at each of the gable ends to support the
ridge pole, like the earlier Takayuka structures. Straight
rafters carry a weight of thatch which may be considered the
building's chief ornament, surpassing in the boldness of its
effect even the decorative wood cylinders like logs, called
katsuogi, placed along the ridge. (The function of these
heavy cylinders may originally have been to prevent the roof
from lifting in a strong wind ; at Ise their shape and size have
been carried beyond any purely practical purpose.) The
thatch roof is sewn together in bundles, tied to the rafters,
and then, with the aid of wood templates like those used in
the construction of a boat, cut and trimmed to produce a
gentle convex surface. The roof is, as it were, given a hair
cut, patted, combed, and brushed into shape.
The buildings at Ise illustrate perfectly that preference
for the articulation of structural elements which has suffered
only a very occasional lapse during the twenty-odd centuries
of its history in Japan. But Shinto architecture's transfor
mation of structural necessities into sculptural forms of ab
stract beauty is a process better described as amplification
rather than articulation. For the Japanese architect merely
to reveal a fact is of no great significance ; to transcend the
fact is to approach truth, in architecture as in religion. The
truth that transcends the facts has surprising manifesta
tions at Ise. Because Amaterasu O-mi-Kami represents the
purity of nature, a building designed to shelter the sacred
mm ,mm 'ma mm mm *#*> s#*** m '*

t tm M> MUK *®* §WW* •flMSW |*aw

i "I H I I M M J! i

ISE SHRINE
The Shoden, north elevation.

33
ISE SHRINE
Prayer gate in the second fence.
 symbol in which the deity resides must itself embody that
purity, and not in appearance only. Thus the round columns
of hinoki (Japanese cypress) ranging in diameter from 2
feet to 4 feet, are planted directly in the ground, as they
once grew, even though they immediately begin to deteri
orate from dampness. Like the columns themselves, the
beams, ridge pole, and rafters are often far larger than they
need to be, but it is the details of joinery which suggest even
more the response of the sculptor as much as of the car
penter-architect. Bold shapes whose surfaces are their sole
adornment, smoothed and polished to warm the golden-
yellow grain of hinoki, finally come to suggest, like many of
the wood carvings of Constantin Brancusi, that they would
look as they do if nature were suddenly to produce them.
But the effort to sustain, or rather renew, this archi
tecture is necessarily as formidable as that which created
it. Once every twenty years, since the reign of Emperor
Temmu (673-686) every fence and building is completely
rebuilt on an identical adjoining site. The present buildings
are the fifty-ninth reconstruction. This process has by now
almost depleted the Imperial forests of their reserve of suit
ably large hinoki trees, and future restorations, like the one
completed in 1953, may have to draw heavily on Korean and
Formosan timber supplies. Since the seventh century there
have been minor modifications of the design due to the influ
ence of Buddhism. Brass ornaments on the balustrade, the
katsuogi, the gable ends of the Shoden, and on the fence
posts, while often having a practical purpose are neverthe
less of debatable authenticity. More important, perhaps, is
the veranda surrounding the Shoden : probably incorporated
into the design in ancient times, it makes more elegant but
much less powerful the awesome forms seen in the east and
west treasure houses, where the original design is main
tained with greater accuracy.
Nevertheless for over twelve hundred years the symbolic
youth and purity of Shinto architecture has been periodical
ly retrieved. Each time the buildings are consecrated anew.
When the work has been completed the spirit that dwells in
the mirror is led from the old Shoden to a nearby shrine,
where it receives offerings of food. Then the Sacred Mirror
is carried back—but this time to the new Shoden—and the
spirit, following, is thought not to be seriously disturbed;
the new home is identical in every respect to the old one,
except for its polished, golden freshness.

35
ISE SHRINE
West treasure house. The solid walls are planks set on edge and fitted into grooves
in the columns. Similar treasure houses at Ise Geku, first built in 478 three miles
istant from Ise Naiku, are fitted with steps made of massive squared logs. Both
treasure houses at Ise Naiku preserve the ancient structural forms with greater
vitality than does the Shoden. K*ecnei
East treasure house,
ISE SHRINE
Every twenty years the buildings and their enclosures are rebuilt
on an adjoining site. When the new buildings (at the right) have
been consecrated and the symbols in which the deity resides have
been installed, the old buildings and fences will be dismantled.
The latest reconstruction is the fifty-ninth over a period of twelve
hundred years; the ritual will be repeated once again in 1974. 39
 airs are not used in Japanese houses. Silk cushions called zabuton
are placed directly on the mat floors. At the right is a wood armrest,
called kyosoku. The portable charcoal brazier at the left is not used
to heat a room but to warm the hands of those who sit near it.
balled a hibachi, the brazier consists of a copper bucket set in a
lacquer container.
2
Basic assumptions the Japanese make about the world they
live in—both visible and invisible—are far more important
to their art of architecture than are the specific qualities of
materials, whether a building be made of steel and glass,
wood, stone, or the earth itself. Until the intrusion of West
ern values the natural way to build was simply to meet the
requirements of warm weather— an assumption of such seem
ing reasonableness to the Japanese that to debate it would
have been idle. Thus for centuries the people of Japan have
lived on the floors of papery pavilions not as warm as the
crude earth huts of the Koreans, who long ago devised a
form of central heating. Winter in Japan is less bitter than
it is in Korea, but it is not so much milder that the variety
of charcoal braziers used by the Japanese to warm their
houses, or at least their hands, could be considered an ade
quate solution to the problem of heating. Winter was held
to offer an experience of difficult but rewarding beauty. The
wise man would not struggle to avoid it but would deliber
ately submit himself to it. Indeed, by the seventeenth cen
tury those adepts of Zen Buddhism who had mastered "the
art of being in the world" knew how to relish the falling
snow, while sitting calmly in a room thrown open to its
frozen garden. Nevertheless, from September to April less
philosophical Japanese are cold—not because they do not
know how to make themselves warm but because they have
preferred to build for summer. The demands of climate, and
the availability of materials and technical skills combine to
influence architectural form, but they are themselves inter
preted according to those patterns of response by which a
society develops all of its concepts. Religious aspirations,
philosophy, and fortitude were evidently far stronger fac
tors in shaping Japanese architecture than was, for example,
the climate, and yet no architecture in the world can be
described as more closely related to its environment than
the architecture of Japan.
There is one other aspect of Japanese life, apart from
those private and social gestures motivated by religion and
philosophy, that has profoundly influenced the country's
architecture. Japan is the only major civilization in the
world never to have developed furniture; the Japanese pre
fer to sit on the floor. There are, of course, items of furniture
like portable screens, boxes, chests of drawers and low
tables ; all of them are stored in closets when not in use. That
this preference for sitting on the floor in an empty room has
its origin in some deep racial tie with the hot countries,
where houses as well as furniture are very nearly super
fluous, is a speculation neither more nor less rewarding than
that which attributes a distaste for furniture to a truly acute 41
?

The kotatsu provides more warmth than does the

hibachi. It consists of a charcoal brazier with a
removable wood grille set over it like a table. To
store heat a heavy quilt is spread over the kotatsu
and the legs of the people sitting around it. An
other version of the kotatsu is entirely built into
the floor; a mattress placed near it, with a quilt
long enough to cover both the kotatsu and the
mattress, makes a comfortable sleeping arrange
ment.
 fastidiousness. But the practical results of sitting on the
floor can be strictly measured. It has influenced the choice
of materials and textures, besides making it desirable to
build the floor off the ground ; it has influenced the design of
clothing and made absolutely necessary the removal of shoes
before entering a building, since the floor itself is a kind of
fragile furniture ; it has influenced the size of rooms, which
may conveniently be small if they are to accommodate peo
ple only; it has encouraged the use of moveable partitions,
often decorated with large paintings since there is nothing
to obstruct either the view of such partitions or access to
them ; and it has influenced the design of gardens, which are
seen most often by eyes approximately 2 feet 6 inches above
the floor. In China one rises from the comfort of a chair to
greet one's guests ; in Japan one kneels on the floor. Servants
in many restaurants and homes still enter a room on their
knees, as does the mistress of the house when meeting her
conservative husband's friends, although the change in daily
living habits due to the introduction of Western ways, par
ticularly in business life, has brought about the collapse
through sheer unwieldiness of many such customs.
Between the primitive impulse to architectural form
manifested by the Yayoi pit dwellings, and the highly de
veloped abstractions of structure at Izumo and Ise, two
themes are established: the characteristic Japanese sense of
construction emerges in the process of fitting together many
separate pieces of wood to outline space with a structural
cage; and the Japanese sense of shelter is expressed by am
plifying the roof into a faceted sculpture. The skeleton frame
and the dense roof which tops it are, to the Japanese form
sense, decisive architectural elements, and such separate
disciplines as orientation, plan, structure, and decoration,
achieve their happiest effects when they facilitate this form
sense. It is convenient first to consider these elements apart
from the social influences which produced specific building
types and their local variations. Separated, for the moment,
from such details, the form itself may be examined with an
eye to discovering by what inner laws it evolves.
A significant problem of design for the carpenter-archi
tects of Ise would have been an irrelevant detail for the men
who built, say, the Parthenon— although the Greeks pre
served in stone many of the forms they originally developed
in wood construction. The Greeks found meaningful archi
tecture in a just equilibrium of parts, ordering podium,
columns, and roof in a composition made incoherent if any
one of those elements unjustly dominated the others. The
builders of medieval cathedrals elevated the dynamics of
thrust and counter-thrust to a pre-eminence which ulti- 43
 mately destroyed the sense of supporting and supported
members. In Europe's renaissance a reappraisal of the Medi
terranean tradition established the wall as an architectural
factor of decisive significance; the roof, except as a dome,
frequently disappeared altogether, leaving only a cornice to
show where it had been. Even in the twentieth century, when
skeleton-frame construction in steel or concrete has brought
about a reappraisal of all the elements of architectural com
position, the Western architect habitually composes a build
ing with walls— facades. But for the Japanese the most
expressive architectural element has always been the roof.
A Japanese building is a roof, and when the Japanese speak
of the beauty of a building they think at once of the propor
tions, the curvature, the sculptural modeling, and the texture
of its roof because here the architect reveals his particular
sensitivity, especially in buildings of monumental size,
through adjustments of extraordinary delicacy.
Four types of roof have been developed and refined by
the Japanese over the centuries. They are the single gable,
called Kirizuma; the square pyramidal, called Hogyo ; the
hipped roof, called Yosemune or Shichu; and the lrimoya, a
Japanese combination of the hipped and gabled roofs. Varia
tions of this last type are found also in the southern Pacific
islands, and the prototypes for all of them may be found in
China.
Although skilled carpenters may dispense with full-scale
dress rehearsals, quite often wood members for each of these
loof types are first assembled on the ground, with wedges
and tenons. After important corrections have been made the
structure is dismantled and set aside, each piece having
been numbered. Respectable craftsmanship requires that all
parts which remain visible when the roof is completed be
pasted over with thin paper to protect the surface from
fingermarks; the wood is not painted but is rubbed with a
vegetable oil which, in time, darkens its golden tone to a
rich deep brown. Immediately following completion of the
column structure, and before the walls have been filled in,
the roof is constructed in place. The framework for a roof
60 feet by 40 feet can be assembled by ten men in about two
days. Some of the beams may consist of entire tree trunks,
rough-hewn, but assembly begins with the finished pieces!
often of a purely decorative nature, which appear to support
the overhanging eaves. When the ridge pole is in place a
religious ceremony called Mune-age is held to insure by
divine protection the safety and durability of the whole
building, and to give thanks for the safe completion of the
difficult part of the work.
Considering the weight of tile or thatch loaded onto the
ROOF TYPES
Top row, left: Kirizuma. Right: Hogyo. Bottom row, left: Shichu. Right: Irimoya.

In temple compounds or groups of palace buildings roof types were arranged

hierarchically, Shichu and Irimoya roofs being generally reserved for larger and
more important buildings.
 roofs of Japanese houses the Western achitect would expect
to discover that a considerable ingenuity had been expended
in the development of strong and economical framing tech
niques. But such an expectation would be gratified instead
by the discovery that Japanese carpenters succeed in balanc
ing massive superstructures by techniques unconcerned with
those elementary principles of the truss that have effectively
operated in all the techniques of timber construction known
to Western practice. The adequacy of the Japanese methods
is proved by Todaiji temple's Kondo, the largest wood build
ing in the world. What keeps the roof of a Japanese building
in place, first of all, is its enormous weight. It rests on the
columns like a granite table top; the more heavily the
table is loaded, Japanese carpenters assert, the more se
cure it is. Earthquakes succeed only in making the whole
building bounce and sway, because the columns perch on
stones at ground level, rather than on deep sunken founda
tions. But nevertheless a sudden severe shock brings tile
tumbling into the street, and sometimes the rest of the roof
follows. The principle of the truss is not unknown to the
Japanese, and is indeed widely used in today's Westernized
practice. But until now it has been distasteful to the Japa
nese sense of form. In the same way the Greeks, knowing
the principle of the arch, reserved its use mainly for sewers.
While such discriminations are not necessarily rational they
are motivated nevertheless by a consistent logic of values.
Thus the Japanese, seeking to preserve the cage-like purity
of horizontal and vertical members, construct the roof with
heavy horizontal beams carrying many vertical posts. Some
times, if the beams are to be hidden by a flat suspended ceil
ing, a few of them will be made from naturally curved tree
trunks, taking advantage of the extra strength provided by
the slight arch. The lowest beams are supported by columns
at both ends, and the vertical posts they carry are placed
close to the columns to reduce the bending moment of the
beams as much as possible. There may be as many tiers of
beams and vertical posts as are considered necessary to
ensure adequate strength; occasionally these beautiful con
structions reach a startling complexity, requiring such
quantities of timber as to dissuade engineers whose tech
nology is less lavish from attempting to design them.
Any of the four roof types, individually or in combina
tion, may be found suitable for a particular building, but
certain of them are more obviously suited to simple prob
lems. For example, the square pyramidal roof lends itself
very well to smaller buildings, and is often used for temples
and houses of limited size and extreme simplicity of plan.
A gable roof, less intricate than those found in Shinto
 Exposed roof framing in a Kyoto farmhouse.

Cross-sectionof roof framing. From a carpenter's manual c. 1860.

Posts of varying height are supported by heavy beams. (Those shown in

the photograph take advantage of the natural curve of the tree.) Canti-
levered roof members are fastened between two beams well toward the center
of the building. These members also support a series of posts and beams
which carry a thin board sheathing and tiles or shingles. (The straight
line in the drawing indicates the degree of pitch and also reveals the amount
of curvature.) Projecting approximately 8 feet beyond the exterior wall,
the rough beams are covered with false rafters both to provide a finished
surface and to make the roof appear still thicker.
 shrines, is by virtue of its relative structural simplicity used
most often for farmhouses, barns, or other buildings where,
regardless of their place in the hierarchy of social prefer
ence, an air of unassuming modesty seems appropriate. But
more complicated forms also lend themselves to small build
ings. The main building of Muroji Temple, near Nara, is
in all respects a modest structure except for the extravagant
grace of its Irimoya roof. The curved eaves line, called sori,
is here the Japanese modification of the more emphatically
curved roofs introduced into Japan from China, during the
seventh century, as a detail necessary to temple architec
ture. Like the gable roof, the hipped roof is proper to a
rectangular plan, and the two forms are often combined in
private houses ranging from the very modest to the elaborate
mansions of feudal dignitaries. In its purest form, that is to
say when it covers a single rectangular unit, the Irimoya roof
mitigates a too sharp distinction between front and sides of
a building, and the problem of carrying off a heavy rainfall
often suggests to the designer solutions of great plastic and
pictorial interest. When a large building, with several wings
arrayed in echelon, asymmetrically, is tied together by a
series of Irimoya roofs, their intersections become most
complicated and are a chief source of invention for those
pictorial effects—best seen from one preferred angle—that
so much delight the Japanese connoisseur.
Roof coverings of tile or thatch, singly or in combina
tion, are generally used for farmhouses. Tile is appropriate
for more elaborate Buddhist temples and for private houses,
both in the country and in town. Of the various kinds of tile
used two are seen most often. Imported from China, the
oldest of these designs is called hongawara. It consists of
concave tiles overlapped by convex pieces which provide a
watertight cover. The design produces an emphatically
striped texture, as if the roof were made of widely spaced
bamboo poles. The less expensive of the traditional tile
designs consists of single pieces convex at one end and con
cave at the other ; no intermediate pieces are required. A tile
roof is built up on thin boards applied to the rafters. The
boards are covered with a layer of shingles and then with
a thick layer of mud or clay. Tiles are often embedded in
this mud without any other bonding agent, so that in time
their hold on the roof is precarious. But on more elaborately
executed roofs the tiles are wired to each other and to the
boarding.
For temples and private houses, as well as for tea cere
mony houses, shingles made from the bark of hinoki or
sawara trees produce a roof the chief esthetic merit of
which is its teri, or sheen. These shingle roofs are designed
MUROJI TEMPLE
Shingled with hinoki bark, the lrimoya roof of Muroji Temple, near
Nara, is distinguished for its unusually subtle curvature. Chains
attached to the ridge provide a means of access. The ridge is covered
with copper sheets.
The thatched Irimoya roof of this farmhouse near Kyoto is com
bined with a tile roof to protect the veranda. The ridge is decorated
with bamboo poles ; such decorations vary in each province. Accord
ing to sound practice a thatch roof must have at least a 45° slope,
with considerably more preferred in the northern provinces.
 . f .,

Thatch and two traditional tile designs are combined in the gable
roof of this farmhouse at Nara. The small tile roof at the right
covers a chimney.
MYOSHINJI TEMPI,E
The elaborate tile ornaments, reflecting Chinese influence, are
designed to emphasize the roof's flamboyant, ascending curves.
Dolphins, symbolizing water, are placed at both ends of the ridge to
piotect the building from fire. The intersections of the eaves are
equipped with grimacing horned heads to ward off evil spirits.
K1TANOTENJINSHRINE
Hinoki bark shingles are used for the main roof and the seven
modified Irimoya roofs clustered around it. Although the shingles
average 8 inches at the eaves, the actual thickness over most of the
roof surface is 1 inch. Ridges are sheathed in copper ; the wave-
pattern end pieces are of tile.
 Two hipped roofs are superimposed in this Kyoto house. The lower roof, called
engawa, covers the veranda. Both roofs employ slight convex curves in a Japanese
departure from the concave surfaces and more pronounced curves characteristic of
Chinese roof designs. The thickness of the shingles at the eaves only is 2 inches ; the
54 actual thickness is less than 1 inch.
with great subtlety. For example, because a good part of
its beauty consists of a simple quantitative display of thou
sands of bark shingles along the eaves, this section is some
times made three or four times as thick as the actual
weatherproof covering on the rest of the roof. In reality
it is an artificial rim designed to suggest that the entire roof
is quite thick and heavy : but only that part which overhangs
the rafters at the eaves line actually has such thickness, and
to sustain the illusion it often becomes necessary to suspend
false rafters below the real ones. On the other hand, an
entirely different effect is obtained by revealing, or even
reducing, the actual thickness of the shingles at the eaves
line, so that by their very thinness the eaves belie the real
weight of the superstructure. Both treatments can be modi
fied for different effects by rounding the edges of the eaves,
especially where its line is long and gently curved, or by
cutting the edges as sharply as possible, with the fascia slop
ing abruptly inward toward the walls.
Those vast, hat-like roofs are made to hover above the
fields by constructions that seem only indifferently con
cerned with what they support. But the skeleton frame of
wood is the inner discipline of Japanese architecture, and
it is the physical outline of a conception of space. The place
ment of isolated column supports is determined by two con
siderations: the practical limits imposed by the scale of a
particular building and by the available sizes of timber;
and by the desire to make of the space contained in a build
ing a series of finite units, in theory if not in practice capable
of unlimited extension. Space in Japanese architecture is
additive. A room is a closed volume adjoined by other closed
volumes. Though they may vary in scale, they are seldom
intended to express those over-riding preoccupations of the
Western architect with spatial sequences progressing from
minor to major. Japanese architectural space characteris
tically knows no beginning, middle, and end.
The preference for additive space is revealed not only in
Japanese architecture itself but in the way buildings are
represented in Japanese painting. A view into the many
rooms of a house is often taken above normal eye level, so
that the observer seems to be peering down on the scene
while sitting in a tree. From such a vantage point one would
expect only an excellent view of the roof. But the conven
tions of Japanese pictorial representation permit the roof
to be omitted entirely, so that instead one looks down on a
cluster of cells partitioned like a tray of ice cubes. The near
est facade is sometimes drawn parallel to the picture plane,
and the lines indicating the sides of the building and its
interior partitions are drawn in isometric perspective. This
 method requires that all lines which in reality are parallel
to each other be drawn just that way. As a consequence
Japanese perspective, like that of other Eastern cultures,
does not depend on a vanishing point toward which all lines
converge to create the illusion of depth. Without a vanishing
point the representation of a building and its various rooms
may be extended indefinitely, and in the scroll paintings
called e-makimono buildings are often extended for several
feet without the drawing being organized, as a composition,
around any single dominating element. Thus the conven
tions of painting and perspective present a house as an aggre
gate of rectangular spaces, strictly delimited and often so
alike as to be interchangeable.
In architecture itself no less than in pictures of archi
tecture, differences in quality or mood, or purpose, are ex
pressed through the size of a particular room and through
the richness of its appointments. But there is nothing in
the disposition of the rooms or in the treatment of space
itself to suggest that a building has been imagined in its
entirety according to some preconceived abstract hierarchy
of spatial experiences. In the view which regards architec
ture as a kind of music, Japanese architecture is a thought
ful meandering along a keyboard. Each note struck is
another column ; the intervals of silence are the spaces they
delimit. Crescendos are rare, the art of the fugue is unknown,
and to the Western observer there seems to be no reason
why this architectural "music" can not continue forever
across the landscape.
Each of the volumes which together comprise a house
reveal the identical discipline of design. In order to trace
this discipline in its various manifestations, from foundation
stones to mural decorations, it is preferable to consider first
the simple units of measurement by which the discipline is
imposed.
The Japanese unit of measurement is the shaku. One
shaku corresponds to 11.93 inches, and is itself divided into
10 sun. Six shaku constitute 1 ken, which is the basic linear
unit of measurement in architectural planning. Lumber is
2, prepared in standard lengths of 1, iy 2, and 2V ken. A
square the sides of which measure one ken constitutes an
area of one tsubo ; this area is the basic unit of measurement
for surfaces. Buildings are considered to cover so many
tsubo, rather than square shaku or ken of floor space. But
a basic unit of measurement in the east of Japan is not the
same thing in the west of Japan. When the capital was
established at Nara in the eighth century, with its streets
organized in a right-angled grid, the ken was a 6 foot unit
designating the distance between columns. In eastern Japan,
KASUGAGONGENSCROLL
Kamakura, c. 1300. (detail) Collection Imperial Household Museum, Tokyo.
The rooms of a palace are shown with the roof and the upper part of the walls
removed. Partitions at floor level are sliding paper screens decorated with landscape
paintings (right). Fine bamboo curtains, called sudari, are shown rolled up at the
top of the columns (left, center) and unrolled along the exterior walls (foreground).
Above the sudari are wood weather doors hinged at the top and suspended from
the eaves.

