Tatami Mats

Tatami mats (Fig. 130) are thick, woven straw mats, measuring just under one by two meters, that were commonly used as flooring in traditional Japanese-style rooms from about the Edo period (1603-1868). The word “tatami” was first documented in the Kojiki (“Record of Ancient Matters”) in 712, indicating that the early prototypes of these mats date back to the Nara period (710-794) or before. These prototypes began as seating and bedding mats for the aristocracy, gradually evolving into the more durable mats that began to see use as room flooring in the sixteenth century, and by the seventeenth were common in homes of all social classes.

“Tatami” comes from the verb tatamu, meaning “to fold” or “to pile,” suggesting that early mats were thin enough to fold for storage when not in use. During the Heian period (794-1185), tatami was a luxury item reserved for the highest-ranking aristocrats and samurai. In those days, when Imperial Palace floors were wood, smaller stand-alone mats served as seating cushions during the day, then were exchanged for larger mats, known as goza, as bedding for the night. It was not until the late Muromachi period (1338-1573) that tatami mats similar to those of today began to see use in covering entire floors of the Palace and other estates of the aristocracy. With time, tatami mats for flooring became so integral to Japanese architecture that room size came to be standardized in terms of the number of mats. Even today, “tatami” (jo) remains the unit of spatial measurement that, more so than meters or feet, most Japanese can visualize with greatest facility.

The Edo period saw the development of the architectural style known as “traditional Japanese,” a hybrid of Zen Buddhist architecture and the formal—minimalist—reception rooms of the samurai elite. This style was characterized by tatami floors, shōji sliding doors, coffered ceilings (Fig. 131), and square pillars. By the seventeenth century, tatami mat flooring had become a part of every Japanese household with the means to afford it. Demand for tatami fell with the influx of Western architecture in the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912) and plummeted dramatically in the modern post-war era, but leveled off and has remained steady. Today, most Japanese homes and apartments have at least one room with tatami floors.

Tatami in Japanese History and Culture

Tatami mats are an excellent example of the deep and enduring bond between Japanese architecture and culture. These mats are not just an internationally recognized symbol of Japanese aesthetics and craftsmanship, but a foundational component of Japanese national identity—what makes Japan Japanese. 

Japan’s oldest tatami artifact, known as Goshōdatami (Fig. 132), was a personal use item of Emperor Shōmu (701-756) (Fig. 133) long before tatami use as floor coverings. (The name Goshōdatami comes from the Goshō Palace, Emperor Shōmu’s official residence during his reign.) The Goshōdatami resembles a mat spread on a bedstead, covered with several straw mats and a layer of linen. 

By the mid-Heian era (794-1185), tatami mats had become a favorite of not only the aristocracy, but literary and artistic chroniclers of the court. In The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel, The Pillow Book, and other works of literature with picture scrolls that illustrate the narratives, tatami mats are depicted in numerous scenes as a staple of aristocratic lifestyles. The scenes below and others from the court clarify that, by the eve of the Kamakura period (1185-1333), tatami mats were standard accessories for portable seating or bedding purposes.

With the rise of the samurai to unchallenged dominance in the early Muromachi period (1333-1573), tatami mats for flooring were used in study rooms of the warrior elites. Tatami continued to gain acceptance into the fifteenth century for reception and living quarters, but it was still common to use stand-alone mats, as only the wealthy could afford to cover entire rooms with tatami. 

By the late sixteenth century, however, tatami rooms had become the samurai standard, stimulating a thriving trade in tatami dealers, so much so that tatami quarters full of tatami shops also came into being. Later, in the mid-Edo period—late seventeenth century—demand for tatami as a floor covering skyrocketed among commoners.

This burgeoning popularity penetrated beyond literature and the arts to inform more fundamental cultural disciplines, including philosophy and morality.

The Luck of the Layout

In aristocrat and samurai households, tatami mats were regularly rearranged to accommodate the needs of different guests and events. In tea rooms, layouts changed with the seasons; the hearth mat, for instance, was centrally relocated during winter to help keep occupants warm. By the Edo period, a catalog of rules had developed governing the number and arrangement of tatami mats in event venues, with auspicious (shūgijiki) and inauspicious (fushūgijiki) layouts clearly established. In business as well, shops were designed around the size of "five and half tatami mats," as this assured good fortune no matter what kinds of products were made or sold there. The following auspicious patterns were found in private residences, as well as at weddings and other celebratory events. (Fig. 136)

Inauspicious arrangements (below) were configured to ward off bad luck during funerals and periods of mourning at people’s homes, as well as at Buddhist temples, where services for the dead were performed on a regular basis.