57
 TENJIN ENGI SCROLL
Kamakura, thirteenth century, (detail) Collection Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York.
Carpenters, wearing hats of lacquered cloth, are shown constructing a temple,
A light bamboo scaffold can be seen in the background at the right.

58
and particularly in Edo, the seventeenth century capital of
the Tokugawa Shoguns, the ken designated a space from the
center of one column to the center of the next. In addition
to these local divergences in method, there are other differ
ences due to fine distinctions between the relative importance
of buildings. Thus in Kyoto a ken when applied to a mansion
meant 7 feet, or 6 feet 6 inches for a temple, or 6 feet 3 inches
for a house—and there were many other variations not trace
able to any single cause. By the end of the fifteenth century
the ken was considered a fixed unit of measure, although
Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo) distinctions persist to this day.
Ordinarily columns along the exterior walls of a build
ing are not placed closer together than one ken. A wall 3 ken
long—approximately 18 feet—may have four columns (one
at each end and two in between) but the wall opposite, which
may be in the interior of the building, need not have columns
that correspond in number or placement. This seemingly
paradoxical freedom in the disposition of columns is an im
portant aspect of Japanese planning. Differences in column
spacing on the various walls of a room are usually produced
by the juxtaposition of two or more rooms of different sizes.
Two small rooms backed up on one larger room necessarily
reveal an intermediate column on one wall of the larger
room, since columns are ordinarily exposed on both sides
of a wall. Another, and perhaps the most obvious, effect of
spacing columns irregularly is to stress one particular open
ing in a wall; by omitting one of the four columns on a
hypothetical 3 ken wall, the resulting larger interval focuses
attention on the view outside, even if the view through the
narrower adjoining bay is left unobstructed.
Foundations for the columns are provided by small
stones. A cylindrical recess in the top of each stone receives
a peg cut out of the bottom of each column ; no connection
less tenuous than this keeps a Japanese building in place,
and the foundation stones, carefully set in a bed of rock and
gravel, perhaps 2 feet deep, seem never to shift and settle.
About 2 feet above the ground each column is joined to a
floor beam. There are no basements, but sometimes the space
between the ground and the floor is enclosed by a plaster
wall to keep stray animals from establishing themselves
underneath the house. Numerous columns underneath the
floor beams provide additional support and make the floors
of Japanese houses unusually sturdy. There are, in fact,
really two sets of columns: those which support both floor
and roof beams, and those which support the floor beams
alone. Verandas and overhanging roofs receive their own
complement of columns. Like other exposed wood members,
all of these columns are usually left in their natural state:
 Detail from a contemporary carpenter's manual
Connection of two exposed horizontal members. The diagonal joint
is preferred because it minimizes interruption of the pattern of
wood graining.

60
Detail from a contemporary carpenter's manual
A column cut to receive four interlocking floor beams.
 Detail from a contemporary carpenter's manual
Two round beams intersecting at a corner column. A third piece
is added to make the beams appear to pass through each other.
Ends of both projecting pieces are notched to receive rafters.

62
no paint is used, but applications of vegetable oil afford some
protection against the effects of weather.
Columns are only one element in the linear description
of space with which Japanese architecture is concerned. But
the related structural and non-structural elements that fall
within this linear discipline must be viewed in conjunction
with the wall surfaces spread between them. Walls in Japa
nese architecture are screens against the weather, and have
no structural function other than to support themselves.
Since the eaves may project beyond the walls as much as 8
feet, the walls are usually well protected from rain. A solid
wall is most often built up on a lath of bamboo strips tied
together with rice straw fibres. Over this are applied, in
two layers of slightly different consistency, a coating of
mud always one half the thickness of the column (which
may be from 4 to inches square) , and to this is applied
one finishing coat of plaster about Vieinch thick. This top
coat of plaster is often of a paper-smooth texture comparable
to that of the plaster walls used inside Western houses; in
Japan the same material and the same smooth finish is used
for both interior and exterior surfaces. Both the mud base
and the plaster top coat are let into grooves in the columns,
allowing for shrinkage without additional trim details.
Craftsmanship of the best quality calls for the insertion of
straw fibres taped and nailed into the groove in the column,
to provide an additional bonding agent inside the wall itself.
The elimination of all visible trim details wherever wood and
plaster are joined produces an elegance and precision impos
sible to achieve by more cumbersome, if more durable, West
ern techniques.
By the eleventh century moveable wall panels of wood
were widely used ; prior to that time solid walls were built of
broad planks set on edge, horizontally, as in the buildings at
Ise. The moveable panels, called shitomido, were hinged at
the top so that they could be swung up into a room and
hooked to metal rods suspended from the ceiling. Occasion
ally they were lifted outwards and held in place by rods sus
pended from the eaves. Gradually these hinged doors were
replaced by an arrangement of considerably greater con
venience. Sliding doors of wood, called amado, protected
sliding panels made of light wood strips to which sheets of
translucent rice paper were pasted on the side exposed to the
weather. Called shoji, these paper walls admit an agreeably
cool and diffused light. In v/arm weather amado may be
stored in a kind of closet attached to each exterior wall of a
building, and shoji, on the rare occasions when they are
removed, are stacked inside the building or in a separate
storehouse. The smallest length of space in which shoji can
Left : a slioji panel with a protecting plate at the base. Translucent
paper is pasted to the outer side. Proportions of the grid, made of
thin wood strips, are variable. The baseplate may be omitted or,
as in the earliest versions of shoji, only the top half of the panel
may be of paper. Designed by Sutemi Horiguchi.
Right : a fusuma panel with black lacquer frame and inset finger-
grip. Layers of opaque paper are pasted to both sides of the wood
grid, which resembles that of the shoji. Both panels are approxi
mately 6 feet high.

Tatami, rice straw mats covered with woven rush, average 3 feet
by 6 feet and are at least 2 inches thick. The long sides are bound
with black cloth tape.
be used before their proportions become too narrow is 1 ken,
which takes two sliding units.
Almost all partitions inside a building are made of light
sliding panels similar to shoji, except that they are covered
with heavy, opaque paper on both sides. Called fusuma,
these interior partitions can be completely removed to con
vert the many rooms of a house into one open space. Often
the paper used for fusuma is embossed with small gold or
silver designs. In the great sixteenth-century efflorescence
of palace and temple building fusuma carried a weight of
mural painting in black ink, or in color on a gold or silver
ground, that may be said to surpass in its subtlety and its
invention the greatest achievements of architectural decora
tion in the Italian Renaissance. The proportions of fusuma
are of course determined by the placement of interior col
umns ; but quite often the process is reversed and a prefer
ence for a certain proportion will decide the placement of
columns. For example, given an average height of 1 ken, a
distance of 3 or 3V£ken between columns can be divided into
four fusuma the proportions of which are generally con
sidered to be desirable.
Even if every exterior wall of a building is composed of
sliding shoji, unless half of them are opened the rooms will
be surprisingly dark. This is due in part to the broad over
hang of the eaves, but it is also, of course, an intrinsic limi
tation of the rice paper itself, and is further aggravated by
the planning device of completely interior rooms with no
source of light (or ventilation) other than that borrowed
from adjoining rooms. The general gloom is compensated
by the even diffusion of light, the absence of glare, and by
the contrast of wood columns against white-toned walls—
a contrast the pursuit of which has encouraged further clari
fication of interior structural detailing. Light as a controlling
factor in the creation of space has played no great part in
Japanese architecture, as it has, say, in the buildings of
Bernini and Borromini, although a strong sense of the
quality of light has guided much of the design and the choice
of materials.
The floor also contributes to the structural organization
of a building, although originally it did not have such impor
tance. In the private rooms of Kyoto's eighth century Im
perial Palace, for example, the floor was of polished hinoki
planks with only a thick mat of rice straw bound with silk
tape provided for the Emperor's particular comfort. Propor
tions of rooms and the placement of columns was then con
ditioned by elements other than an occasional floor mat. But
by the middle of the fourteenth century the use of floor
mats of standard sizes had spread at least to the middle and 65
 upper classes, and except in verandas, both open and closed,
finished floors were now entirely of mats. Called tatami,
these mats are made of rice straw closely packed inside a
cover of woven rush. The long sides are bound with linen
tape, usually black, though for special purposes a figured or
printed colored silk may be used. Tatami average 2Vs inches
in thickness, 6 feet in length, and 3 feet in width—the latter
two dimensions being conditioned by the kyo and ma systems
of measuring, respectively, between columns or from center
to center. Although the mat size, like every other dimension
in a building, was originally determined by the standard ken
unit of measurement, once the mat became a fixed item of
the Japanese plan it acted to determine that plan more effec
tively than any other element. Thus the architect builds up
the shape of a room by combining mats in arrangements
which yield a limited number of room dimensions. In fact,
rooms are described in terms of the number of mats they
contain, rather than by their dimensions in tsubo or ken.
Certain arrangements require half-mats, or mats of other
wise unusual size, but the standard room sizes are generally
based on 4%, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15 and 18 mat combinations.
There are two great advantages to this module system.
First, it guarantees an internal order and consistency to the
various parts of a building. Second, because it is not based
on structural elements but acts instead to organize the
structure, it is a planning device of considerably greater
flexibility than is at first apparent. In effect it is two mod
ules: 1 ken in length and V2ken in width. Simply by having
one row of mats at right angles to all the others, or by
arranging all the mats in a spiral pattern resembling a Greek
key design, the architect avails himself of two interlocking
scales. Floor patterns made by the black tape bindings are
one of the most striking details of Japanese interiors. If the
floor is imagined as an abstract picture composed of rec
tangles, it will be seen that divisions on the "frame" enclos
ing the picture-the walls of the room—are affected by the
floor pattern itself. The black lines dividing the floor surface
not only suggest to the architect the placement of columns
and those intervals of shoji which will best relate a room to
its garden, but also tie together wall and floor in a harmony
as varied as it is consistent.
Besides the plan module imposed by tatami, two other
details also contribute to the organization of wall surfaces
and columns. The columns are in fact only the vertical ele
ments of a visible structure conceived somewhat like a
jungle-gym, and though it is true that they dominate the
composition by their relatively unalterable performance in
the linear description of space, they do not altogether escape
Tatami may be arranged in varying patterns to produce rooms of
different sizes.

Top row : Left : eight mats arranged in the old formal style usually
reserved for temples, palaces, or aristocratic mansions. Right : four
and one-half mats, usually used for tea ceremony rooms. A wood
panel may be substituted for the half mat.
Middle row: Six, eight, ten, and twelve mat rooms. The mats are
arranged to avoid the intersection of four lines.
Bottom row : Fifteen and eighteen mat rooms. The pattern may be
extended indefinitely, but the proportions of a room will be limited
to those shapes produced by mat combinations which avoid four
intersecting lines.
 modification by the horizontal elements of the structural
frame. It is just these horizontal units of structure and
decoration that most subtly establish scale in Japanese in
teriors. Approximately 1 ken above the floor a beam called
nageshi, apparently as heavy and solid as the columns it
ties together, provides a continuous horizontal line around
the room, like a cornice or a dado. Tracks to receive shoji or
fusuma are incorporated in the nageshi where required. The
nageshi is always revealed on both sides of a wall, even in
fixed plaster walls where it does not function as the top fram
ing for sliding panels. The space above the nageshi is usually
from 18 inches to 3 feet high. It may be filled in by white
plaster or shoji, if it is on an exterior wall, or, if it is part of
an interior partition, by plaster or by a wood lattice called a
ramma. This decorative element ranges from simple vertical
grilles to the most elaborate carved filagrees of plants, ani
mals, and birds. While the openness of the ramma is designed
to permit circulation of air, the practical motivation for the
nageshi itself is the provision of that lateral bracing which
walls of paper or plaster do not afford. But the restriction
of such bracing to horizontal elements alone is a procedure,
like the characteristically devious framing of the roof, that
cannot be justified on rational grounds alone. Prior to con
temporary practice, in which expediency often triumphs over
national taste, diagonal bracing was occasionally put to
use ; but it was invariably concealed within the thickness of
a plaster wall. Thus the elevations of a building include
horizontal bracing which forms, in conjunction with the
column structure, those Mondrian-like patterns so greatly
admired by contemporary Western architects. They have
always been admired by the Japanese; so much so that
Japanese carpenter-architects have not hesitated to intro
duce a superfluous "structural" element, or to conceal the
presence of real ones, if by so doing they could improve the
asymmetric composition of a facade.
As Japanese architecture clarified its conception of space
modulated by a structural cage, the horizontal elements of
the cage received still greater attention. For example, the
nageshi, ostensibly only a practical device, is scaled far
beyond its practical requirements. Made to look like a solid
beam, it is in reality merely a thin grooved plank (to receive
the sliding screens) flanked by two boards to strengthen it.
When it spans 3 or more ken, the nageshi is often divided
into two lengths. These sections are caught at the center by
a post hung from the beams; the dimensions of this post
are slightly smaller than those of the normal columns. Over-
scaling the nageshi guarantees that the eye will interpret
it as a structural element at least as significant as the col-
 THE IMPERIAL PALACE, KYOTO
The white plaster walls are divided by exposed horizontal bracing
arranged with due regard for effects of scale. Wall and roof sys
tems offer strong contrasts of linear and sculptural forms, height
ened by the occasional omission of a wall. Covered verandas
connecting these buildings were removed during World War II to
prevent fire from spreading.

70
umns, thus preserving the continuity of structural delinea
tion. But on walls meeting each other at a right angle the
nageshi are often at slightly different heights—the difference
being from one half to two or three times the depth of the
nageshi itself. This abrupt denial of continuity focuses
attention on the corner of a room, as if to accent the limits
of the space it contains. And the consequent differences in
the height of the ramma on adjoining walls has the further
effect of forcing into prominence one wall otherwise no more
important than the others. This seemingly disjunctive struc
tural grammar provides an unfailingly effective emphasis in
an architecture not susceptible to more drastic axial and
hierarchic development.
Every aspect of its design suggests that a Japanese build
ing is a kind of fable, elaborately shrouding such elements
of the structure as do not lend themselves to a poetic rendi
tion. Apart from all other details the ceiling of a Japanese
house alone would justify this view. It is true that in farm
houses, and in temples and certain other large buildings that
are almost entirely open in plan, the immensely complicated
superstructures are often revealed. But urbane usage re
quires the quantities of space, so carefully delineated by col
umns, tatami, nageshi and ramma, to be completed by flat
ceilings. The framing of the roof is not to be seen. What is
seen instead is a pattern of very light wood strips rather like
battens, placed perhaps 18 inches apart. These strips are
fastened to a ledge on the wall, called mawaribuchi, and
during construction are temporarily held aloft by a pole
suspended from the rafters. The Vs inch thick boards which
make the finished ceiling are placed on top of the strips so
that they overlap each other, and are nailed to the strips
from above. At intervals a somewhat heavier strip is nailed
on top of the boards, and to this in turn are attached several
wood poles which, finally, are nailed to the rafters far above.
Other methods also produce hung ceilings of that esthetic
simplicity for which the Japanese are justly famed.
At the intersection of wall and ceiling occurs what is
called the tenjo-nageshi. It is often given the appearance of
a major structural element, consonant with an architecture
in which surfaces, including ceilings, are subordinate to
lines. But the articulation of every element in the composi
tion of a room produced effects antipathetic to each other.
For example, it was felt that the ramma, particularly when it
was a plaster panel, detracted from the tenjo-nageshi so that
the ceiling itself seemed inadequately supported. This defect
was remedied by inserting, just below the ceiling, a strip of
white plaster wall perhaps 6 or 8 inches high. The extra
band of plaster made the wood ceiling appear to float effort- 71
KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
The influence of tea house architecture in this formal reception
room is revealed by the rounded corner post of the tokonoma, and
by a round nageshi above the sliding screens.
lessly above the room, but at the same time the tenjo-nageshi
was deprived of any apparent structural purpose. In reality,
of course, it had no significant structural function, but in
conformity with other such details it had always been ar
ticulated as an element of structure rather than decoration.
Columns could not be allowed to interrupt the extra band
of plaster even though the logic of the structure as a whole
suggested that they should, because such an interruption
would mean the loss of effects advantageous for the ceiling.
Sought for their own right rather than to clarify the initial
concept of a structural cage, such secondary effects were
finally organized into a separate system. The unusual merit
of this new style was its integration of acutely disparate
ideas. Called Sukiya-zukuri, its development was brought
about by the requirements of the tea ceremony, which in
cluded a special room and finally a separate house as part
of its equipage. The Sukiya style produced minor master
pieces of an architecture difficult to understand without a
detailed knowledge of the literary and metaphysical specu
lations which sustained it.
Another effect proper to Japanese architecture, but
infrequently exploited, is the arrangement of the rooms in
a building so that not all of them directly adjoin each other.
Like boxes of varying sizes packed unevenly in a carton,
rooms may be separated from each other by an unused,
wasted space. In practice this ambiguous area may serve
as a passageway or, perhaps, as in the example at Katsura
Palace, as a dressing room. Considered as an esthetic device
alone, the function of such an irregular space is to reveal the
corners of the rooms adjoining it, thus making it possible
to experience those rooms both from within and without as
complete, independent volumes. Such an arrangement un
expectedly emphasizes Japanese architecture's underlying
concept of additive, cellular space, even though it requires
the introduction of a secondary space which, like an organ-
point in musical composition, remains free of the harmonies
it supports.
The limits of each room are given their most important
definition not by the sliding screens but by the band of white
plaster wall above them. Together with the ceiling this
raised wall makes the upper part of a room a kind of lid
floating just above eye level. When the sliding screens are
opened to the view, it is the band of solid wall above which
seems to keep the inhabitants of the room from falling out
into the landscape. The proportions of the fixed upper wall
may be readily adjusted to the requirements of a particular
room by raising or lowering the ceiling height, since the
ceilings of individual rooms are suspended from the roof 73
beams and can be fixed at any appropriate level. The archi
tect is thus enabled to maintain throughout the building one
height for all sliding wall screens, without thereby sacrific
ing minute but necessary local variations in scale.
The relative absence of a monumental scale in classical
Japanese architecture, and of forms appropriate to it, has
often been attributed to geographical and climatic condi
tions. Heavy rainfall, abundant forests, and the constant
threat of earthquakes are regarded as having made inevita
ble the intense refinement of wood architecture. Stone, how
ever, is as readily available in Japan as timber, and the
dangers of seismic disturbances are at best minimized rather
than overcome by construction in wood. In fact it may be
noted that earthquakes are most successfully defied by stone
walls such as those found in the castles of Nagoya and
Osaka. Nor is the monumental scale inaccessible to the Jap
anese spirit: Emperor Nintoku's burial mound covers 80
acres (the great pyramid at Gizeh occupies 13.1 acres) ;
mural paintings like those of Kano Eitoku and his school
are a sustained, powerful outpouring of color and massive
pattern; and the Noh drama, with its stately evocation of
the tragic spirit, has for the Japanese that resounding
authority of insight which the Western world finds in
Sophocles and Shakespeare.
Nevertheless, the Japanese sense of form does not reveal
itself most clearly in monumental conceptions. Poetry, paint
ing and music no less than architecture affirm instead a pre
occupation with the refinement of form. But both the
miniature and the monumental (with certain notorious
exceptions) are subject to the same standards: restraint
and sobriety, and, among other things, a mildly negative
response to the temptations of worldly experience. All of
these modes of feeling are themselves part of the Japanese
conception of simplicity, which does not necessarily include
the spontaneous and direct. Something astringent, re
strained, and sober is shibui , the Japanese say, and reflects
an austere taste informed with a certain pleasurable mel
ancholy. Delighting in the transient and cultivating the
accidental, shibui nevertheless is sustained by a furious
energy, purposeful and unrelenting, and in its characteristic
game of reconciling contradictions lies what may be the
essence of the Japanese sensibility.
3
Ancient Korea had three major kingdoms. Two of them,
Silla and Kokuli, made war on Paikche, their neighbor. In
552 envoys from the King of Paikche applied for military
aid to the Emperor of Yamato, whose domains then com
prised the western half of Honshu and a foothold on Korea
itself. The envoys also delivered an image of the Buddha,
with a message from the King of Paikche recommending the
new doctrines as the best of all religions. The gift of Bud
dhism eventually altered and enriched every aspect of
Japanese life, but at first it was identified with the interests
of rival factions at the Imperial court. There it became the
personal commitment of Soga-no-Umako, a Minister who set
himself to importing everything necessary to the temporal
organization of the new faith. It remained for the scholarly
Prince Shotoku Taishi to import the moral and philosophical
content, while balancing the interests of the ascendant Soga
family against the conservative guardians of the native
Shintoism. Monks and architects began to arrive from
Paikche in 577. By 640 Buddhist temples in Japan numbered
forty-six ; by 697 there were over five hundred.
Horyuji Temple was founded in 607 by Empress Suiko. Its
earliest surviving buildings reflect a style of architecture
current in China perhaps one hundred years earlier, and
indeed they constitute a record of building types now van
ished from both China and Korea. One influence of the
Korean kingdoms is found in Horyuji's Kondo, or main hall,
which v/as built with the Korean foot measure prohibited
in Japan after 645. Horyuji's full name is Horyu Gakumonji,
which means Learning Temple, and it was in fact a combi
nation of temple and college. The earlier Korean and Japan
ese plan for this complex of functions began with a large
cloistered court approached from the south through the
Nandaimon, the Great Southern Gate. On a north-south axis
through the center of the site four structures were aligned :
The Chumon, or middle gate; the pagoda; the Kondo; and
the lecture hall, called Kodo. Buildings outside the enclosure
on the north, east, and west housed the monks. At Horyuji
this plan was modified. Within the cloistered court the
Kondo and the pagoda are placed not on the central axis,
where they can be seen only in sequence, but to the east and
west of the axis, where their varied heights and proportions
are seen in relation to each other and to the cloistered walk.
The Kondo stands on a stone podium, and its round columns
have a slight entasis, like their Chinese prototypes. The
columns, which rest on flat stones, are surmounted with
round plates carrying clusters of brackets to make possible
a greater extension of the cantilevered roofs. Conforming
with the equal prominence given to the main hall and the 75
 HORYUJI TEMPLE
Inside the temple compound are the pagoda and the Kondo. Both
buildings were destroyed by fire in 1949, and are now being recon
structed. The gatehouse, called Chumon, is at the far left; the
76 lecture hall is at the right.
pagoda, the middle gate incorporates two entrances side by
side, rather than one.
A pagoda either marks a sacred site or contains a
Buddhist relic; in Japan it is most often used for the latter
purpose, the relic being contained in a cup hollowed out of
a stone. This stone is placed under the central shaft, which
rises the entire height of the structure. The area at ground
level is walled in, despite the fact that the enclosing mokoshi,
or "skirt-building," mars the effect of weightlessness pro
duced by the tiers of roofs above. Like the Kondo, Horyuji's
five-storeyed pagoda stands on a stone platform, and it is
balanced and partially supported by its single huge central
column. Lesser columns surrounding this shaft support
beams which in turn carry more columns, for each of the
five cantilevered roofs.
Derived, through China, from the Indian Stupa, in which
the universe and the axis on which it revolves are repre
sented by a dome surmounted by a spire, the pagoda became
a giant architectural ornament retaining, at its top, only a
miniature replica of the forms from which it evolved. This
evolution was influenced by construction in wood rather than
stone, and a striking example of its technical refinement is
provided by the pagoda of Yakushiji Temple. Founded
around 680, Yakushiji was reproduced in Heijo, near modern
Nara, when the capital was moved there at the beginning
of the eighth century. Esthetically Yakushiji's pagoda is far
more complex than Horyuji's. Each floor has two projecting
roofs rather than one. The mokoshi seen at the ground floor
of Horyuji pagoda is here repeated on each level, and at each
level it is equipped with its own roof. The "real" roof above
it, much larger, thus appears to be a pedestal for the next
mokoshi. These skirt walls serve primarily to mask the clut
tered structure from which the roofs are cantilevered. The
total number of storeys is three, but the number of roofs
suggests that there are six. And where Horyuji's pagoda
relies for its effect on the diminishing size and the curvature
of its roofs, Yakushiji's introduces alternately large and
small roofs in a complicated rhythm at least as important as
their curvature. Curiously animated, even restless, the roofs
of Yakushiji pagoda, when seen from below, combine to hide
the mokoshi walls and thus seem to be hanging in air like
beads on an invisible string.
Yakushiji's pagoda is the surviving member of a two-part
composition; originally it was adjoined on the west by
another pagoda identical to it. Both of them were placed
within the temple compound on either side of the north-
south axis, recalling the earlier Korean style at Horyuji but
being in fact a modification of another arrangement im- 77
 HORYUJI TEMPLE
The Kondo and the pagoda are on either side of a north-south axis
terminated by the gatehouse, in the background. Exposed structural
framing of these buildings is painted red, with yellow accents.

PAGODA OF HORYUJI TEMPLE

All visible structural members for the roofs are cantilevered. Since
the balconies are not accessible, their railings at each floor serve
no practical purpose. The enclosure at the ground floor, called
mokoshi, is believed to have been added about one hundred years
after the pagoda was built. The reconstruction now in progress
will include this wall, but the pagoda will first be photographed
without it to provide a record of what its original appearance is
78 assumed to have been.
 PAGODA OF YAKUSHIJI TEMPLE
The mokoshi at ground floor level is repeated on each storey, and is
equipped with its own roof. These smaller roofs appear to be pedes
tals for each of the three large roofs, and suggest that the pagoda
has six rather than three storeys. Columns in the wall plane rest
on cantilevered members and serve primarily to stiffen the thin
80 plaster walls.
PAGODA OF YAKUSHIJI TEMPLE
Bracket arms reinforce the concealed, cantilevered roof beams
ported from China. In effect the pagoda was demoted, having
been taken off the central axis, as was done at Horyuji. But
here the Kondo, or main hall, is assigned a dominant posi
tion on the axis, and as a result two pagodas were required
to balance the design. Many of these developments were en
couraged by the spirit of the Taikwa Reforms, inaugurated
in 646 by the Minister Nakatomi-no-Kamatari, whose enthu
siastic adaptations of T'ang dynasty productions extended
to politics, economics, and religion as well as esthetics.
Technical dexterity of the kind that made possible the
pagodas of Yakushiji and Horyuji also produced another
kind of structure which, though unrelated in design or func
tion, is not less intricately calculated. The most impressive
example of this building type is the log treasure house in
Nara, called the Shosoin. Stored in this box-like building,
without benefit of lock and key, are invaluable documents,
pictures, musical instruments, weapons, and utensils, as well
as foreign glass and textiles. This treasure was deposited in
the Shosoin by the widow of Emperor Shomu, in 756. Slips
of paper signed by each succeeding Emperor, and attached
to each of the building's three doors, have always been suf
ficient protection against intruders. Today the Shosoin is
patrolled by a guard whose chief duty it is to sound the
alarm in case of fire.
The Shosoin is built on a platform 108 feet long, held 9 feet
above the ground by forty massive columns. Log walls divide
the platform into three compartments. All the logs are trian
gular in cross-section; intersecting and overlapping at the
corners of each compartment, they present a faceted surface
to the weather side while forming a perfectly smooth inte
rior wall. In hot dry weather the logs shrink away from each
other and allow fresh air to circulate within, but during wet
weather they expand and seal the building, thus keeping
the interior dry. The whole structure is covered by a single
tile roof, its weight being transmitted to the columns
through the log walls. In this respect the Shosoin is a build
ing type unique in the architecture of Japan, since the roof
is carried by walls, rather than by isolated columns, and is
necessarily the last part to be built.
Most heavily forested cold areas have produced a type of
building in which thick log walls, sometimes with a caulking
of mud, protect the inhabitants from severe cold. In Japan
this type of construction is called Azekura; the Shosoin and
many smaller storehouses similar to it are representative
examples, but it is not quite clear why this construction was
pursued for a while by a people otherwise so wholeheartedly
devoted, despite the rigors of winter, to a light, open archi
tecture. A more refined version of the Azekura style makes
use of plank walls 2 inches thick, as in the treasure houses
at Ise Shrine, but the general development of Azekura build
ings seems influenced less by the availability of heavy
timber, or by climate, than by the need for an architectural
symbol of security to discourage intruders. Certainly the
Shosoin itself is intended to be difficult of access : there are
no stairs. Once a year, when the treasures are examined
and ceremonially aired, a veranda and stairs are built along
the front. The most important objects are removed from the
building, set out on the lawn, inspected, and quickly returned
to their places. The veranda with its stair is then dismantled.
To structural complexity and a certain devious practical
ity must be added another facet of Japan's classical archi
tecture: great size. The largest wood building in the world
under one roof is the Daibutsuden, the Hall of the Great
Buddha, of Todaiji Temple, the Great Eastern Monastery
of Nara. First built in 751 in an eastern quarter of the capital
city, the Daibutsuden was destroyed by fire and rebuilt in
the twelfth century. Eleven bays long from east to west
and seven bays wide from north to south, the building orig
inally measured 290 feet by 170 feet, and was 163 feet high,
including the 11 foot stone base. In 1567 it again was burned,
and after years of neglect was rebuilt, between 1696 and
1708, at two-thirds its original size. The Daibutsuden is now
188 feet in length, 166 feet in width, and 157 feet in height.
The Daibutsuden houses in a dim light a gilded bronze
image of the Vairocana Buddha, twice partially destroyed
by fire. Under the direction of a Korean expert the 53 foot
high statue was cast in forty-odd stages, the head and neck
being cast together as a separate shell 12 feet high. The
discovery of a native source of gold by a provincial governor
of the Junior Fifth Rank enabled its costly gilding to be
completed. Even the original building, it may be conjectured,
was not large enough to have accommodated comfortably
so imposing a sculpture. Now, the statue seems to be wearing
its building like a tight-fitting overcoat, leaving only
cramped folds of space in which visitors struggle for a
distorted view of the blackened, imperfect colossus.
The new state religion was shaped by six major sects,
and three of them are of particular interest for their effect
on Japan's art and thought. The Sanron sect, based on a
Chinese version of a work by Nagarjuna, held that all phe
nomena are unreal and exist only relatively to one another.
The Hosso sect was based on the commentaries of Vasuband-
hu, who asserted that the only reality is consciousness. The
Hosso sect gained considerable power and eventually con
trolled its own temples, including Horyuji, which is today
its headquarters. These and other sects were concerned pri- 83
THE SHOSOIN
The triangular logs of the Shosoin, an Imperial treasure house, produce a faceted
exterior and a smooth interior wall. In wet weather the logs expand and seal the
building; in dry weather they shrink and allow air to circulate within. Forty
columns, deliberately split and bound with iron rings, hold the building 9 feet
above the ground.
TODAIJI TEMPLE
Visitors pause at this pavilion to wash their hands in symbolic puri
fication before entering the Daibutsuden.
DAIBUTSUDEN,TODAIJI TEMPLE
The figures in the pavilion, at the lower right, help to indicate the
scale of Todaiji's Daibutsuden, the largest wood building in the
world. The lower roof is cantilevered almost thirty feet. Columns
and other structural details are painted red and yellow, and the
tile ornaments on the ridge, representing the tail of a mythical
bird, are covered with gold leaf.
marily with attaining salvation by ridding the mind of
"sensory illusions," and were often expounded simultane
ously in one monastery with the same interest later given
by the Japanese to Christianity. In 733 two Japanese monks
travelling in China invited to their homeland a renowned
exponent of a disciplinary sect, the priest Ganjin. The adher
ents of this sect placed their hope for salvation in the
orthodox observance of Buddhist ritual. After great hard
ships Ganjin reached Nara in 754, when he was sixty-seven
years old, and blind. He was lodged in Todaiji, which was in
effect the official seat of Buddhism, and he received from
Emperor Shomu authority to perform the rites of ordina
tion. A kaidan, the altar of ordination symbolized by a large
high platform, was built at Todaiji and over four hundred
persons, led by the Empress dowager, were received into
the order. In the last years of his life Ganjin presided over
Japan's central kaidan, transferred from Todaiji to a new
temple built on a site given him by Emperor Shomu. The
finest surviving example of Buddhist architecture in the
T'ang dynasty style imported from China, during the Nara
age, is the main hall of this temple, Toshodaiji, where Ganjin
died.
Toshodaiji was built in 759. Its Kondo, the main or
"golden" hall, houses a statue of the Vairocana Buddha and
two attendant deities. This building is seven bays long and
four bays deep, but the bays are of different sizes. The
widest of them, at the center, is flanked by progressively
diminishing bay widths, and the line of bays on the front
and rear elevations are less deep than those inside the build
ing. On the main elevation this rhythmic division of spaces
was emphasized by setting the wall plane back on the sec
ond line of columns, thus creating a colonnade. The columns
also have a slight entasis, and because they stand free of
the wall they lend to the building a pronounced frontality
seldom found in Japanese architecture unless it be of con
tinental origin. Inside the building the altar is placed against
a screen wall, rather than in the center of the hall, partially
as a result of the spatially complex arrangement of bays.
Later refinements of technique allowed the true roof
structure to be entirely concealed, including the lever arms
which carry the eaves far beyond the exterior walls. But in
its earlier phases the required cantilever could be made
structurally secure only with the aid of an elaborate system
of supporting brackets. These brackets, in their simplest
form, occur as arms springing from either side of the column
to shorten the span of beams in the wall plane. Later a beam
at right angles to the wall plane was projected beyond the
column, and on this, parallel with the wall, another member
KONDO, TOSHODAIJI TEMPLE

OVERLEAF:
Left: The colonnade of Toshodaiji's Kondo. The columns have a slight entasis,
and the bay widths diminish at each end of the building. The wire screen to pro
tect the bracket arms is a contemporary addition. In the background can be seen
a small log treasure house of Azekura construction.
Right: The two central aisles of the building are treated as one hall, with a
coffered and coved ceiling. Additional rooms are behind the statues of the Buddha
and his attendants.
MM
The component parts of a bracket system, in this drawing from an eighteenth-
century carpenters' manual, are shown individually and assembled at the corner
of a building. The short section of a rafter serves no structural purpose and is
used only to fill out the pattern made by the real rafters, which are not shown in
the drawing.

CORNER BRACKETING, Mil TEMPLE

NINNAJI TEMPLE
The column and beams (above) and the carved capitals supporting
bracket arms were photographed during the dismantling and re
construction of the gate at Ninnaji Temple in 1937.
HEIAN-KYO
The eighth century gridiron plan for Heian-kyo was modeled on Chinese predecessors.

1 Imperial City
2, 3 Imperial Park and university buildings
4 West reception buildings
5 East reception buildings
6 East market
7 West temple
8 East temple
was placed to carry the purlin which supports the rafters.
This arrangement takes the point of support one step out
from the wall plane, but further developments multiply both
the tiers of bracket arms and the number of steps away from
the wall plane, until the purlins appear to be carried on a
filigree of sculptured and sometimes painted ornament. It
is believed that the Kondo's roof was made steeper in altera
tions during the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. By
that time the bracketing had been deprived of its original
function, the true structure being concealed, and the roof
of the Kondo illustrates certain ambiguities in the relation
of the eaves line to the complicated but now decorative
bracketing.
Death, in the ancient Japanese ontology, was associated
with defilement. On the death of an Emperor it was custom
ary to move the capital to a new site, which meant removing
the palace buildings only a few miles or even hundreds of
yards ; the capital city itself probably remained unchanged.
But by the Nara period architecture had become more sub
stantial, and it was no simple thing to rebuild or move even
the palace alone. Nevertheless, ceremonial defilement, the
new power of the priesthood, and the political intrigues of
the Fujiwara family seem to have prompted Emperor
Kammu to build a new capital when he ascended the throne,
and so in 782 the Nara period came to a close. Work began
in 784 on a site at Nagaoka, and within five months the Em
peror took up residence in the new palace. Construction of
government buildings proceeded at great expense during the
next ten years. Then, suddenly, an Imperial edict announced
that the capital would be moved again. Ill-fortune, and the
death of a trusted administrator in still another political
intrigue, seem to have provoked Emperor Kammu's search
for a more auspicious site. With the aid of diviners a site was
selected about five miles from Nagaoka. It was named Heian-
kyo, "the capital of peace and tranquility," and remained
the capital of Japan until, in 1870, Edo became the Imperial
Residence and was called Tokyo, or Eastern Capital. Heian-
kyo was then distinguished from it by being called Kyoto,
as it is known today.
Like Nara before it, the city of Heian was modeled on
China's Sui dynasty capital at Ch'ang-an. Heian-kyo was
a rectangle three and a half miles long from north to south
and three miles wide from east to west. Situated on a flat,
gently sloping plain near the Katsura river, it was enclosed
by mist-shrouded mountains on the north, east, and west. Six
streams were made to enter the city in canals, some of them
wide enough for boats, and an embankment and a moat sur
rounded the entire rectangle. The city was divided into east 97
and west districts by a great highway 250 feet wide, called
the Shujaku. Entrance to this highway from the south was
through a seven-portaled Great Gate, the Rashomon, and
from there the road proceeded in a straight line to the
southern gate of the Imperial Palace precincts at the north
ernmost end of the city. Paralleling the Shujaku were eight
avenues 80 or 120 feet wide. Except for the 170 foot wide
Nijo road fronting the Imperial enclosure, the east-west
avenues were 80, 100, or 120 feet wide. The city unit, called
a cho, was a block 400 feet square usually divided into thirty-
two residential areas 50 by 100 feet. Smaller streets between
cho were 40 feet wide, and all were bordered with moats and
planted with willow and cherry trees.
Since many of the buildings were hidden from the streets
by walls, the architectural character of the city was pre
dominantly horizontal. But when seen from the mountains
nearby the city's checkerboard pattern revealed the artful
ness, somewhat removed from what really could be experi
enced down in the streets, with which an Imperial Park, a
university, markets, and temples had been disposed within
the grid. Like the fixed structural skeleton of a Japanese
building, in which walls are merely shifting incidents, Heian-
kyo's fixed grid of streets were not designed to lead from
one building to another ; the buildings, rather, were incidents
fitted into the space between streets. The only interruption
of the regular grid pattern was that made by the Imperial
City enclosure at the north. There the Emperor presided,
physically and symbolically, over a people ranged at his feet
in living spaces commensurate with their place in the social
structure of his "family." The size of a house was fixed by
law, according to the rank of its owner. The highest possible
rank, the Emperor's, required not a house but a city unto
itself, a walled Imperial domain.
Completed by 804, the palace enclosure measures 1266
yards from east to west and 1533 yards from north to south,
and originally contained about fifty buildings, including gov
ernment offices, guardhouses, residences, temples, and, for
the Imperial entertainment, a "Hall of Rich Pleasures." But
perhaps the most notable of the original structures in the
pure Chinese style was the Great Hall of State called the
Daigokuden. This building was 170 feet long by 50 feet wide.
Standing on a stone base, it was painted red and covered by
a roof of blue tiles. It was not rebuilt after fire destroyed it
in 1277. Of the buildings remaining today, as reconstruc
tions, the most beautiful are the Shishinden and the Seiryo-
den. The Shishinden is the main reception hall of the palace,
and it was to this building that the ceremony of accession
to the throne was transferred after the destruction of the
 0 10 20m

THE IMPERIAL PALACE, HEIAN-KYO (KYOTO)

Plan. Private apartments of the Emperor in the Seiryoden (upper
left) are connected to the Enthronement Hall, called Shishinden,
by covered galleries which also enclose the gardens. 99
 Seiryoden

Shishinden
THE IMPERIAL PALACE, HEIAN-KYO (KYOTO)
Great Hall of State. The Seiryoden contains what were origi
nally the private living quarters of Emperor Kammu.
The Shishinden is a spacious hall from which project, on
each elevation, galleries called hisashi-no-ma (chambers
under the eaves). In plan the building thus forms a cross,
measuring 90 feet from east to west and 75 feet from north
to south. At the front of the building, which faces south,
a flight of eighteen broad steps leads to the veranda, and
additional stairs are found at the corners of the building in
the angle formed by the projecting galleries. The single
Irimoya roof extends to cover these stairs, so that the whole
structure appears to be a simple rectangular block the cor
ner bays of which have been omitted. Although the roofs of
the palace buildings retain the concave surfaces of their
Chinese prototypes, they are nevertheless peculiarly Japa
nese in that all curves have been subdued. Only at the corners
of the Shishinden do the eaves lift, very gently.
The south and east hisashi-no-ma open directly into the
main hall; the north and west "chambers under the eaves"
are closed from it by partition walls of sliding screens, this
being one of the earliest uses of fusuma. The north wall is
decorated with paintings in color of Chinese sages. Through
out the building the floor is of thick planks polished to a
watery smoothness, reflecting the massive round columns.
Neither the hall nor the galleries are ceiled, the dressed
rafters being completely exposed, and no color is applied to
the wood. In the center of the main hall stands the lacquered,
lavishly decorated and canopied Imperial Throne. The ex
traordinary garden towards which the Shishinden opens is
devoid of all planting except for an orange tree and a cherry
tree, each enclosed in a bamboo fence ; the rest of the garden
is entirely surfaced with white sand raked in a pattern of
straight lines. A high wall with three gates encloses the area,
the tile roof of this wall being carried out beyond it to form
a cloister-like walk around the great expanse of sand. Only
on ceremonial occasions are the gates opened and the garden
used.
Contrasting with the polished grandeur of the Shishinden
is the elegant intricacy of the Emperor's private apartments,
the Seiryoden. Facing east to another sand garden, smaller
than that which fronts the Enthronement Hall, the Seiryoden
comprises a main chamber which serves as a living room,
flanked on the north by a dining room, bed chamber, bath
and dressing rooms, and apartments for the Imperial con
sorts. Kitchen and storage quarters are on the west. Rooms
for the servants and apartments for the court were in sepa
rate buildings reached by covered galleries. Measuring 60
feet long by 30 feet wide, the Seiryoden is raised above the 101
 SHISHINDEN, THE IMPERIAL PALACE
Steps to the southern veranda are made of thick planks in single
lengths. The ends of each plank are painted white as a protection
against the effects of weathering ; originally white paper was pasted
102 to the wood for this purpose.
SHISHINDEN, THE IMPERIAL PALACE
The sand garden of the Shishinden, used only on ceremonial occa
sions is enclosed on three sides by a covered gallery. Columns and
wood doors of the gallery are painted red. An orange tree (left)
and a cherry tree on the other side of the stairs are the garden's
only ornaments.
 SHISHINDEN, THE IMPERIAL PALACE
Galleries inside the Shishinden, called hisashi-no-mct, (galleries
under the eaves) open directly into the main hall but can be closed
to the veranda by hinged wall panels called shitomido. These panels
are held aloft by iron rods suspended from the ceiling. Protection
from the sun is afforded by finely woven bamboo blinds called
sudari, which are shown partially unrolled.