Special Cases

While numerous arrangements are possible in a given space, certain layouts, irrespective of actual mat positioning, are “just not done.” There are no four-mat rooms, for instance. (4.5-mat layouts appear in Fig. 136 above, but no four-mat versions.) Why? Because one of the readings for the number four—shi—is also a reading for the character 死, which means “death.” Much like Western buildings have no thirteenth floor, fourth floors in Japanese buildings and four-mat tatami rooms in Japanese homes are likewise nonexistent.

Superstitions likewise surround treading on the edges of tatami mats, which is also believed to bring misfortune. Even Japanese martial artists are taught to step over cracks between mats, although there could be a historical basis for this. Some explain it as a throwback to the samurai days, when ninjas hid below the floors of their enemies’ houses, waiting to impale warriors foolish enough to neglect this long-standing precaution. On the other hand, similar superstitions are found the world over, perhaps the most famous in English being, “Step on a crack, and break your mother’s back.”

Interestingly, although it is standard practice to reconfigure mat layout to inauspicious patterns in rooms where funerals are to be held or surviving family members will be in mourning, there are special cases in which what appear to be the subtlest of changes can mean the difference between lucky and unlucky.

The positioning of cracks between mats was of crucial importance in layouts in other rooms—specifically, cracks in front of decorative alcoves (tokonoma) and those near room entrances. An alcove positioned to face a crack between mats and a room entranceway positioned near one are both inauspicious.

• In the inauspicious example at left below, both alcove (in black at upper right) and closet (oshiire) face cracks between mats. This is corrected in the auspicious layout at right, a textbook example of properly configuring six mats in such rooms. (Fig. 140)

• It is also unacceptable to have a single entry/exit door open onto the narrow side of a mat. 

Tatami Mat Features

Tatami mats were made to order for Japan’s challenging pre-air conditioning climate, including multiple features unavailable with wooden flooring. In addition to enhancing interior acoustics and air quality, tatami responds better to high humidity despite the temperature extremes of summer and winter. Rooms with tatami flooring offer greater multifunctional convenience in response to housing conditions, including small rooms, wood frame houses, lack of central heating, and social gatherings at New Year’s and the Bon Festival. Tatami mats are integral to many Japanese cultural traditions: going barefoot at home, sitting and sleeping on the floor, etc. A well-ventilated room is important to keep tatami mats in top condition.

Soft Rush Benefits

Soft rush adds a number of its own unique medicinal benefits to tatami mats’ value in Japanese homes.

Tatami in Satsuma

Below is a picture of a full tatami layout (Fig. 141), a close-up of the edges of the mats (Fig. 142) and the tatami of my great-uncle's house removed before the renovation (Fig. 143).

Week 6: The Samurai World

Iriki Fumoto

School’s out for the summer, and I’m officially on vacation—even for only a few days. So my aunt graciously helped me take advantage of that sliver of free time before the apprenticeship began. She drove me to a 19th-century samurai military stronghold known as Iriki Fumoto (Fig. 144), where we toured the impressive home of a samurai doctor built in 1873—the beginning of the tumultuous transition from the Edo period (1603-1868) to the Meiji Restoration (1868-1912). 

Before going into the visit per se, I’d like to look briefly at the history of those times. The Satsuma Domain, which covered the southern half of Kyushu, was ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate during the peaceful, but tense Edo era. Based at Kagoshima Castle in the modern-day city of Kagoshima, the Satsuma Domain established about a hundred fumoto, or “outer towns,” that served as strongholds throughout its territory to host samurai retainers responsible for their respective regions of governance. A billboard from the Visitor’s Center showed the locations of these fumoto around Kagoshima (Fig. 145), along with a map of Ikiri Fumoto itself (Fig. 146).

Following that map, we noticed a handful of smaller houses around the doctor’s residence that looked to be from the same period—perhaps lower ranking samurai—but occupied by families unrelated to the Fumoto and not open to the public. Iriki Fumoto is not a fully restored tourist attraction along the lines of “Old Williamsburg” Virginia, where the entire town is a recreation of the 18th-century settlement, but was rebuilt and reopened to the public in 2010. The community recently added a new school on compound premises, in addition to other public, private and commercial properties.

Narrow paved roads with waist-high stone walls lining both sides crisscrossed our route (Figs. 147, 148). As we entered the doctor’s house, I felt a sense of awe reminiscent of my first step inside the gate to Hosshinji weeks earlier. The caretaker greeted us and, as his only guests, we had the house to ourselves for our own private tour. It took two hours to explore as we listened to his historical accounts and anecdotes of samurai times. 

He began by calling attention to our current room’s flooring structure. As in other traditional homes, tatami mats dominated most rooms, but the focus here was the support system for these mats. In the family dining area next to the genkan, the tatami rested on long stalks of bamboo laid in rows on the pier foundation traditionally used (Fig. 149). Plentiful, inexpensive, and durable, bamboo provided solid functional floor support, but according to samurai thinking, areas for women, children and servants did not require high-quality materials. The adjoining room, accessed by stepping up into a separate section of the house with elevated floors, was the entrance of the samurai master and him alone (Fig. 150). Women were not allowed there, with the exception of female servants who cleaned the rooms and attended the master. This room featured both wooden planks and bamboo as floor support, which provided greater stability. The sub-floor support for the two inner rooms beyond the master’s entrance, that were used to entertain guests, consisted exclusively of wooden planks, which guaranteed complete stability for activities of any kind. 

As we returned to the family dining area, the lower room just off the genkan, our guide pointed out a square, shallow pit filled with ash and, over what in samurai times would have been a small cooking fire, a cast-iron pot suspended from the ceiling beams (Fig. 151). This was the family irori which, until recently, was the dining area in traditional Japanese homes. My aunt, who is in her late 60s, remembers sitting around her family irori as a child in my grandmother’s home. In this samurai residence, on the other hand, servants prepared food in the large, dirt-floor kitchen, then carried the meal to the family seated around the irori according to customary family hierarchy. The father sat facing the kitchen, his children at his right, and his wife sat opposite the father with her back to the kitchen, so she could receive the food, then pivot to serve the family. Irori also helped control humidity in the house and prevent its wooden pillars from rotting, as the rising smoke adhered to the wood, curing it to keep it dry and sturdy. 

The engawa on this residence was not equipped with exterior-side glass sliding doors, only shōji separating the home interior from the outdoors—a style common in older houses (Fig. 152). Two sets of sliding doors—interior shōji and sturdy exterior sliding doors—were a more recent innovation, but not for all. This home’s engawa was built only outside raised-floor guest rooms, emphasizing respect for guests but not family members. Additional evidence of this guest-first, family-second hierarchy was the nando, a room “hidden away” at the back of the house next to the family dining area. It served as both storage space and bedroom for the master’s wife and children. 

The next attraction was a bamboo gutter running the length of the hallway separating the lower and upper sections of the house (Fig. 153). This house has two roofs, with gutters positioned at their junction—one end higher than the other—to divert rainwater into a bamboo chute and on to the front yard (Fig. 154). These gutters were an advanced idea for the time but were known to leak in heavy rains.

While no new Japanese home today is without an indoor toilet and bathtub, both were conspicuously absent here. As in other homes of the era, these facilities were located in a separate structure outside the main house (Fig. 155). To bathe in the stone tub, servants filled it with cold water, then heated it with a fire from a compartment below (Fig. 156). A wooden palette was laid over the tub bottom to sit or stand on, while preventing burns from the hot stone. These firewood-heated tubs still exist in some older homes, including my grandmother’s.

I remember my father telling me “war stories” from his days at Hosshinji, where preparing the bath was one of his daily duties: cleaning the cast-iron tub, splitting the firewood, stoking the fire, etc. One of my favorites was the time he heated the cast-iron tub, only to discover that he’d forgotten to fill it with water first. He hastily threw open the tap, which only made the situation worse—producing a deafening hiss and a huge cloud of steam that billowed out the open bathhouse window. Even so, he recalled, luck was with him. Had the iron been older, it might have cracked from top to bottom, ruining the tub and, he suspected, his Zen career in the process. 

Getting back to the doctor’s house, this beautifully crafted structure was a living museum that sent me slipping back in time with each new room. And while I understood in my mind that samurai life of that era was neither easy nor glamorous, never has the past been brought to life so vividly before my eyes. 

Hakusan (White Mountain) Shrine

Several days of rain kept my aunt and I indoors for the most part after our trip to Iriki Fumoto, but we took advantage of a short break in the clouds for a visit to my third Satsuma shrine. Hakusan Jinja (Fig. 157) is an outpost in a nationwide network of sister shrines, whose enshrined deity, Kikuri-hime, is a goddess known for her role as relationship mediator for Izanagi and Izanami, the father and mother gods of Japan who created the archipelago. As a female deity of relationships and mediation, only men were allowed to worship at Hakusan shrines for many centuries, but today Kikuri-hime hears prayers from believers of both sexes on matters of love and marriage. Satsuma’s Hakusan Jinja is a small shrine without a resident gūji (Shinto priest), but the inner sanctum, the residence of the goddess, is kept clean at all times in accordance with the Shinto emphasis on purification. This space is so holy that access is granted only to the priest, who is required to recite a special prayer (norito) each time he opens and closes the doors to the sanctum. Note the sacred shide paper streamers hanging from the top left and right of the ceiling of the entrance hall to the kami no heya (god’s room) (Fig. 158).

I can’t imagine anything that could have inspired me more than Iriki Fumoto as preparation for my upcoming apprenticeship. I start next week, and can hardly wait. This was what I came for, and it’s hard to contain my excitement at the prospect of finally getting underway. I look forward to sharing the experience with everyone. See you again in Week 7!