The Imperial Throne (right) stands on a lacquered dais and is

covered by a silk canopy. Exposed beams here and in the outer
galleries are unpainted but precisely finished. The Shishinden is
104 still used for the enthronement ceremony.
SEIRYODEN, THE IMPERIAL PALACE
At one end of the suite built for Emperor Kammu is a floor made
of waxed white plaster. The observance of certain religious cere
monies required the Emperor to be in contact with the earth,
which in inclement weather is represented by the plaster floor. The
metal lid covers a sunken charcoal brazier.
SEIRYODEN,THE IMPERIAL PALACE
Exposed structural framing of the buildings which enclose the
Seiryoden's garden provide a pattern of carefully composed rect
angles. The value attached to such patterns can be gauged by the
fact that these walls are the only view from the Emperor's private
apartments.
Hinged wall panels (left) are made of thin sheets of wood rein
forced on both sides by wood strips. The rolled bamboo blind bound
with silk tape can be seen, in relation to the columns, in the photo
graph on page 106.

OVERLEAF:
Gallery connecting the Seiryoden and the Shishinden. The narrow section is removed
during a yearly ceremony, when a messenger on horseback rides out of the enclosure
bearing the Emperor's written greetings to the deity at Ise Shrine.

109
ground and surrounded by a veranda reached from the sand
garden by two short flights of steps. Here again are two
trees only—this time clumps of bamboo on either side of the
south stair. Originally water flowed here in several streams
bordered with bamboo groves, but in the tenth century the
garden was modified to its present austere state. It is en
closed on the south by the rear elevation of the Shishinden,
and on the east and north by the galleries and offices which
connect both the Shishinden and the Seiryoden with other
parts of the palace precincts. Bordering all the buildings
around the court is a narrow stone trench to carry off rain
water shed by the overhanging eaves. Emphatically incised
into the earth, this stone trench is a sharp line of demarca
tion between buildings and garden no less effective than a
podium. No effort is made, as in later Japanese architecture,
to relate a building to its garden by stepping-stones or plant
ing. Instead the composition depends on the grouping of
buildings so that they block, and at the same time create,
courtyards of different sizes ; the Seiryoden, for example, is
virtually a platform placed to close off a kind of outdoor
alcove formed by the almost blank rear walls of three differ
ent buildings.
The walls of these connecting buildings are of white
plaster, divided by their wood structural framework into
compositions of thoughtfully related rectangles. The cool
facades which thus constitute the only view from the Em
peror's apartments are a study in abstract pattern, free of
sculpture or other ornament. Like the accidentally textured
and shadowed walls admired by Leonardo da Vinci for the
images they suggested, these walls can also be "read," but
only for deliberate harmonies of proportion.
Outside Heian-kyo the Imperial edicts concerning frugal
ity, as manifested in the size of an aristocrat's country
house, were more difficult to impose. One reason was that the
Emperors, forced to live in the country mansions of their
regents during occasions of political and military stress,
eventually undertook to build country palaces of their own.
Partly through the example of Chinese predecessors, the
mansions of the Fujiwara regents, and the Shishinden of the
Imperial Palace itself, there developed late in the Heian
period (898-1185) a type of country residence consisting of
semi-detached buildings grouped around a large reception
room called shinden. This room was also used as a bed cham
ber and so was roofed with thatch, on which rain makes
little noise. The shinden faced south to a wide lake (usually
artificial) and was flanked west and east by covered galleries
leading to pavilions for, respectively, fishing and enjoying
the cool breeze. The lake sometimes flowed under part of the 111
ITSUKU SHIMA SHRINE
The buildings are of formal shinden design developed under the
Fujiwara regents. Columns and some structural details, painted
red, reveal Chinese influence.
shinden and the east and west pavilions, and bridges led
from the garden "mainland" to a diminutive island in the
"sea." Entrance to the estate was through gates in the cov
ered galleries. North of the main buildings were additional
houses for the women and the family, all connected by the
rambling covered corridors. At first the plan was symmetri
cal, but in time the arrangement was varied according to the
exigencies of the site and a preference for more unexpected
groupings. Called Shinden-zukuri (the Shinden way of build
ing), these estates appear in scroll paintings of the time to
illustrate the dwelling arrangements Buddhists anticipated
in paradise.
While the Emperor officiated at certain religious cere
monies, poetry composing contests, or excursions to view
the moon, the country during the Heian age was actually
under the control of Fujiwara regents only technically ap
pointed by the court. For a time the Fujiwara balanced op
posing factions by paying them off with tax-free estates and
honorary titles, but eventually the lords in the provinces,
grown wealthy, were able to defy not only Imperial pro
nouncements but the control of the Fujiwara as well. By
1185 Minamoto Yoritomo, having overthrown the Fujiwara,
extracted from the Emperor an edict making him Shogun,
or commander-in-chief. Yoritomo set up an army head
quarters called the Bakufu in Kamakura, which place then
became the real capital even though the Emperor continued
to live at Heian-kyo. The military vassals of the Minamoto
and other clans had by now achieved a new status. Called
samurai, these knights formed a powerful class with an
austere code of ethics exalting military hardship and devo
tion to their leaders. Samurai houses by the end of the Kama
kura period differed from the Heian aristocracy's Shinden
mansions primarily in that most of the rooms were under
one roof; galleries connecting separate wings do not seem
to have been used. Possibly this more compact plan was
developed for security, since samurai houses were often
surrounded by board fences and, sometimes, there were
towers for archers. Sliding doors of wood and of paper seem
generally to have replaced the hinged, two-part horizontal
wood doors of Shinden palaces. The floors were of wood,
with cushions placed only where needed. In such a house
one room was equipped with a built-in desk called a shoin;
this new architectural feature was introduced through Zen
Buddhism, recently arrived from China. The samurai found
in Zen doctrines much that was in sympathy with their own
strenuous code, but since the Kamakura government had to
import from the effete Heian capital officials who could read
and write, samurai adaptations of Zen library desks must
 have been primarily an expression of respect or religious
enthusiasm. The room with a desk was likely to be the finest
in the house : guests were received in it. In time it was called
simply the shoin room, and eventually the term Shoin-zukuri
designated samurai dwellings in distinction to the Shinden-
zukuri mansions of the Heian aristocracy. Often the shoin
was on a dais in one corner of the room. Behind the shoin
itself were small sliding shoji to admit light, and on the
adjoining wall was an alcove called a tokonoma, in which
were displayed such works of art as a scroll of calligraphy,
a painting, or a beautiful vase. The tokonoma was also an
adaptation of a Zen idea : a Zen Buddhist shrine was at first
a small table holding a candle, flowers, and a censer, but
eventually it was incorporated into the architecture as a
shallow alcove raised one step above the floor. Similarly, a
cabinet with shelves used in Shinden mansions developed
into the chigai-dana, a niche built into the wall near the
shoin, for storing papers and small objects.
When Kamakura rule was overthrown by the Ashikaga,
the capital was re-established at Heian-kyo. Eight succes
sive Ashikaga Shoguns gave the arts precedence over affairs
of state; Japan is now rich in Chinese art of the Sung, Yuan,
and Ming periods as a particular result of Ashikaga Yoshi-
masa's dalliance. The tea ceremony, an outgrowth of a Zen
practice, was the special enthusiasm of Yoshimasa, who
with the advice and assistance of the monk-artist Noami
codified the Japanese taste for the austere and evocative.
The last of the Ashikaga Shoguns lived in mansions of ele
gant Shoin design. Board floors were used but straw mats
(tatami) were placed freely around the rooms. Black and
white paintings on the sliding paper walls and in the toko
noma were the only decoration, and sometimes the columns
were lacquered black. Landscape paintings and drawings in
black ink are perhaps the most enduring monument to the
dry, sometimes melancholy Ashikaga taste.
By 1467 the Ashikaga lost political control. Civil war
began and presently embroiled the whole of Japan. From
1500 to 1600 the struggle for the redistribution of feudal
power continued. During this time the foundations of mod
ern Japan were established by three extraordinary men:
Oda Nobunaga, who subjugated contending factions and
succeeded in becoming the de facto Shogun ; Toyotomi Hide-
yoshi, a soldier who rose from the ranks to become a general
of Nobunaga's armies and ruler of Japan; and Tokugawa
Ieyasu, an aristocrat who joined forces first with Nobunaga
and then with Hideyoshi. As regent, Hideyoshi continued
Nobunaga's subjugation of provincial lords with such suc-
114 cess that he found time to launch a futile attack on China,
AUDIENCE HALL, NISHI-HONGANJI TEMPLE
Plan. The Great Hall of Audience (shaded gray) includes a dais called a jodan, at
the left, and opens to a veranda and a courtyard on the right. The Hall is adjoined
by dressing rooms and, behind the jodan, rooms for Hideyoshi's armed guard.
 5• :

- " , >'j

AUDIENCE HALL, NISHI-HONGANJI TEMPLE

The ramma between the Hall proper and the jodan are wood carvings of wild geese,
reeds, and clouds. The framework of the suspended coffered ceiling is lacquered
black and decorated with gold fittings, and the coffers are lacquered red, green,
black, and gold. Black-lacquered floor plates between columns, set flush with the
tatami, reflect the dark brown unpainted columns. The tatami are identical in color
and texture but those in the center, arranged to form a path the length of the Hall,
116 catch the light at a different angle and appear darker.
through Korea, before his death in 1598. Ieyasu, appointed
Shogun, completed the political reorganization begun by his
predecessors and made the Tokugawa family supreme in
Japan for two hundred and fifty years.
A contributing factor to the civil wars had been armed
bands of Buddhist monks. Threatening violence unless they
received new tax-free lands, and other considerations of a
metaphysical nature, they descended on Heian-kyo and
fought in its streets. Buddhist temples thus incurred Nobu-
naga's special enmity, and Nobunaga burned what he dis
liked. Hideyoshi, more thoughtful, found other methods of
exerting control, and the age was great not for its temple
architecture but for its palaces and castles. Under Hide-
yoshi's lavish patronage the arts burst into new and colorful
play. Given to entertainments on the grand scale, Hideyoshi
did not hesitate to remodel and enlarge a temple to accom
modate his three thousand guests, and in his castles at
Momoyama (from which the age takes its name) and at
Osaka the walls all but dissolved in a polychromy of gold-
ground paintings, red and black lacquer and gold hardware.
Extravagant, even boisterous, as Hideyoshi was he never
theless paid more than homage to the Heian capital's stern
canons of elegance, as set forth by the Ashikaga Shoguns.
Advised by the tea master Sen-no-Rikyu, as Yoshimasa was
advised by Noami, Hideyoshi also sought and encouraged a
parallel art of intense refinement.
The Great Hall of Audience in Kyoto's Nishi-Honganji
Temple was first built in 1594 as a reception room in Hide-
yoshi's Fushimi-Momoyama castle. In 1632 Ieyasu trans
ferred the Hall and a garden designed for it to Nishi-
Honganji. Based on a ken module of IV2 feet, the Hall proper
is a chamber approximately 15 feet high and 67 feet square,
open at the west to a platform one shallow step above it. On
this platform, called the jodan, Hideyoshi sat to receive his
vassals. The jodan runs the entire width of the room except
for a portion at the right raised one more step. This smaller
dais is equipped with a shoin and a chigai-dana , and is
screened from the Hall by a partition pierced with a round
window. On the rear wall of the jodan is a tokonoma 18 feet
wide. To the left of it are heavily framed fusuma decorated
with paintings on a gold ground. (Behind these fusuma an
armed guard waited on the alert.) Rows of columns divide
the Hall into three galleries, the central one being demar
cated from the others by plaster panels between the columns,
just under the ceiling. Bilateral symmetry is used here to
focus attention on the jodan: like a nave flanked by side
aisles the central gallery establishes an axis, reinforced by
the plaster panels above, and reiterated below by strips of 117
Hideyoshi's seat on the jodan, from which he addressed his vassals, is made of two
thick tatami. The paintings are attributed to Kano Tannyu.
AUDIENCE HALL, NISHI-HONGANJI TEMPLE
A distortion in column spacing is visible from the side aisles of the
Hall, looking toward the jodan. The last two bays are V2 ken
smaller than the others, which makes the room appear longer than
it actually is.
 black-lacquered wood set into the floor between the columns.
Such floor plates are required when columns occur in the
middle of a room because the mats can not conveniently be
notched to fit around the columns, and the gap that remains
in at least one direction is filled by a wood insert. In the
Audience Hall this practical necessity has been exploited for
reasons of esthetics.
On the north, east, and south walls columns are spaced
on a 1 ken module, but columns in the center of the room,
for the first three bays on the east, are set 2 ken apart. The
last two bays, on the west, are each IV2 ken wide, the change
in rhythm being marked on the floor by another strip of
black lacquer running parallel with the jodan. Some columns
on the north and south walls fail to correspond in placement
with the columns at the west end of the central gallery, but
this may not have been noticed by Hideyoshi's audience
when, facing him, they enjoyed one of the rare examples in
Japanese architecture of a perspective artificially length
ened, in this case by a reduction of the space between col
umns at one end of the room so that to the eye the total
distance seems greater than it actually is. On the north the
Hall is bounded by a closed corridor which can be opened
to the garden, but on the east it opens directly to a veranda
and a courtyard, in which stands a stage for the Noh drama.
In the fourteenth century native and imported ritual
dances and entertainments were given a coherent dramatic
form by two men : Kanami, a Shinto priest whose narrative
dances relating the histories of temples were favored by the
Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, and Kanami's son, Seami, a
gifted actor, playwright, and producer. For Seami beauty
consisted of realism : the imitation of nature. But by imita
tion Seami meant the abstract representation of life through
gesture and sound. A gesture too closely reproducing a real
act was, and is today, regarded as cheap trickery. By West
ern standards the Noh drama lacks development of plot or
character, and conflicts seem arbitrarily terminated rather
than resolved. But Seami's aim was to recreate in his audi
ence an acute experience of what the national temperament
regards as beautiful, dwelling on the poignancy of an emo
tion rather than on its origin or its outcome. Real and super
natural persons and events are represented, albeit abstract
ly, like the poor and humble fisherman whose goodness is
revealed by his white kimono.
As the dramatis personae are abstractions of people and
supernatural beings, so the Noh stage itself is an abstraction
of Japanese architecture. Set in a sand-strewn courtyard (a
purified landscape) it is a platform 18 feet square (a single
120 pure unit of space) with a column at each corner supporting,
NOH STAGE, NISHI-HONGANJITEMPLE
A stage for the performance of the Noh drama stands in the court
yard adjoining Hideyoshi's Audience Hall. Covered by a gable roof
of hinoki bark, the stage proper is 18 feet square. The gallery at the
left leads to a dressing room in a separate building. Spectators sat in
the sand-strewn courtyard or on the veranda of the Audience Hall.
 Jl

Actors, musicians, and chorus on a Noh stage.

STAGE DIRECTIONS FOR NOH DRAMA

The diagram and accompanying text from a program book contain
instructions for speed of walking, gestures, and some of the dia
logue in one short scene from a Noh drama. The sequence begins
with the actor standing at the spot marked by a white dot, and ends
at the white circle. Among the instructions noted are ". . . when
'cherry tree blossom' is spoken point toward left with right hand,
then take one step toward left . . .", etc. In its almost choreographic
concern with patterns of movement the Noh drama parallels Japa
nese garden design, in which movements are often regulated by
122 the texture and spacing of stepping stones.
KASUGA SHRINE
Ritual dances performed in Shinto shrines contributed to the formation of the Noh drama.

'' ;;
....',,....
usually, a gable roof like that of the stage at Nishi-Honganji.
Extensions like verandas occur at the rear, where an alcove
9 feet deep is provided for the four musicians whose flute
and drums accompany the drama, and at the right, where
the stage is extended 3 feet to accommodate the chorus. The
only wall in this idealized house is the backdrop for the rear
alcove, which is regarded as "backstage." Painted on this
wall is a large pine tree, recalling the Noh drama's ritual
origin in forest clearings. A gallery about 20 feet long diago
nally connects the backstage area to dressing rooms in an
attached building. Once they have left the "room-of-the-
mirror" to slowly cross this gallery the actors are on stage.
Much of the narrative action, never far removed from the
dance, depends on stamping and shuffling, and for centuries
carpenters have refined the concealed structural details of
the Noh stage to facilitate the amplification of sound by
thirteen earthenware jars, suspended in holes dug in the
ground beneath the platform. Masked and stiffly costumed,
the posturing actors, as they strike the stage with their
feet and sonorously recite their lines, can make the entire
building rumble and boom like a giant musical instrument.
With Hideyoshi's death the Momoyama age—forty-seven
years—came to an end, but the exuberance of Hideyoshi's
time continued to shape the arts well into the age of the
Tokugawas. This was due in part to the initial measures
taken by Tokugawa Ieyasu to ensure his rule. Following the
examples of Hideyoshi, Nobunaga, and the Kamakura gov
ernment, Ieyasu removed himself from the intrigues of the
Heian court, and around 1600, as Shogun, he made Edo his
capital. Much of Edo was swampland, and great tracts were
reclaimed and assigned to the nobility. An extensive strict
plan on a Chinese model was not imposed, and Edo had none
of Heian-kyo's orderliness. That he lacked money for land
reclamation and for the enormous castle he built was for
Ieyasu an advantage. He enlisted the financial aid of his vas
sals, who, unable to refuse, were soon so burdened with debts
that they were also unable to plot uprisings against him.
Samurai were now a hereditary caste, and to keep an eye
on his feudatories Ieyasu obliged them all to spend some
months of each year in the capital. When they returned to
their provincial castles they were required to leave some of
their women in residence at Edo. Forced to spend so much
time at the capital, the nobility soon provided numerous
commissions for ever larger and more luxurious mansions,
and despite legislation enforcing "frugality" the common
people also began to build larger and better homes. Tatami
entirely covered the floors, all rooms were ceiled except in
the poorer dwellings (and in farmhouses) and the applied 125
arts thrived. The now idle samurai gave to the merchant
class not only their money but also the Shorn style of resi
dence, which soon lost its martial dignity. Merchants and
shopkeepers came to the new capital, and the wealth fostered
by peace and security, as well as by trade with Europe and
China, began to make itself seen in new kinds of buildings,
among them inns, restaurants, public baths, and indoor
theatres. By the eighteenth century the enervating refine
ments of Heian-kyo and the austerities of Kamakura had
indeed been escaped. The aristocratic Noh drama, for
example, lost ground before the more colorful and boisterous
Kabuki theatre. The people who gave excessive attention to
this and other amusements were regarded as frivolous, foot
loose habitues of "The Floating World," which was the
domain of the Kabuki and its immensely popular actors and
actresses. Scenes from the Floating World and other agree
able quarters of Edo, as well as details of domestic life, were
pictured in cheap colored prints ( ukiyo-e ) which earned
the admiration of nineteenth century European connois
seurs, whereas at home they received from the Edo aris
tocracy only a condemnation for the vulgarity with which,
it seemed, they were destroying the old standards of quality
and refinement.
Ieyasu visited Kyoto from time to time, and in 1603 he
built there, next to his castle, a mansion called Ninomaru,
the Inner Citadel. This building consists of five units facing
southwest and grouped alongside each other on a north-
south axis. The first three units are directly connected to
each other, but the fourth and fifth are reached by covered
galleries. The arrangement combines the compact units of
Shoin style developed by the samurai with the extended com
plexity of the Heian aristocracy's Shinden palaces. Grouped
asymmetrically, in echelon, three of the five Irimoya roofs
intersect in a tenuously linked but continuous composition.
Each unit is approximately square, with rooms grouped in
the center and surrounded by a wide wood-floored veranda.
On the perimeter the veranda is enclosed by shoji and the
wood weather-doors called mairado; the latter may be stored
in outdoor closets at the southeast corners. There is also a
narrow "wet" veranda outside, so called because it is ex
posed to the weather. Rooms grouped in the center of each
building are of course partitioned from the enclosed veranda
by fusuma, and servants using the verandas could walk from
one end of the mansion to another without actually entering
a room. But the gain in convenience also results in dimly
lighted interiors, and many of the rooms are without direct
ventilation. A formal entrance to the whole building is at
the northeast corner, through a closed porch with a tile floor
NINOMARU, NIJO CASTLE
Plan. The entrance (genkan ) is at the lower right. The narrow outer veranda
borders a closed wood-floored corridor, separated from the main rooms by sliding
screens. The asymmetric arrangement of relatively small units offers an increased
number of corner rooms with broad views, but the innermost rooms are without
direct light or ventilation.
NINOMARU, NIJO CASTLE
A wall of white plaster screens the private garden of the first unit.
The genkan, at the right, is roofed with hinoki bark shingles.
Bronze decorations on the gable ends are gilded.
NINOMARU, NIJO CASTLE
The shoji, part wood and part paper, may be stored in outdoor
closets ; one of them is visible at the intersection of the two units
in the background. Massive stones border the pool and are scat
tered in the sand gardens around it. 129
 at ground level. Called a genkan, this room originated in Zen
Buddhist temples, where, as the "dark place," it provided a
suitable transition to the quiet rooms within a Zen establish
ment. Like the shorn, it too was borrowed by the samurai,
but used as a hall in which to hang arms and armor. By the
eighteenth century it had developed into the standard
entrance, where shoes are removed, of every Japanese house.
In the first and second units of the Ninomaru are recep
tion halls and, in the second unit, apartments for the officials
who assisted the Shogun. The third unit contains the Sho-
gun's Audience Hall, a room built on two levels like Hide-
yoshi's almost square Audience Hall now at Nishi-Honganji
temple. But here the shoin, tokonoma, and chigai-dana, on
the upper level, are at the narrow end of a room 3 ken wide
and 9 ken long. Behind the Hall are private apartments and
the inevitable chamber for armed guards. A further precau
tion against surprise manifestations of ill will is the cele
brated plank flooring of the veranda itself. The planks are
said to have been deliberately made to squeak, by a bevelled
hard-wood spline between each board, so that slippered
assassins announce themselves with a harmonious chirping
from the floor.
The quality of this architecture is determined by four
factors. First, the 7 foot ken module used makes the scale
of the entire building larger than ordinary. Second, the
ceilings are coved, coffered, and double coffered, giving them
a plastic intricacy of scale absent from the structural frame
work, while for the same purpose the transoms ( ramma )
between some of the rooms are treated either as filigree bas-
reliefs of plants and birds, carved on both sides, or as geo
metric patterns of great delicacy. Third, color applied to
the ceilings, but not the structural frame, and gold applied
to ornamental nail-coverings and other hardware, provide
the structure with a unifying background tone illuminated
by highlights. Fourth, and incorporating all of these aspects
of design and decoration, paintings of mural size are used
in concert with the vertical and horizontal grid of columns
and nageshi. These structural and pseudo-structural ele
ments, occuring in the wall plane, are isolated by painted
landscapes which appear to recede or advance around them.
A flatly painted branch of a tree passing behind a column
may reappear as foliage brushed in dense chiaroscuro : the
wall plane thus seems differently placed on either side of
the column. Depth is indicated by tonality and by position
with reference to the floor : a tree in the background begins
higher up the wall than a tree in the foreground. But the
picture plane, the actual surface, is never denied. In fact
130 decorations are applied to it. A chrysanthemum, for example,
NINOMARU, NIJO CASTLE
The paintings of pine trees and eagles are attributed to Kano Tannyu. Gold leaf
partially rubbed with white is used for the background ; colors are predominantly
brown, copper green, cobalt blue, and black India ink. Red and white flowers and
birds on the ceiling are painted on paper or silk, pasted to the wood.
 s#*- 4

mMz*

NINOMARU, NIJO CASTLE

Contrasts of dark and light are sometimes used to soften the divi
sions made by exposed structural framing in the wall plane. The
painting of pine trees is attributed to Kano Sanraku.

This detail of Kano Sanraku's Maple, Cypress and Peach Trees is

designed to suggest a deep space beyond the column. Repeated
vertical elements make the column itself appear to occupy a point
in the foreground nearest to the spectator. Because the eye sees the
other verticals at depths relative to the column, the wall plane in
which the column lies seems to disappear. The upper section of
the wall, called arikabe, is here treated as part of the composition,
but the narrow strip of plaster under the ceiling is left undecorated
(and is not interrupted by the column) because it is intended to
132 isolate the richly colored ceiling plane.
 NINOMARU, NIJO CASTLE
Flowers, tiles, and a garden fence on these fusuma repeat the intricate scale of
the lattice ramma, through which can be seen some of the ceiling decorations in the
adjoining room.

Facing page, top: Above this painting of bamboo and tigers, attributed to Kano
Sanraku, the ramma has been reduced to a narrow carved strip of flowers, leaves,
and birds. Paintings on sliding screens between two rooms are often designed to
destroy rather than enhance the illusion of depth. Such an emphasis of the picture
plane is reinforced by making the space above the painting partially or completely
open, revealing the room behind the screens.
Bottom : The base of the pine tree is cut off to suggest that it is seen from above
ground level. Attention is thus diverted downward, away from the undecorated
upper panels.

I
 may be sculpturally modeled in thick impasto to introduce
a "real" element, in contrast to leaves and clouds brushed
with watercolor transparency.
Even when half the moveable screens are pushed behind
the others, individual panels remain convincing entities.
They are framed with strips of lacquer, and these divisions
were also considered part of the composition, along with
such minor details as hardware, so that a bole on a painted
tree trunk may also coincide with the recessed hand-grip.
Restricted in theme to landscapes and animals, but lavishly
executed with an apparently inexhaustible invention, these
paintings have perhaps been incorrectly described as decor
ative : at their best they are the view without which this open
cage-like architecture would be incomplete.
Buddhist temples had been built customarily on flat, even
sites, but the mountainous outskirts of Heian, and perhaps
a certain restlessness in the life of the nation, determined
the choice of irregular sites for many of the later temples.
Outstanding among them is Kiyomizu, which, however, was
first founded in 798, when the capital was established at
Heian. Kiyomizu as it appears today was built in 1633. Its
site is certainly unlikely: the oldest part of the main hall
perches on Higashiyama mountain, and in front of it, flying
out over the hillside, is a broad wood platform partially
enclosed by two flanking galleries and a large hall. The plat
form is carried by an elaborate structure built of heavy
columns in single lengths of timber, braced by horizontal
members. The projecting ends of these braces are covered
with miniature shed roofs to protect them from rain.
At the back of the main hall are rooms for priests, a sanc
tuary, and the long narrow altar. The major part of this
hall is used by the public ; such spaces date from the Heian
age rather than the period of Kiyomizu's restoration, and
the hall is believed to have been, originally, a palace build
ing in Nagaoka. Except for the two side galleries projecting
onto the platform the entire hall is under one great hipped
roof. The gable roofs of the galleries, however, are carried
around to the sides and back of the building, producing on
those elevations a double roof like Todaiji's. The curves of
the hipped roof are convex, but the gable roofs of the gal
leries are concave. This combination of gently rising and
falling lines gives to the composition a slow, hovering dig
nity, enhanced by the natural finish of the wood. Kiyomizu
is interesting for its use, however limited, of a more vari
ously organized architectural space. A transition from the
great pillared hall to the open platform is superbly achieved
by the side galleries, and the building has a purposefulness
136 to its interior design not sensed, for example, at Todaiji.
 VXXXVyr

KIYOMIZU TEMPLE
Plan and elevation. Rooms for the priests and a sanctuary are
shown at the top of the plan. Remaining space is used by the public.
KIYOMIZU TEMPLE
Dwelling units for the priests are connected to the main building
by a covered gallery.
KIYOMIZU TEMPLE
A platform and side galleries are carried out over the hillside on a
cage-like wood substructure. Convex curves of the hipped roof are
a Japanese modification of concave Chinese prototypes. 139
 NIJO CASTLE
Japanese fortifications center around a main citadel or keep, called
Honmaru, which contains an observation tower and living quarters
for the lord of the castle. This area is surrounded by second and
third citadels, called Ninomaru and Sannomaru, and sometimes
there are additional outer defenses. Stone walls supplanted earth
works during the time of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, when European
firearms were introduced to Japan. The standard height of a stone
wall is twenty feet, though some are as high as one hundred and
thirty feet. Stones are wedge-shaped and placed with their smaller
sides turned outward. This arrangement locks them in place by
their own weight, and secures them against damage by earthquake.
Behind the stones a thick layer of rocks and gravel separates them
from the earth core. No mortar is used, and water may escape with
140 out exerting excessive pressure.
NIJO CASTLE
Research indicates that curves were determined geometrically by formulae regarded
as craft secrets. At least one expert hid work in progress behind huge bamboo
curtains.

Toytomi Hideyoshi's clan contested the rule of Ieyasu, and established itself in
a castle at Osaka. To meet this threat Ieyasu built castles at strategic points
between Osaka and Edo. Nagoya castle, one of the most important, was given to
the command of his son. After defeating the Toyotomis, Ieyasu and his successors
forbade clan lords to have more than one castle each, thus reducing Japan's forti
fications to little more than two hundred.

NAGOYA CASTLE
HIMEJI CASTLE
Himeji, the White Heron Castle, was in existence by the middle of the fourteenth
century. It was enlarged by Hideyoshi and given its present grandeur by Ikeda
Terumasu, around 1600. In addition to the main keep there are three additional
tower keeps all connected by an inner corridor. The main tower has five roofs
although it contains seven floors.
TURRET EAVES, HIMEJI CASTLE
The bracketing of the walls and eaves are plastered and white
washed as a protection against fire.
 One country mansion and its attendant gardens and pavil
ions, completed around 1636, reaffirmed an attitude towards
architecture neglected by such imposing works as Ieyasu's
mansion at Nijo castle. Of an unassuming but deceptive sim
plicity, the many buildings which comprise this country
estate remain today one of the major achievements of Jap
anese architecture, and in degrees of excellence can be com
pared, and contrasted, with the powerful buildings at Ise.
The Katsura Villa, as it came to be known when the owner's
descendants changed their family name to Katsura-no-Miya,
in 1810, contains some forty-odd rooms in three connected
wings. Occasionally the nearby Katsura river overflows its
banks, and for safety the entire building is raised above the
gently sloping ground. The eastern-most unit, called the Old
Shoin, stands on slightly higher ground than the rest of the
building and is raised no more than is customary for a
structure of its size. The other two units, however, are held
approximately 6 feet above the ground by slender stilts,
recalling the ancient Takayuka dwelling. A white plaster
wall set well back under the floor closes off the basement
area to stray animals. Changes in floor level are minimized
and occur chiefly at points of connection between the three
units.
The units are placed asymmetrically, as they are at Nijo
and as they were in an earlier version of this Shoin-zukuri
plan, the Higashiyama Palace of the Ashikaga Shogun,
Yoshimasa, where the numerous detached pavilions of Shin-
den style were simplified to make a few compact units. As
developed at Katsura the Shoin style exploits the asymmet
rical massing of units and divides interior spaces with much
greater freedom and imagination. All major rooms face
southeast, with rooms at the back used for circulation so
that internal verandas like those at Nijo are largely omitted.
Nevertheless it is not possible to traverse the entire building
without stepping outside.
Katsura's Irimoya roofs are unusual for a building of such
high social rank in that they do not imitate the flamboyant
curvature of their continental predecessors. Instead, Kat
sura's roofs are modeled with gentle convex surfaces which,
seen in profile, render their massive proportions lightly ele
gant and crisp. This modification in roof design is peculiarly
Japanese, and at Katsura it has been further enhanced by
a corresponding adjustment in the dimensions of structural
members, all the columns and exposed beams being thinner
than was customary for a building of such dignity.
The plan of the Katsura mansion prepared in the nine
teenth century (page 148) reveals the complexity of its
146 interior spaces. Drawn in a time-honored style, it also reveals
something of the architect's system of values. In this plan
the columns are clearly represented as black dots. Walls,
however, are indicated only as single lines, with no attempt
to differentiate between fixed or sliding walls or to indicate
the number of panels on a wall made of sliding sections. It is
difficult to determine from the plan alone which areas on the
perimeter of the building are open and which are enclosed.
An example is the unit at the upper right corner of the
drawing, which represents the last part of the building to
be completed. Called the New Goten, it was constructed in
1658 for the first of two visits made by the retired Emperor
Gomizuno. The rooms in the New Goten are decorated with
more obvious splendor than those in other parts of the build
ing, as befitted the occasion for which they were built. The
major room in the suite boasts a shoin on a dais, together
with a sumptuous chigai-dana. Adjoining this room is a
veranda the floor of which is partly of wood and partly of
tatami. There is no indication on the plan that this veranda
is enclosed by sliding shoji, or that the verandas in both the
middle unit and the Old Shoin (at the left center of the
plan) are entirely open. In Westernized contemporary
drawings of Katsura, like the plan on page 149, sliding and
fixed walls are differentiated by line weights, and the num
ber of sliding panels for each wall is plainly shown. The
earlier plan resembles in its delicacy a Paul Klee drawing,
in which dots and lines patter across the page, and with its
blithe indifference to everything but the location of columns
the drawing expresses the architect's primary concern with
compartments bounded, literally, by points of support. In
the contemporary drawing the detailed organization of parts
is of course clearer, but the esthetic significance of the col
umns is lost.
Few of the rooms in the Katsura mansion were assigned
any single irrevocable function. Those few that were shaped
by the specific activity they were intended to accommodate
reveal a greater concern for symbolic rather than practical
uses. Near the entrance to the Old Shoin there is a room
where arms and armor were hung on the walls, probably as
a decorative allusion to ancestral pomp, since the unfortified
villa and its retiring owner evidenced little preoccupation
with worldly affairs. The shoin room in the New Goten, with
its imposing desk and shelves and its carved balustrade,
served not only as a study or library but also as a formal
reception room. Kitchens, in a separate wing at the rear of
the building, and bath and dressing rooms were of course
carefully planned utilitarian spaces. Two of the most inter
esting of these are storage rooms. Here the walls are divided
into three tiers of shelves, all protected by sliding doors in 147
 ,,,, >»(

ft 9

«*- !%rtr9ij
rtO hvi^

SOOQclf^

KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

Plan. The traditional style of this nineteenth century drawing emphasizes columns
but does not distinguish different wall materials. The unit at the upper right is
the New Goten, connected by a veranda to the Middle Shoin and, at the left center,
the Old Shoin.
KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
Plan. The contemporary drawing indicates by dotted lines the number and place
ment of tatami, and differentiates sliding screens from fixed plaster walls. Kitchens
and servants' quarters at the right have undergone modifications. The mansion
belongs to the Imperial Household and is used briefly once a year.
Sissi
.K".
KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
Shoes are left on the stone step outside the genkan.
The irregular shapes of stepping stones (left) set in moss contrast
with the stone path which leads to the genkan. The wall at the left
conceals a garden.
I

KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

The New Goten, at the far left, is connected to the Middle Shoin
152 by a small covered veranda on which music was performed.
KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
The Old Shoin, at the right, has an open veranda. Stepping stones
lead from the building to a landing stage at the lake.
 KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
Sliding exterior wall panels in the Old Shoin consist of both shoji
and wood weather doors. This arrangement admits less light but
allows the unit to be completely closed.

Shoji, shown open in the photograph at the right, reveal the carved
balustrade on the interior veranda of the New Goten. The closed
space beneath the house is not used ; a wood grille set in the
plaster wall allows circulation of air. Chains hanging from the
ridge allow access to the hinoki bark Irimoya roofs in case of fire.
The field in front of the New Goten was used for archery and
154 football games.
KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
The veranda at the left leads from the New Goten to the Middle Shoin. These units
are from five to six feet above the ground.
an arrangement that anticipates by three centuries the stor
age wall of contemporary western usage. Clothing folded in
neat squares, and personal possessions like jewel boxes,
water basins, and mirrors were all kept on these shelves to
gether with portable cabinets for other small objects. Shelves
alone were adequate for clothing, since the traditional Japa
nese costume was not cut on the bias and was easily stored
folded and flat. (But sometimes a beautiful kimono might be
draped on a stand and displayed like a tapestry.) Between
the middle unit and the New Goten is a veranda which was
considered suitable for the outdoor performance of music,
and adjacent to it is a room in which musical instruments
were stored. Only a shallow ledge raised a few inches above
the floor was provided for this purpose ; nothing else. But the
walls are covered with a pale cream-colored paper, on which
is printed a shimmering pattern of silver paulownia blos
soms dimly illuminated by a small vertical window.
The architectural form of Katsura is as much the reflec
tion of one man's personality as it is the expression of atti
tudes widely held in Japan early in the seventeenth century.
The patron who imposed his taste so effectively was Prince
Toshihito. When he was ten years old the Prince, a grandson
of Emperor Ogimachi, was adopted by Hideyoshi. But when
a son was born to Hideyoshi in 1591 a new title was estab
lished for Toshihito and a separate mansion was built for
him on the grounds of the Imperial Palace—thus elevating
the Prince into a peaceful and non-political obscurity. Even
as a boy, Prince Hachijo-no-Miya Toshihito showed an
unusual talent for composing poetry. He was tutored by
Yusai, the annotator of an anthology of verse in the Chinese
and national styles, called the Kokinshu. On Yusai's death
Hachijo-no-Miya succeeded him as guardian of the Kokinshu
manuscripts, as well as the manuscript of Lady Murasaki's
Tale of Genji, and became the foremost authority on their
interpretation. When he decided to build a country mansion
away from Heian, on the opposite bank of the Katsura river,
its design naturally reflected his enthusiasm for an earlier
and presumably happier age. The Tale of Genji is particu
larly rich in descriptions of country mansions, palaces, and
gardens, and it appears that the Prince drew up his instruc
tions to his gardeners and architects with these descriptions
in mind. A comparison between Hachijo-no-Miya and Horace
Walpole is not entirely inappropriate, but the Prince's man
sion, unlike Walpole's Strawberry Hill, did not revive out
moded building forms with the casual art of a literate ama
teur ; on the contrary, it accepted and even advanced to per
fection some of the most interesting features of the sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century aristocratic residence.
Attached to the veranda of the Old Shoin is a bamboo Moon Viewing platform,
KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
Plaster walls screen the side entrance to the veranda of the Old
Shoin.
 T
mm
r
f| J
$ ,Jfe^Jp ...IMh
;^V s *'?*&&$ ? t
s '* MH?- ft - 'v'BjB ..
s'
«,»i
(5 *fc ! il $jyp V y j ;vB
' I I- '
| ffj^l 11
9 r
j ! I-

KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

Tokonoma in a reception room in the Old Shoin. The composition of the room
depends on the juxtaposition, and the intersection at columns, of different horizontal
levels. As the focal point of the room the tokonoma employs the strongest contrasts
of heights. A narrow band of white plaster above the lattice ramma separates it
160 from the ceiling and also serves to mask a change in ceiling heights.
 r— — —

KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

Tokonoma in a reception room in the Middle Shoin. In this formal design the alcove
runs the width of the room, which is 12 feet, and is decorated with a painting attrib
uted to Kano Tannyu. Shelves and storage compartments are in the alcove at the
right, called chigai-dana. Except for the black lacquer frames and baseboards of
the tokonoma and chigai-dana, all wood is the natural color, darkened by age.
 m

KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

Shelves and cabinets in a reception room in the Middle Shoin.

KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

Tatami cover part of the floor in the enclosed veranda of the New
Goten. The plaster wall, called arikabe, above the sliding screens, is
pierced with windows which light the inner rooms when the
screens are closed. Dark plaster and roughly shaped structural
members are deliberately rustic. Constructed in 1658 to accommo
date the visiting Emperor Gomizuno, this suite of rooms exhibits
162 excessively decorative details.
 Hi

KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

The desk in the main room of the New Goten is on a dais, as are
the shelves and cabinets of the unusually elaborate chigai-dana, at
the right. The low ceiling above this section of the room is coffered.
"' ,
KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
Shelves in this wardrobe room in the New Goten can be completely
closed by sliding panels. Clothing was stored folded.
 |HM
%...-

A storage room in the New Goten, with open and closed shelves.
Veranda adjoining the storage room for musical instruments.
KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
Musical instruments were stored in the 9^2 foot long tokonoma, at
the left. A pattern of paulownia blossoms is printed in silver on the
pale cream-colored wallpaper. 169
 KARAMON GATE, TOSHOGO SHRINE
Temple architecture in the Edo period, though technically accom
plished, sacrificed scale and clarity in favor of ostentatious display.
Almost contemporary with Katsura, this decline of taste was
fostered by the Tokugawa Shoguns in the process of deifying
themselves in mausolea at Nikko. The Karamon gate of Toshogo
Shrine is a characteristic example. Lacquered in brilliant colors
which require constant maintenance, the building presents a sur-
170 face no part of which is left undecorated.
 Superstitions once played a large part in the selection of
an appropriate site, for whole cities as well as for private
houses. Collected in books of charts and instructions called
Kaso, most of these injunctions contain eminently practical
advice. The classical Kaso diagram is a circle around which
are disposed the months and seasons of the year like the
numbers on a clock or the cardinal points of a compass. At
the north is December (winter) ; at the east is March
(spring) ; June is at the south (summer) ; and at the west is
September (autumn ) . All twelve months are represented on
the circle by lines radiating from its center, and on each of
these axes are entered, by means of six short lines, all the
information one requires. For instance, December, the month
of the Rat, is marked by one broken line nearest the peri
meter of the circle, the other five lines being unbroken. This
means, among other things, that very little sunlight can be
expected to penetrate the circle during December, though
there will be more than in November, which has unbroken
lines only and so admits no sun at all. May, on the other
hand, is like an open door : all the lines are broken and sun
light streams in. January, the month of the Ox, and Febru-
ary, the month of the Tiger, are in a direction best closed
off against evil spirits. The roots first take hold in December
and by January they have absorbed enough water to pro
duce dampness: therefore one should be careful about the
northeast (as well as the southwest). The most auspicious
direction for a house to face is southeast. April and May
fall in that quarter of the circle and eleven of their twelve
lines are broken, thus admitting the maximum amount of
sunlight. The Katsura mansion faces southeast, as do thou
sands of farmhouses in comparable latitudes all over the
world, but Ieyasu's Kyoto mansion faces southwest. Some of
the Kaso injunctions suggest a mixture of superstitious and
esthetic, rather than practical, motives: according to the
rules of Kaso houses are best placed with a mountain to the
rear and a valley in front, to cut off the more serious demonic
assaults. Aside from the instincts to self preservation that
may underlie an esthetic response to this arrangement, we
may recognize it as a composition which controls visually a
building's approach and background.
The Japanese have always regarded buildings as aspects
of the natural scene. Unlike the Greeks or the Chinese they
have never attempted seriously the creation of an architec
ture complete and valid unto itself, no matter where in the
landscape it is set down. Mountains in Japan were never
thought to be uncouth, as the English once liked to regard
the attractions of Switzerland, but on the other hand nothing
could be more alien to the Japanese temperament than the
POND GARDEN, SAIHOJI TEMPLE
Stones are placed in and around the Golden Pond of Saihoji
Temple's small pond garden. The ground is entirely covered with
moss. 173
 allees of Versailles, or the symmetrical plateaus and busy
fountains of the great Italian gardens. The background of
architecture in Japan is not a garden merely but mountains
and fields and, indirectly, the sea. Water and islands, the
sense of seascape, inform the Japanese gardener's art with
a theme partially religious in origin (Emperor Nintoku's
tomb was an island surrounded by three moats) . The major
classifications under which Japanese gardens may be de
scribed, with the exception perhaps of gardens for tea pavil
ions, are the pond garden and the Kare-sansui (mountain
and water) garden. Pond gardens begin their long and cir
cuitous development with islands in the center of a lake,
often immense, and in the sixth century a garden was called
simply magario, a curved beach. The islands were held to be
sacred abodes of the deceased. Sometimes there were four
or more islands strung out in a line (like Japan itself), the
formation being designated the "archipelago style." Royal
dwellings or shrines were placed on the islands, rather than
on the shore, presumably for security. Amplification of the
shapes and sizes of these islands produced the "dragonfly
style," with one or two islands shaped like dragonflies placed
so that their arms formed paths to the shore. When houses
were built on the shore rather than on the islands the latter
became entirely ornamental.
During the Heian period a Buddhist legend concerning
a mythical island in the farthest reaches of the sea, where
one could find eternal youth, enjoyed a great vogue through
ornamental Horai islands intended to represent this para
dise. Cranes and turtles, symbols of long life, suggested more
interesting shapes and eventually replaced the earlier
Buddhist symbol. Throughout the Heian age the largest of
these "boating gardens" provided the decor for royal pro
gressions gliding over the water to impeccable islands. The
Katsura palace itself was the scene of such excursions:
Hachijo-no-Miya, and afterwards his heir, Prince Toshitada,
on summer evenings stepped from the terrace before the Old
Shoin into a painted boat: passing first under a red bridge
now vanished, he sailed away to the tea pavilion called Shoi-
ken, on a promontory where fireflies were especially thick in
that season, and perhaps, after a musician had sung the
appropriate song, he admired the lantern lights at the more
elegant Shokintei, and late at night returned past Orindo,
the Buddhist temple in which was kept a portrait of Hachijo-
no-Miya's literary mentor, Yusai. Even if they were sus
tained by too elaborate mechanics, and lacked a certain
spontaneity, these were Cytherean journeys Watteau would
have admired.
174 These dreamlike landscapes were replaced by a new
GARDENS OF KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
At the left is a small island connected to the mainland by a stone
bridge. The lantern at the right stands on the edge of a promontory
surfaced with smooth round stones, representing a pebble beach.
The Old Shoin may be seen in the background. 175
 kind of garden in which their chief charm was embodied. If
the new aristocracy, the warrior class, austere and eco
nomical, reduced the size of the garden to something more
reasonably maintained, they nevertheless preserved the idea
of moving through it, albeit on foot, in a carefully planned
tour of its attractions. Greater attention to detail in a con
fined space eventually produced the "scenery garden," in
which famous scenes were reproduced in specific, realistic
detail. As in the Noh drama, realism meant a transposition
of the world of nature beyond the garden (which belongs
to art) into manageable, stylized fragments. Thus in a gar
den representing a view of the ocean, selected stones were
arranged along the edge of the pond to represent crashing
breakers. Stones were used to represent even mist, in the
shapes often found in Chinese monochrome paintings. Some
times a famous view might be summarized by a single object,
and in a "condensed scenery garden" one pine tree might
symbolize a whole forest. Or the treatment might be reversed
to include not only the contents of the garden but also
"borrowed scenery," like a neighbor's bamboo grove, or dis
tant mountains.
By the fifteenth century the space immediately in front
of a house, customarily reserved for ceremonial purposes,
was often made into a small garden designed to be seen only
from the main rooms of the building. Undoubtedly the need
to economize spurred the development of walled "mountain
and water" gardens in which there were neither water nor
mountains, and sometimes indeed no living thing. But war,
pestilence, and poverty only gave practical point to a re-crea
tion of nature that was already symbolic. Many of the ideas
developed during this time had first been displayed in the
pond garden, and to these were added some new themes
drawn from temples and shrines. Like other ceremonial sites,
temple compounds were strewn with a coarse white sand.
At one end of the area a reserve supply of this sand was
pressed into a truncated cone. Eventually, Japanese gar
deners believe, this cone of surplus sand was admired for
its decorative effect, and sand itself was seen as a gardener's
medium. In "dry" gardens, mostly rectangular, the sand
might be spread irregularly and the margins filled with moss,
clipped trees, or shrubs. A wall of plaster or board usually
enclosed three sides of the plot : within this frame the gar
dener "painted" a picture, using stones for brushstrokes.
The analogy is authentic: one of the most striking of the
Kare-sansui styles is the "pictorial," in which the brush-
work of Chinese black ink paintings was deliberately imi
tated. To compensate for the distortion brought about by
176 having the "picture plane" stretch away from the observer,
POND GARDEN, SHUGAKUIN IMPERIAL VILLA
The forty-acre gardens of Shugakuin, completed in 1653, are part of a vast Imperial
estate outside Kyoto, which is hidden from view by the Western Mountains in the
background at the left. What appear to be clipped shrubs covering the field in the
foreground are actually trees twelve feet high. Gardeners climb ladders placed be
tween the branches to keep the tops evenly clipped. The low hedge bordering a path
on the far side of the lake is in reality approximately five feet high and seven feet
wide. Both in its scale and in the gentle sweep of its contours the garden suggests
an English park.
GARDEN OF DAISEN-IN, DAITOKUJI TEMPLE
Detail. This garden has undergone numerous changes since it was
first designed in 1513. Vertical stones in the background represent
a mountain waterfall, and stones are also used to represent cliffs
and a boat.
along the ground, predominantly vertical shapes were
grouped at the rear and the ground itself was often pitched
downward imperceptibly toward the veranda, from which
the garden is seen. At Daitokuji Temple, in the garden of
Daisen-in, one of the most convincing of these compositions
despite the alterations it has suffered, there is a white plas
ter wall, now half hidden, that once carried the tone of the
sand-strewn ground up behind all the clipped shrubs, thus
flattening onto an imaginary picture plane objects in reality
some distance from each other. At Daisen-in too can be seen
several other characteristics of the dry garden. For example,
two boulders are balanced on end to suggest, by the narrow
space between them, a mountain waterfall. Before this
group, and nearer to the spectator, is a stone bridge cross
ing what is meant to be a narrow ravine through which water
(moss) rushes wildly. In the foreground a stone boat bobs
about, and along the sides of the stream are steep stone
cliffs against which lumps of moss symbolically foam. Be
cause the waterfall is supposed to be a great distance away
the trees behind it are smoothly clipped: the stone bridge,
which indicates the middle distance, is much larger in scale,
and trees in the foreground, also larger in scale, are left
untrimmed so that they may have the detail one expects to
see near at hand.
The most beautiful of all sand gardens is that belonging
to Ryoanji Temple, near Kyoto. Rydanji was a Zen Temple
established on a site previously held by another sect, and its
famous sand garden was designed in 1499, when a house was
built for the new superior. After this building was destroyed
by fire in 1797 a similar one was put up on the same site;
the garden is not believed to have been altered. On three
sides a plaster wall, part of it rubbed with oil, encloses the
rectangular plot; the fourth side of this imaginary picture
frame is provided by the veranda, and behind that the rooms,
of the superior's house. Only from these rooms and the ver
anda can the garden be seen. It can not be entered. The
garden consists simply of fifteen stones arranged in twos,
threes, and fives, totaling five groups in all. Some moss at
the base of each group softens the contrast with the white
sand. There are no trees, sand covers the whole area, and
a shallow trench made of cut stones provides a neat border.
What is it that accounts for the tension generated by this
space? In part it is the site itself. Ryoanji is some distance
from Kyoto, in a forest on a hillside. From the veranda one
looks over the garden wall at tree tops thin against the sky.
There is no sound, not even from the village below, and the
centuries conspire to make the visitor's response appropri
ately subjective. 179
 But there is also a structure that reveals itself slowly,
and the beauty of this garden is not entirely an accident of
circumstances.
Traditionally the elements of Kare-sansui gardens were
composed in triangles rather than on formal axes. Three
stones or trees in a triangle refer vaguely to Buddha and
his two consorts. Usually six objects, or groups of objects,
would be arranged as the points of two separate but adjacent
triangles, and the gardener's artfulness was spent in adjust
ing their relationships— no two of which are likely to be
the same. At Ryoanji, however, it is believed that a slightly
different device was employed. There seem to be two basic
triangles overlapping each other, and one group of stones
constitutes simultaneously the apex of two or more super
imposed triangles. Lines drawn between all the points of
any two triangles, adjacent or superimposed, will of course
produce several more triangles. But the key to Rydanji's
composition may be determined, according to taste, by set
tling on a particular group of stones as the apex of one tri
angle (the Buddha in the triumvirate), thus establishing
the order of the remaining points. Regardless of how the
garden's formal structure is interpreted, its field of empty
space remains a tangible sign of Zen Buddhist speculation ;
austere, deliberate, and perhaps bitter.
The spiritual content of stone compositions was not orig
inally so exalted. In the seventh century the Imperial Court
received as a gift from the Emperor of China a collection of
curiously shaped stones. So great was the enthusiasm for
such things that there was invented a kind of parlor game-
perhaps it should be likened to solitaire —in which small
stones were arranged in a lacquer tray filled with sand.
Called bonseki, these tray landscapes were an amusing rule-
ridden preparation for later essays in design more ambitious
and expensive. Stones of bizarre shapes, suggesting all sorts
of things, were dug up and dragged at great expense from
remote provinces to ornament what had once been small and
economical gardens. Ryoanji's stones do not belong to this
category, except insofar as they were selected for their sculp
tural qualities, but they are distinguished by a consistency
of texture and scale one might expect to find in an ink draw
ing executed with an almost dry brush.

180 GARDEN OF RYOANJI TEMPLE

GARDEN OF RYOANJI TEMPLE
Five groups of stones set in moss are arranged on a field of white sand. Part of the
wall is rubbed with oil. The garden may be seen only from the veranda.
GARDEN OF RYOANJI TEMPLE
EMPLE

.
V*' '
 Just as tatami give the floors of Japanese houses an un
expected interest, it is the texture and modeling of the
ground that gives to most Japanese gardens their peculiarly
insistent tactile qualities. Traditional footwear—the wood
clogs called geta—impose a short abrupt step. This is
exploited by the gardener through surface materials which
determine the pace at which a garden may be inspected.
Conscious always of the path he must follow, and alert to
keep his balance as he makes his way through carefully
plotted sequences of moss, widely spaced stepping stones,
dried pine needles, rocks, narrow bridges, smooth pavement,
and coarse gravel, the spectator's attention is necessarily
directed to the ground. Perhaps the most encyclopedic array
of textural sequences is to be found in the gardens of Kat-
sura. It is true that here the insistence on titillating sur
prises is sometimes tiresome, and that the gardens lack the
single compelling feature that would have given them dra
matic coherence (although the missing red bridge may
once have provided this) . But in variety and invention Kat-
sura's gardens are unsurpassed. From no two angles does
any part appear quite the same ; like the bits of paper and
glass inside a kaleidoscope, Katsura's trees, stones, ponds,
and buildings tumble into fresh patterns merely by the act
of moving through them.
Another pastime elevated by the Japanese to the realm
of creative expression, but one which remains largely incom
prehensible to the West as an art form, is the arrangement
of flowers. The rules for flower compositions, with their first
and second subjects and major and minor themes, are no
less elaborate than were those for the game of bonseki. Both
pursuits reflect certain characteristic preoccupations of the
Japanese landscape artist. One of the most striking of these
is the great store set on the unique and preferably venerable
object. Objects not sufficiently unique are often made so,
either by distorting the object itself or by subtly altering
the context in which one expects to see it. Ordinary trees
in a temple courtyard or a private garden, for example,
sometimes seem strangely independent of the ground out of
which they have sprung, because the ground level has been
built up and perhaps covered with a layer of white sand or
gravel, thus concealing the roots and making the greenish-
black trunks seem like decorative accessories pinned to a
carpet. In many gardens twisted stones vie for attention
with twisted trees so old that their limbs must be supported
by bamboo crutches. Set apart by a low granite fence in the
courtyard of Nishi-Honganji Temple is one such venerable
pine tree, its branches, extending perfectly horizontal for
186 twenty feet, held aloft on all sides by a forest of bamboo
GARDENS OF KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
At the end of a road paved with small stones is a promontory on
which stands a pine tree, drawing attention to an excellent view
of the lake.

OVERLEAF
Right: Stepping stones set in moss.
Left : Stepping stones set in rocks.

187
 ' *w ?

..mrn

n
•
m ,m
;
 GARDENS OF KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
To make visitors pause at the entrance steps the stone path leading
to the genkan abruptly changes direction, scale, and texture. The
area without moss is designed to connect visually both sections of
the path.

ISO Stone bridge in the garden of the Katsura Imperial Villa.

! • A;.

GARDENS OF KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

Diamond-shaped stepping stones relate a building to a stone path
which parallels the veranda.

A stone path fifty-four feet long and three feet wide is terminated
by a water basin at one end and a lantern at the other. "Parting
stones" along the way lead to other paths or buildings. 193
 P§*ir<

GARDENSOF KATSURAIMPERIALVILLA
This water basin adjoins a Buddhist temple on an island in Kat-
sura's gardens. Moss, pebbles, and grass are combined with cut
stone.

The cut stone basins at the lower left are part of the cooking
equipment in Katsura's Shokintei tea pavilion. Irregular stepping
stones are used for maximum contrast but are related to the lawn
by a gradual change in texture from small pebbles to moss. The
stone curb indicates a boundary. The composition is one of many
variations on the dot and line theme used throughout Katsura's
gardens.
 . .. '

HP**!

apN

'* •

.I
^^^lllilip* *
• \/: -^

f HBtal
qfT.
Water basin in the gardens of the Katsura Imperial Villa.

GARDENS OF KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

Stone water basin under the eaves of the Shoiken tea pavilion. The
weight and sculptural mass of the large stones is emphasized by
the smaller curved stones, which seem to be rising out of a pit.
A path at the foot of the hill is bordered with small stones to make
a dotted line.
GARDEN OF SAMBOIN TEMPLE
Circles of moss are set in a field of white sand. The garden was redesigned in its
present form in 1698, for a feast given by Hideyoshi. Although the moss circles are
perhaps its most interesting detail, the garden also contains stones so highly re
garded that they were wrapped in brocade while being carried to the site.
MOSS BRIDGE, SAMBOIN TEMPLE
Boulders are used for abutments, and two beams carry a deck
made of logs packed with clay. Moss planted on this surface and
on the banks of the pond makes the bridge appear to be a ribbon
of earth stretched across the water.

199
 poles that all but conceals the tree itself. The limbs of trees
are often tied to the ground, to buildings, to adjacent trees,
and clipped, bent, or otherwise coaxed toward distinction.
Three blossoms on the stalk must be removed to make more
perfect the already perfect fourth, and sometimes the stalk
itself must be broken to render its line more poignantly
expressive. Landscapes in pots, miniature trees with jade
bridges, are other expressions of this enthusiasm.
But the products of this aspect of Japanese sensibility
are not always miniature or painfully exquisite. An example
is the garden of Jishoji temple. If Ryoanji is the most beau
tiful of Kare-sansui gardens, the garden of Jishoji temple
and Ginkakuji, the Silver Pavilion, is certainly the most
astonishing. It was to the Silver Pavilion on a hill near Kyoto
that the Ashikaga Shogun, Yoshimasa, withdrew to contem
plate his collection of ceramics and paintings, compose poet
ry, and study the Noh drama. The Silver Pavilion, in modest
imitation of the Golden Pavilion built by Yoshimasa's grand
father, was to have been covered entirely with silver leaf,
including its bark roof, but it was never quite finished. At
the beginning of the Edo period the estate became the prop
erty of Jishoji temple, and a sand garden was added near
the pond originally made for the Silver Pavilion. The Edo
period addition consists of a cone of sand some 14 feet in
diameter at the base and approximately 6 feet high, and a
broad triangular plateau of sand about 30 inches above the
ground. The cone symbolizes a mountain, while the plateau,
its surface raked in a pattern of straight lines, symbolizes
the ocean. This conjunction of shapes a little too large for
the area is disturbing. Jishoji's garden, however, is a no
less disciplined expression of the sculptor-gardener's art
than is Ryoanji's, and the discordant scale is perhaps its
particular refinement. But where Ryoanji is designed to
compel silence and the contemplation of what is essentially
incommunicable, Jishoji is designed to provoke comment.
The spirit of Zen Buddhism had changed over the years.
The tokonoma, the shoin, and the genkan were all archi
tectural features of Zen buildings, borrowed in a spirit of
respect and admiration by the samurai for their own use,
and eventually adapted throughout Japan. But Zen influence
was far more profound than these superficial details may
suggest, and in order to understand the architecture of the
tea house, perhaps the strongest expression of Zen attitudes,
it is necessary to know something of Zen itself. By the sixth
century Buddhism in India had produced two major schools,
the Mahayana and the Hinayana. Both schools had in com
mon the belief that man suffers because he desires to retain
200 what is essentially impermanent: his life, his possessions,
GARDEN OF JISHOJI TEMPLE
An early Edo period addition to an Ashikaga garden, the plateau called Ginshanada
and a cone of sand represent, respectively, a moonlit sea and a mountain. The rail
ing in the foreground is a contemporary addition. Ginkakuji, Yoshimasa's Silver
Pavilion, may be seen in the background.
GINKAKUJI, JISHOJI TEMPLE
The Silver Pavilion, overlooking a pond garden.
GARDEN OF JISHOJI TEMPLE
Cone of sand in the garden of Jishoji Temple.
Women picking tea leaves.
and beautiful things. The self was regarded by the Hinayan-
ists as truly non-existent— an illusion—while the Mahayan-
ists maintained that when man renounced his false self he
would discover the true one, and that the true self included
within it the whole universe. This state of being one with
the universe was called Nirvana, while the world of chang
ing forms in which we live was called the Many : the Wheel
of Birth and Death. For the Hinayanist the highest spiritual
attainment was escape from the self to the One: Nirvana.
But to the Mahayanist the eternal peace of Nirvana is impos
sible to enjoy while others suffer. Thus the Mahayanist must
renounce what may have taken innumerable successive
lives to attain, so that he can return to the world of forms
and help others to find enlightenment and release.
The Zen sect saw the distinction between the One and the
Many as a necessary defect of language, or more precisely
of the intellect, and maintained that Nirvana exists here,
now, in everything, but that it can be apprehended only by
a direct intuitive grasp, and that intellectual approaches
can lead only to partial, and hence false, understanding.
Little is known of Zen in India. The first great Zen teacher,
Bodhidharma, appeared in China in A.D. 527, at which time
he explained to the Emperor Wu that there was no special
merit in building temples, since everything in the world was
already holy. Distressed by this news the Emperor queru
lously desired to know by what right, therefore, did Bodhi
dharma come to lecture him on holiness, and Bodhidharma
eagerly conceded that he had no idea what he was doing
there. According to a famous legend Shang Kwang, Bodhi-
dharma's disciple, waited in the snow outside the cave in
which the master sat meditating. He waited for several years
without gaining the master's attention. Then, to demon
strate his perseverance by a gesture which could not fail to
be noticed, he cut off his frostbitten arm and presented it
to Bodhidharma, who murmured, "I see you are serious."
Zen in China absorbed much of the teaching of Lao Tzu, and
when it was established in Japan by Essai, in 1191, it em
bodied many of the great Chinese philosopher's recom
mendations about the Tao, the process of living (the Way) .
Because of their weightless spiritual enlightenment Zen
teachers found it impossible to take too seriously the gross
but transient things of this world, and so they necessarily
appeared quixotic. Often they helped their students attain
enlightenment, which had to come instantaneously, by sud
den slaps and kicks, and enlightenment was tested by the
response to riddles impossible to answer logically. Chinese
and Japanese artists unfailingly pictured Bodhidharma as
a gruff black-bearded man with bushy eyebrows, staring at 205
 TEA BOWL AND TEA WHISK
Shown approximately two thirds its actual size, this contemporary sand colored tea
bowl of traditional design is partially covered with a translucent whitish glaze.
Irregularities in shape and texture are part of its distinction. The tea whisk, made
206 from a single piece of bamboo, is used to mix powdered tea.
the world with comic ferocity. No doubt training in Zen did
sharpen the sense of humor.
Tea, like Zen, also came from China. It had been used
there since the eighth century, and was carried to Japan
by merchants and returning scholars. People of the T'ang
dynasty packed the tea leaves into a moist cake which they
later boiled ; Sung enthusiasts ground the leaves into a green
powder which, with the aid of a bamboo tea whisk, was
whipped into a brew the consistency of split-pea soup; and
Ming esthetes steeped the leaves in boiled water to produce
what we know today as tea. Zen monks drank tea together
before an image of Bodhidharma, and tea was taken often
during the long periods spent in meditation. Eventually the
Zen monasteries set aside special rooms in which the monks
took their tea with less solemnity, and by the fifteenth cen
tury, under the enthusiastic patronage of the Ashikaga
Shogun, Yoshimasa, the tea ceremony was established on a
secular basis. Tea was considered to be of medical as well
as mystical advantage : it cleansed the body, it purified the
mind, and in general it encouraged right thinking.
At first the space set aside in private homes for the tea
ceremony was not more than four and one half mats—about
9 feet square—this being the amount of space in which a
legendary Buddhist figure received a saint and his 86,000
disciples, in a demonstration of the non-existence of space
to the truly enlightened. Not more than five persons, how
ever, were expected to participate, and a portable screen
shielded the tea area from the rest of the room. The first
independent tea house was designed late in the sixteenth
century by Sen-no-Rikyu, under the patronage of Hideyoshi.
In addition to the tea room itself Rikyu provided a separate
pantry, where some of the materials were prepared, a shelter
in which guests assembled until summoned to enter the tea
house, and, connecting the two, a garden path so landscaped
as to remove from the minds of those who walked it all
thoughts of the world outside.
The tea ceremony, called cha-no-yu, encourages its partic
ipants to delight in simple, homely activities, and in beauti
ful surroundings, including the objects used in the tea
service, and to appraise works of art intelligently. To facili
tate this mood of respectful but enthusiastic estheticism
every phase of the ceremony was strictly prescribed, the
guests having agreed on the order in which they would enter
the pavilion while they were still waiting in the garden;
and the mixing, serving, and drinking of tea, as well as the
studied approval of the kettle and bowls and the decorations
in the alcove, were all conducted according to plan. These
prescriptions were, it will be readily imagined, multitudi- 207
 „__L_ _j

TEA ROOM PLANS

The small square in each plan represents the hearth. Plans range in size from a
three mat room (top left) in which two of the mats are three-quarter length, to a
nine mat room (bottom right) in which one mat adjoining a tokonoma is 1^4 ken
208 long.
HOUSE FOR TEA CEREMONY
Stepping stones lead to a small "crawling-in entrance," intended
to make guests disassociate themselves from the outside world
through the inconvenience they must momentarily endure, regard
less of rank. The main roof is of thatch.
JO-AN TEA ROOM
A wood partition partially screens the hearth; here and in the
tokonoma at the left, columns are made of unfinished wood. Tracks
for sliding panels divide the wall into three tiers.
nous. Tea masters famed for the subtlety with which they
created an appropriate atmosphere soon became arbiters of
taste, influencing through their patrons the development of
painting and literature. The black ink paintings of the
Ashikaga period, for example, owe some of their allusive
white emptiness to the taste of the tea masters, as does the
metaphysically significant emptiness of Ryoanji's sand gar
den. The tea house itself was intended as a demonstration
of Zen (and Taoist) attitudes. Lao Tzu had remarked that
the true reality of a room was not its walls but the emptiness
they contained. The only reality, Lao Tzu said, is nothing
ness: a room is inconceivable unless it be—nothing. There
fore the purest style of tea house architecture, called Sukiya-
zukuri (sukiya may be translated variously as the abode of
fancy or the abode of nothingness) claimed to be concerned
not with the material of the building itself but with the emp
tiness within. To proclaim this more persuasively the build
ings were made of rude materials. Walls were not finished
with white plaster, as they would be in a house, but were
left the natural color of the earth. Ceilings were of bamboo
and roofs were of thatch, and often at least one of the col
umns would be an imperfectly finished, if not entirely rough,
tree trunk from which the bark had not been removed.
Kokuzo Okakura, in his famous Book of Tea, remarks that
teaism is "essentially worship of the Imperfect." It was
important to produce a space that would reflect the transien
cy of things in this world, the world of forms, and to this
end asymmetrical compositions were preferred: only what
is incomplete is still within the process of life (the Way)
and is therefore imperfect (asymmetrical).
The rough, country materials of the tea house, which
often adjoined an ineffably luxurious mansion, were also
intended to affirm man's oneness with nature. Needless to
say mere crudity was not enough, and a well-constructed
tea pavilion was a very expensive building indeed. Months
might be spent in selecting the right twisted tree trunk and
an earth of suitable color (red-ochre from Kyoto is still con
sidered superior) and the finished buildings were rather
like fine cabinets in their delicacy and precision.
While the main developments of architecture in Japan
were concerned with the articulation of structure, sukiya
architecture used structure primarily as a point of departure
for decorative effects. Like Japanese houses, tea pavilions
were built of light wood frames, but the frames were filled
mostly with walls of earth applied to a lath of bamboo.
Whole walls of translucent shoji were infrequently used
because the atmosphere of refinement calls for a subdued
light, and because the small space makes solid walls desir- 211
 TAI-AN TEA ROOM, MYOKI-AN TEMPLE
Designed in 1582 by the famous tea master Sen-no-Rikyu, Tai-an
has ochre colored plaster walls mixed with pieces of straw for
textural interest. Exposed wood members are left partially un
finished. At the corner of the room on the left and at the back of
the tokonoma structural members have been entirely concealed.

The bamboo lath has been left exposed to make a decorative lattice
for the window. The bamboo pole which bisects it is actually part
212 of the column structure reinforcing the wall.
 ***** jM

SHOKINTEI, KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

The arched doorway at the left leads to a pantry. Placement of
windows is partially determined by lighting requirements during
the tea ceremony. White paper pasted to the wall at floor level pro
tects it from fingermarks. Shelves attached to the wall are held at
the corner by a bamboo pole suspended from the ceiling. As in
Tai-an, columns are concealed wherever they might detract from
the importance of a few major vertical elements, such as the rough,
214 curved center-post used here.
<,
'
«.<.

...

v -OS-
A ^
 able if only as backgrounds for the occupants of the room.
The skeleton structure makes it possible to cut windows in
any part of these earth walls, and the practical incentive to
do this came from the need for a strong light at specific
points in the room; near the hearth, for example, where
the host may be mixing the tea. Thus the windows were used
almost as stage lights carefully arranged at all levels to
pick out certain phases of the performance. To illustrate
rustic oneness with nature, and an indifference to the appear
ance of things, a window might be placed so that it was
casually interrupted by a column. An example is found in
the pavilion called Tai-an, at Myoki-an temple. The bamboo
lath has here been left intact to make a lattice for the win
dow opening; but the exposed bamboo "column" is of
dubious structural value. Windows on the same wall might
be arranged in tiers, the tracks being carried straight across
the wall and the different panels either wallpapered, below,
or left plain. At Tai-an the alcove set aside for a work of
art is unusual for its rounded corners, which deliberately
conceal the structure in an effect hard to consider casual, or
rustic, despite the fact that pieces of straw have been mixed
with the earth to give the walls a pastoral texture.
Simplicity so carefully prepared tends to become tiresome,
and ends by being most complicated. Often these decorative
effects are beautiful, but equally often they are related more
to painting or graphic design than to architecture. Yet
sukiya architecture provided a means of developing and
expanding the major tradition of building. At its best the
sukiya style softened and made more flexible the scheme
of effects considered proper to serious architecture. The
Katsura mansion, for example, illustrates an enhancement,
in almost every instance, of Shoin-zukuri forms. Comple
menting this general development at Katsura is the bold
decorativeness of the tea pavilions, so large that they can
not be considered pure examples of the tea attitude. The
main room of the Shokintei is placed so that the wallpaper
at the back can be seen from inside the mansion, across the
lake. The wallpaper can be picked out of the natural colors
of earth walls, thatch roof, and foliage because its checker
board of large squares is colored white and cerulean blue,
and it flickers brightly through the green and brown land
scape.
The sukiya style, or attitude, could also be made to yield
new spatial effects without altogether sacrificing clarity of
structure. One architect who achieved this balance was
Enshu Kobori, the governor of Enshu province. Soldier,
scholar, official, architect, and tea master, Enshu is supposed
216 to have agreed to design a building or a garden only if three
SHOKINTEI, KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
The pavilion contains several rooms besides those used for the tea ceremony.
SHOKINTEI, KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA
The pavilion is designed to present different effects on each side. Above
west elevation ; left : northeast elvation.
f
I

SHOKINTEI, KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

The main room has sliding screens and a tokonoma papered with
white and cerulean blue squares. Paintings on the cabinet doors
above the hearth are attributed to Kano Tannyu.
s. XI I 5
liliiiiil

SHOKINTEI, KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

From the main room there is an excellent view of an island and,
in the foreground, a stone lantern to light the boat landing. Shoji
in the upper part of the wall are protected by a bamboo lattice.
 wmm

SHOIKEN, KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

The Shoiken is the largest tea house in Katsura's gardens. Like
the Shokintei, it has stepping stones leading from the edge of the
lake for those who arrive by boat. A long window is set at floor
222 level (above) and round windows are spaced above the shoji (right) .
 :. :

SHOKINTEI, KATSURA IMPERIAL VILLA

Widely imitated, this elevation of the Shokintei's tea room is perhaps the apotheosis
of picturesque architecture in Japan. Structural validity has been subordinated to
effects of line and texture ; the wall is an abstract composition of plaster, bamboo,
paper, and wood. At the left are shelves on which feudal tea devotees placed their
swords. The board door at the right shields the "crawling-in entrance." This sec
tion of the wall is approximately nine feet long.
conditions were met : no limit to the budget, no limit to time,
and no interference from the client. Though it is probably
of nineteenth century origin this story does sum up the
high regard with which Enshu was traditionally held. He is
believed, but again without adequate documentation, to have
designed Katsura, its gardens, and, more likely, much of
Ieyasu's mansion and all of its gardens. When he retired to
Daitokuji Temple, Enshu built a large tea room called
Bosen. Contrary to established practice he oriented the
room toward the west. The ceiling is unusually high and
the mats are arranged formally. Shoin-zukuri features like
the nageshi are retained, but the tenjo-nageshi (the horizon
tal brace just under the ceiling) is omitted. The room opens,
on the west, to a narrow veranda protected by an overhang
ing roof. Two sets of shoji are used, but only the innermost
set closes the room to the weather. The outer set, a few
inches beyond the veranda, appears suspended from the
roof. It serves as a visual barrier only, stopping about six
feet above the ground. Seen from inside the room this glow
ing panel of white light acts as a proscenium for the garden,
in which trees and stone ornaments acquire a compelling
dramatic interest.
It is believed that prior to its restoration in the eighteenth
century the ceiling of Enshu's tea room was of white plaster,
rather than boards, and the intersection of white walls,
ceiling, and shoji without benefit of an exposed structural
member must have made the room even more weightless and
austere than it is now. Enshu placed his hearth near the
tokonoma, so that he could sit facing the garden, and he
delighted most in his handiwork when, in winter, with the
inner shoji completely removed, he could drink tea while
watching the snow fall mysteriously from behind his curtain
of white light.
 BOSEN TEA ROOM, DAITOKUJI TEMPLE
Designed by Enshu Kobori in 1636, the room preserves the struc
tural clarity of Shoin-zukuri architecture while introducing new
effects of scale and space. Mats are arranged to suggest a functional
division of areas, the back of the room being treated as a large
alcove containing the tokonoma.

} !
226
BOSEN TEA ROOM, DAITOKUJI TEMPLE ~
Section (above) and plan. The section shows the
outer set of shoji held about four and one half feet
above ground level, and the inner set which in
ordinary use were removed.
228 BOSEN TEA ROOM, DAITOKUJI TEMPLE
BARN AND FARMHOUSE, KYOTO
Folk architecture makes extensive use of fixed, solid walls of plas
ter and wood. The roof of the barn (left) is built up of five to ten
inches of earth on boards, then covered with tile.
 I

WAREHOUSE, KYOTO
Walls are made in two sections, the inner shell of cypress planks
being separated by an air space from the outer shell of plaster. A
board fence protects the lower part of the wall. For protection
against fire the roof is also of plaster, shielded from rain by the
tile canopy which appears to float above the building. Windows vis
ible in the background have wood shutters fireproofed with plaster.

OVERLEAF
GARDEN FENCES
Left, top: vertical bamboo poles and filling of bamboo branches;
bottom : horizontal bamboo poles with branches left untrimmed.
Right, top : bamboo poles in hinoki frames ; bottom : woven split
bamboo.

231
 MmM

ililWliPifl 3 liHuIi J II I 'III;

I II11IfHIU1IIIi im 11HI HI1IWll1
II! iliLiilihil lidiiiiHiililllUiivil
 «

FIREPROOF WALL
The lower part of the wall is surfaced with gray floor tiles set diag
onally. Joints are covered with plaster mouldings. The decoration
of surfaces in Japanese architecture generally depends on the repe
tition of a simple linear pattern, rather than on sculptural effects
234 of mass or light and shadow.
 4i 44 i
if t 'f
43
i i i # i

STORE, KYOTO
The store facade is made of removable panels all set on one track,
with a sliding door incorporated in the center panel. The upper
part of the wall may be left open or equipped with shoji. In warm
weather all panels may be stored in a closet. The removable fence
is designed to protect the wall from animals. Living quarters for
the family may be at the rear, separated from the store by a small
garden.
PROJECTING WINDOW
Lattice windows afford a view from within but are difficult to see
into from the street. Shoji are not used directly behind the lattice,
but are set back on the wall plane.
 4* <h kfrn-

PROJECTING WINDOW
Facades of houses or stores on a village street may incorporate
projecting lattice windows, sometimes lacquered red. The windows
of this building are comparable to the one shown on the left. 237
 v n 7 - i - r
mas

PLASTER WALL
The strips of wood are decorative, but by their number may once
have signified rank. Hemp fibres nailed to the strips (or to a wood
framework if the wall is hollow) provide a bonding agent for
several layers of earth and plaster.
 The increase in urban population and the prosperity of the
merchant class was due not to some planned effort on the part
of the Tokugawa Shoguns, but came about despite their
efforts to limit such developments. The military vassals of
the Shogunate and their samurai found themselves borrow
ing from the merchants in order to buy and maintain the
accoutrements appropriate to their class ; farmers, no longer
able to barter with rice, required more and more money, and
so the wealth of the country shifted from the military aris
tocracy to the new urban middle classes. Speculation in rice
or a bad crop sometimes produced the misery requisite to
peasant rebellions, while those who understood the advan
tages of foreign trade chafed under restrictions which kept
the country closed to the rest of the world. In 1868, when
pressures from within and without could no longer be re
sisted, the monarchy was restored to power and Japan was
opened to the West.
Contact with other nations brought problems unprece
dented in Japan and often unsolved by the West itself.
Foremost among these were, and still are, problems of indus
trialization. In their haste to adapt at least the obvious fea
tures of European and American civilizations, Japanese
architects encountered difficulties in some ways similar to
those encountered in England and the United States, where
many new activities were being housed in buildings not origi
nally intended for them. The Japanese first absorbed Western
architecture primarily as a building technique. Architects
trained abroad could cope with many of the problems they
were called upon to solve, but for major buildings the services
of foreign architects were deemed appropriate. In this re
spect the Japanese were merely continuing a tradition already
active when monk-architects were imported from Korea or
China, to design such major works as Horyuji Temple or the
Daibutsuden of Todaiji Temple. Thus the battlemented His
torical Museum and The Italian Renaissance General Staff
Office in Tokyo were designed by the Italian C. V. Capeletti,
in 1881. Josiah Condor of England built a Russian Orthodox
Church in 1891, and R. P. Bridgens from America, de Boin-
ville from France, and Herman Ende from Germany, among
others, contributed government buildings, universities,
banks, museums, arsenals, and railway stations in styles as
varied as were their architects' nationalities. Unlike previous
importations from China and Korea, these exotic works
brought with them quite new ways of living. For esthetic rea
sons their individual "styles" would have been open to ques
tion even in their countries of origin. In Japan they produced
much confusion.
In 1910 the Architectural Institute of Japan made the 239
 problem the subject of a symposium. Two major objections to
Western styles were expressed at that time. First, all of the
styles were too far removed from Japanese taste. Second, the
Japanese, traditionally accustomed to sacrificing comfort in
order to live in close contact with their natural surroundings,
found that thick stone walls and small windows were ill
adapted to their climate. Inadequate ventilating and heating
facilities made some of the Western style buildings almost
impossible to use. However, the industrialization of the coun
try and the continuing absorption of Western ideas required
new building types for which Japanese architecture offered
no models. The conclusion was that the use of Western archi
tectural "styles" would of necessity be continued, but that
their evils should be mitigated by the introduction of Japa
nese features. Since the beliefs that had produced those
features were themselves being questioned, it proved increas
ingly difficult to graft superficial Japanese details onto West
ern concepts, in architecture as in everything else.
After World War I the need for a new architecture was lit
erally brought home to the public : a style of living consid
ered modern found increasing favor for home life, and many
private homes were designed in European styles. While the
exteriors of such houses suggested English or Dutch villas,
the number of Western style rooms they actually contained
depended on financial resources and on the amount of discom
fort the family was prepared to endure. At the back of the
house there was likely to be a Japanese garden and clean, airy
rooms of traditional Japanese design, ostensibly for less
adaptable parents and grandparents but often a refuge for
the whole family. In most cases a man in a Western business
suit, returning from a day at the office, donned a kimono the
moment he entered his English cottage. His office probably
had central heating, which made a light business suit appro
priate, but central heating or gas heaters set in fireplaces
may have been too costly for home use, thus making a warm,
quilted kimono desirable.
Some outstanding contributions to the development of
modern Japanese architecture were made by foreigners who
came to live and work in Japan. Some of them were well
acquainted with European and American efforts to devise a
new architecture, and they recognized in the traditional
architecture of Japan principles of obvious relevance to the
West. At that moment in Japan, however, it was just those
traditional habits of building that were deemed irrelevant,
or, more precisely, they seemed the property of conservative
elements of the community interested in impeding rather
than advancing the creative capacities of Japan's younger
240 architects. The German architect Bruno Taut lived for a time
IMPERIAL HOTEL, TOKYO
Frank Lloyd Wright, architect. 1916-1922.
Brick walls are ornamented with carved lava stone. Pools sur
rounding the building maintain a water supply during severe
earthquakes.
 in Japan, admired its architectural heritage, and through his
writing diverted attention from such flamboyant works as
Nikko to the classic purity of the Katsura Palace. Taut's
enthusiasm helped re-establish in Japan an attitude towards
building which the Western world was only then developing
for itself.
Antonin Raymond opened his own office in Japan in 1921.
His work has often pioneered technical and esthetic solutions
of great value to Japanese architects, many of whom com
pleted their training in his office. Of Raymond's more recent
buildings an apartment house built in 1951 for staff members
of the United States Department of State is a characteristic
example of his ability to utilize Japanese craftsmanship in
new ways. The smooth walls of the apartment house are of
concrete without any additional surfacing material, and the
building depends for its effect largely on the precision with
which the wood formwork was made.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Imperial Hotel, built in Tokyo in
1918-22, rests on caissons floating in the mud fields Ieyasu
reclaimed for his vassals. The heavy massing of this building,
the undistinguished color of its brick walls, and the coarsely
ornamented lava stone used throughout combine to make the
exterior an excessively personal statement. But some of the
interiors are prodigies of architectural space, at that time
new not only to Japan but to the rest of the world. Particu
larly is this so of the entrance lobby and the main dining
room, where changing ceiling heights and floor levels allow
natural light to be used with great dramatic effect.
While they found much to admire in Wright's work it is not
surprising that most Japanese architects did not directly
benefit from it, nor have they since 1922. Examples pertinent
to their problems were found instead in the work of Walter
Gropius and the Bauhaus, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der
Rohe. Many architects went abroad to study and work with
these men, and the most successful attempts to create a new
architecture conformed in varying degrees with the ideas
and practices of European functionalism, although Le Cor
busier and Mies van der Rohe are not properly identified with
that doctrine. Early in the 1920s a group of Japanese archi
tects, believing that all "styles" are harmful, and that good
architecture is the automatic result of good planning and the
honest expression of function, produced a series of buildings
that seemed allied with traditional values despite the novelty
of their appearance. Art Nouveau, and particularly the
Vienna Sezession , seemed to correspond to the Japanese feel
ing for nature in its enthusiasm for motifs drawn from plant
forms, and so they called themselves the Secessionists.
242 Among them was Sutemi Horiguchi, an architect whose com-
APARTMENT HOUSE, TOKYO
Raymond and Rado, architects. 1952.
Built for staff members of the United States Department of State,
this concrete apartment house incorporates cantilevered balconies
and sliding glass walls.
OKADA HOUSE AND GARDENS, TOKYO
Sutemi Horiguchi, architect. 1933.
The wall, the garden, and the rectangular pool are sharply defined
horizontal planes decorated by stones and plants of widely con
trasting textures. The bamboo terrace recalls the Moon Viewing
Platform of the Katsura Imperial Villa. 245
 affp?>.WW& »

.* - - *'"

WAKASA HOUSE, TOKYO

Sutemi Horiguchi, architect. 1939.
The house is composed of interpenetrating volumes related to the
garden by a ramp and a long rectangular pool.
prehension of the undeclared, even disclaimed, formal es
thetic motives underlying modern Western architecture was
remarkably complete. Horiguchi's Wakasa house, built in
1939, recalls the work of Walter Gropius in its asymmetric,
cubic massing and structurally unarticulated stucco sur
faces, but a long, narrow swimming pool at right angles to
the house introduces a landscape-building relationship pecul
iarly Japanese.
Under the aegis of a militant nationalism the mixing of
styles was revived, in the 1930s, with a new emphasis on
forms of Oriental origin. To Western eyes perhaps the most
unnerving product of this effort is the Honganji Temple in
Tokyo, built in 1934. The interior of this concrete Buddhist
temple is primarily Japanese, while its stone exterior com
bines Indian stupas and a barrel vault with an Italian Renais
sance stair and a basement carrying a single giant order of
Indian columns, between which are wide windows recalling
German Classicism. Once regarded as a model for further
development, this style has not gained wide acceptance.
Skeleton structures of steel or concrete, sheathed with
blank stucco surfaces, offered the purity required by Japa
nese taste. But the enthusiasm for an architecture seemingly
without "style" led to buildings which looked, in the words
Frank Lloyd Wright has applied to their European counter
parts, cut out of cardboard rather than constructed of solid
materials. The preferred corrective for this has been derived
largely from the work of Le Corbusier. An example is the
Nippon Sogo Bank by Kunio Maekawa, an architect who
worked with Le Corbusier in the 1930s. On the first three
storeys the round columns of the Bank are exposed, not as
free-standing pilotis but as engaged columns. For the re
maining storeys the cantilevered facade conceals the columns
and is divided, on the upper floors, into a pattern of glazed
and solid surfaces articulated by projecting balconies and by
slight recessions in the wall plane.
A somewhat different esthetic underlies the work of Junzo
Sakakura, who also worked with Le Corbusier. Sakakura
designed the Japanese Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition,
and in that building he employed the open structural cage,
the modular regularity, and the delicate scale of traditional
Japanese architecture with a precision and clarity hardly
surpassed in Japan since then. Sakakura's Museum of Mod
ern Art building in Kamakura, near Tokyo, retains some of
this direct handling of varied elements, but is perhaps most
interesting for its use of details characteristic of Sukiya-
zukuri architecture, however unrelated to tea house design
they may at first appear to be. Steel columns, for example,
seem to rest on stones floating in a pond at one side of the 247
NIPPON SOGO BANK, TOKYO
Kunio Maekawa, architect. 1952.
Exterior walls are of glass and prefabricated concrete slabs. Ex
posed columns, projecting balconies, and the placement of windows
on the upper floors are designed to add sculptural interest.

JAPANESE PAVILION, PARIS

Junzo Sakakura, architect. 1937.
A temporary building in the Paris Exposition of 1937, Sakakura's
pavilion was a light steel cage filled with walls of glass or wood.
 MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, KAMAKURA
Junzo Sakakura, architect. 1951.
The exhibition floor containing skylighted galleries is raised above
ground on thin steel columns and encloses an open court. Walls at
ground level are masonry ; other walls are of asbestos panels with
250 aluminum joints.
MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, KAMAKURA
Junzo Sakakura, architect. 1951.
The gallery floor is carried out over a pond. Foundation stones in
the water are actually decorative accessories attached to the
columns.
building. The galleries are carried one floor above ground by
these columns, and so the building projects over the water.
But the columns do not in fact rest on the stones: instead
they extend well beneath the floor of the pond, where they
are tied to each other by concrete foundation walls. The
stones are expressive symbols of support, and the craftsman
ship with which they have been cut through to accommodate
the columns rivals the meticulousness of traditional carpen
try. Again, a steel column lands directly in the center of the
main stair, presumably to emphasize the regularity of the
structural system, but it v/ill also recall tea house windows
bisected by bamboo columns or braces.
Few Japanese architects have pursued this adaptation of
poetically inspired details. Sculpturally modeled form has
seemed more important. The imposition of a plastic form on
a linear structural skeleton produces difficulties for Japanese
and Western architects alike. There is, however, this differ
ence : the plasticity so much admired in the work of Le Cor-
busier has behind it centuries of Mediterranean tradition. In
Japan there is no equivalent sustaining tradition of sculp
tural form; on the contrary, except in the design of roofs
Japanese architecture has in the past been essentially planar
and linear. The concern with sculptural qualities also leads to
"style," and a concern with style is equated by some Japanese
critics with a reprehensible indifference to what the United
States has already experienced as "social realism." It is true
that this point of view has been most compelling to those who
are primarily interested in social and political reform.
The architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe has had
relatively little influence in Japan. One reason for this would
appear to be the need, both for safety and economy, of earth
quake-proof reinforced concrete structures. Mies' architec
ture has been centered largely on the problems of designing
with steel, and his buildings have seemed to offer no immedi
ately applicable lessons. Indeed, much that Western archi
tects admire in Mies' work is perhaps overlooked by the
Japanese for no other reason than its resemblance, perhaps
superficial, to a tradition which is itself ignored. Attempts to
revive that tradition have met with difficulties. Sutemi Hori-
guchi, in his recent work, has abandoned many of his earlier
ideas and has developed Shoin-zukuri and Sukiya-zukuri
forms with skill and imagination. But such exclusively tradi
tional statements are possible now only through small build
ings. Antonin Raymond, in his residential work, has
attempted to rationalize traditional systems of construction.
Other architects, and decorators, have adapted superficial
details to make modernized versions of traditional build
ings, similar to American "modernizations" of colonial archi- 253
 '
: a •,«* 3m

FACULTY CLUB ROOM, KEIO UNIVERSITY, TOKYO

Isamu Noguchi, designer. 1952.
The faculty club room at Keio University was designed by the American sculptor
Isamu Noguchi in memory of his father, a professor at the University for many
years. The background for the hearth and the sitting area around it is a white
tokonoma and a wall of red tile. Two concrete columns, one structural, the other
serving as a flue, support a curved metal hood for the fireplace. The designer has
given a new solidity to the Japanese interior by adding new elements and modifying
254 old ones.

I
tecture except for a curious chic that renders them boneless.
A noteworthy example of the adaptation of traditional
forms is a group of buildings designed by Kenzo Tange for
the Hiroshima Memorial Peace Center. This project consists
of two buildings and an arch. The larger of the buildings is a
museum raised above ground on pilotis. The facades are
equipped with vertical louvres for protection against the sun.
Nearby is a building to house a library, offices, and confer
ence rooms. Where the museum depends for its effect on
sculpturally rounded forms, including facades almost imper
ceptibly concave, the library building is an enlarged version
in concrete of the traditional wood cage. Its proportions
recall the upper and lower wall panels of a traditional Japa
nese house. The powerful forms of cantilevered stairs in the
museum building suggest the steps and galleries of the
Imperial Palace in Kyoto.
It would appear that modern architecture in Japan must
first be international— that is to say, visually and structurally
related to twentieth century technology—before it can be
come specifically Japanese. In Japan more than in other coun
tries the tradition of pre-industrial building offers much that
the modern architect finds sympathetic and useful. To main
tain continuity with the past would seem, to the Western
architect, easier for his Japanese colleague than for himself.
But hidden in the Japanese tradition is a strong preference,
as Bruno Taut observed, for irrational structure. Confronted
with Western technology this drive has only infrequently
succeeded in transforming Western techniques : more often it
is itself reduced to arbitrary stylishness. An example of the
interaction of Japanese and Western assumptions is Kenzo
Tange's exhibition building for the Kobe Trade Fair, built in
1950. The building is a wood cage, but steel bolts and plates
replace traditional carpenter's details. In a further effort to
rationalize the structure the architect has chosen to use di
agonal bracing. Behind the braces are light wood and glass
panels, related in scale to shoji. The exposed bracing is per
haps more forthright than most Western architects— prob
ably influenced by traditional Japanese standards— would
allow, but the peculiar effectiveness of this building owes
much to its architect's grasp of what is vital both in the
developing architecture of the West and in his own tradition.
To a Western observer Japan seems to have been populated
entirely by gifted architects. The national talent for making
buildings has not diminished, but the problems with which
architects contend have increased.
 1

*»

ARITOMI HOUSE, TOKYO

Junzo Yoshimura, architect. 1953.
Columns are of cryptomeria with only the top bark removed. Walls
are screens of glass which slide into storage closets, thus enabling
the house to be completely opened in a few minutes. The closets are
256 an adaptation of the traditional amado in which shoji are stored.
MASUZAWA HOUSE, TOKYO
Makato Masuzawa, architect. 1952.
The house is approximately eighteen feet wide. It preserves aspects
of traditional Japanese design while incorporating elements of
Western planning; the interior is one large room two storeys high,
with a balcony at the rear. 257
MEMORIAL PEACE CENTER, HIROSHIMA
Kenzo Tange, architect. Begun 1951.
The center occupies a thirty acre site and will contain conference
halls, a museum, and other facilities for international use in the
promotion of peace. The buildings were photographed in the course
of construction.
* £'

Library building. Model.

 Ik

EXHIBITIONBUILDING,KOBE
Kenzo Tange, architect. 1950.
Intricate carpentry joints were replaced by a system of bolts and
steel plates, and prefabricated panels of wood and glass replaced
shoji. The lightness of the structure is made possible by diagonal
260 bracing, boldly expressed on the facades.
 4
SUPPLEMENT:JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE
The Museum's Japanese Exhibition House was made in
Nagoya in 1953. Together with all accessories it was shipped
to the United States in 700 crates. Among the items included
were prefabricated panels of hinoki (cypress) bark shingles
for the roof, lanterns, fences, furnishings, and kitchen uten
sils, stones of all sizes and coarse white sand for the gardens.
The entire building was reassembled in the Museum's garden
under the supervision of the architect, Junzo Yoshimura,
with the assistance of four craftsmen trained for this project
in Japan by Heizaemon Ito, who was chief carpenter. The
garden was designed by the architect and Tansai Sano ; the
latter directed its assembly in New York.
A Japanese building was chosen by the Museum for its
third House in the Garden because traditional Japanese de
sign has a unique relevance to modern Western architecture.
The characteristics which give it this relevance are post and
lintel skeleton frame construction; flexibility of plan; close
relation of indoor and outdoor areas ; and the decorative use
of structural elements.
Japanese architecture is known in the United States largely
through exhibition buildings such as those seen at the Chi
cago Columbian Exposition of 1893, the New York and San
Francisco World's Fairs of 1939, and through published
examples of tea houses, farm buildings, and folk architecture
in general. Visitors returning from Japan are often familiar
with urban homes of semi-traditional design, but have not
always been able to see the great monuments of Japanese
architecture.
The Museum's Exhibition House was chosen to illustrate
some of the characteristics of buildings considered by the
Japanese to be masterpieces, and considered by Western
architects to be of continuing relevance to our ov/n building
activities. These requirements called for a more disciplined
esthetic and a wider technical range than is found in tea
houses or farm buildings, however beautiful they may be.
The kind of building that seemed to fulfill the requirements
most satisfactorily was the residential complex of the six
teenth and seventeenth centuries, developed for the aristoc
racy and particularly for the military retainers called
samurai under circumstances explained elsewhere in this
book. Surviving examples from this period are most often
found adjoining temples, where they served as residences for
priests. Because the main room of such a house is equipped
with a desk called shoin, the building type was designated
262 Shoin-zukuri , which means the shoin way of building.
 Limitations of the site and problems attendant on making
the house accessible to the public imposed the following
adjustments :
1. Orientation. The main rooms of the house would ordi
narily have faced southeast. Adjoining buildings predeter
mined an orientation to the west, overlooking the Museum's
sculpture garden.
2. Number and size of rooms. Houses of this design consisted
of one, two, or three units, essentially similar and arranged
asymmetrically. Rooms did not differ greatly and were inter
changeable. The Exhibition House presents one basic unit.
The ken module used throughout the main building is ap
proximately 6V2feet, measured from the center of one column
to the center of the next. Storage rooms (number 13 on the
plan) were reduced in size. The veranda north of the shoin
room (number 8 on the plan) was made somewhat larger than
usual to facilitate the movement of large crowds. A complete
tea house, a kitchen, and a bathroom appropriate to the period
were included, but servants' quarters were omitted. No
attempt was made to artificially age the wood by darkening
it. The house presents intact a phase of Japanese architecture
as it originally appeared.
JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. 1954, 1955.

Presented by the America-Japan Society, Tokyo, on behalf of the

people of Japan, and sponsored by private citizens in Japan and the
United States, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Junzo Yoshimura Architect
Heizaemon Ito Chief Carpenter
Tansai Sano Gardener

Arthur Drexler Director

Philip C. Johnson Consultant
George M. Hopkinson Consultant

Natalie Hoyt Coordinator

Edward Winter Construction Supervisor
Ethelbert Furlong Garden Consultant

SPECIAL COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICA-JAP AN SOCIETY, TOKYO.

Architectural Advisors : Kunio Maekawa, Junzo Sakakura, Junzo
Yoshimura, Chisaburoh Yamada, Soyetsu Yanagi. Advisors: Yazo
Anzo, Kojiro Abe, Konosuke Akiyama, Shinsuke Asao, Ryozo
Asano, Ichiro Ishikawa, Taizo Ishisaka, Shojiro Ishibashi, Hisato
Ichimada, Eiichiro Iwase, Aisuke Kabayama, Teiichi Kawakita,
Konosuke Koike, Ataru Kobayashi, Masakazu Kobayashi, Takashi
Komatsu, Kiyoshi Goko, Yaichi Sasaki, Kiichiro Sato, Kyonosuke
Sakai, Seiji Sako, Keizo Shibusawa, Yasuo Shimizu, Michisuke
Sugi, Keizo Seki, Seiichiro Takahashi, Tokujiro Tanaka, Kyosuke
Tamai, Sozaburo Chigira, Kiyoshi Togasaki, Motoichi Toyama,
Risaburo Torigai, Mototada Nakamura, Masakazu Nagata, Shigeo
Nagano, Katsuhiko Hamaguchi, Aiichiro Fujiyama, Josaku Furu-
sawa, Takeyoshi Hari, Shozo Hotta, Chikao Honda, Yoshiichi
Murakami, Ichiro Yano, Tamesaburo Yamamoto, Tadao Watanabe,
Gisuke Watanabe.

The Museum wishes to thank, in addition to the members of the

Special Committee, the following individuals for their advice and
assistance: Antonin Raymond, Mr. and Mrs. Yoneo Arai, Isamu
Noguchi, Douglas Overton, Alan Priest, R. C. Kramer.
 1 GARDEN ENTRANCE 7 GARDEN
2 FAMILY ENTRANCE 8 SIDE VERANDA
3 GALLERY 9 bridge (to tea house and bath)
4 SECOND ROOM 10 TEA HOUSE PANTRY
5 FIRST ROOM 11 TEA CEREMONY ROOM
a.-shoin (desk) 12 BATH
b - chigai-dcma (shelves) a - main room
b - toilet
c -tokonoma (alcove)
13 STORAGEROOM
6 VERANDA 14 GALLERY
a - chumon (vestibule for 15 SERVICE VERANDA
garden entrance) 16 PANTRY
b -nure-en (outer or "wet" 17 KITCHEN
veranda) a - stove
_v r /V Drawing by Dale Byrd
South elevation.

West elevation.

scale: 6V2 foot ken module, measured from column centers.

Section looking north.

Section looking east.

JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE

Museum of Modern Art.
TTTTmor mrrrxxxT

East elevation.

North elevation.

JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE

Museum of Modern Art.
 6. BO 2.5Q-

Section looking south.

South elevation. TEA HOUSE

North elevation.
Garden entrance.

JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE

Museum of Modern Art.
Pool and veranda.
Pool and veranda.

JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE

Museum of Modern Art.
First and second rooms with exterior walls removed for summer use.

Family entrance.
«-

First and second rooms. The mats

are bound with patterned silk tape.

Pool seen from the veranda adjoin

ing the second room.

JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE

Museum of Modern Art.
First (shoin ) room with landscape
paintings in black ink.

The shoin (desk) in the background

is adjoined by storage shelves. The
tokonoma is at the right.
Main garden,
Waterfall in the main garden,

JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE

Museum of Modern Art.
Veranda. Rafters are hung from beams inside the roof and serve primarily for decoration.

JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE

Museum of Modern Art.
Tlfsii il'n i iif'
|ggw n»ninn
Tea house. Walls are of ochre-colored Kyoto earth,

JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE

Museum of Modern Art.
I , #s*
JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE
Museum of Modern Art.

Rear garden. The small veranda leads to the bathroom.

Bridge to tea house and bath. Bamboo service veranda.

Kitchen. The oven, at ground level, is made of earth
and waxed plaster. A charcoal fire is kept in the sand
box (foreground). Drainboard and sink are at the
rear.

Kitchen work space adjoins a pantry, where portable

tables are stored in cabinets and food is prepared for
serving on shelf just above floor level.

Bathroom. Sunken wood tub adjoins sliding lattice screen and waxed shoji.
The roof is of hinoki bark shingles.
 JAPANESE EXHIBITION HOUSE
Museum of Modern Art.

The roof is of hinoki bark shingles.

286
TheMuseumof ModernArt

300 19 18
••- :•»