The First European Description of Japan, 1585 (46 page)

29. In Europe books are bound by sewing the pages together along the margins; in Japan they sew the ends together but the folds remain loose
.

Well into the twentieth century, particularly in Portugal and the Spanish-speaking world, the pages of books were, as Frois suggests, sewn together close to both the left and right margins. The task or honor of cutting the right edge of the pages was left to the individual who purchased the book.

It may be difficult for the reader to gather from Frois' description how Japanese books were bound. Imagine a very long piece of paper, folded back and forth on itself like the folds of an accordion. Then imagine it sewn on one side only, and not right at the edge but half an inch or so from the edge where the spine would be, if there were a spine. The other side is just left as it is. Because the leaves are not cut with these books, one can remove the thread and be left with a very long piece of paper that has print on just one side.

1
  Many of Frois' comments in this chapter receive further elaboration in what remains perhaps the best source on the Japanese language, particularly during the sixteenth-century: João Rodrigues'
Arte da Lingoa de Iapam
(1604); a facsimile edition prepared by Shima Shozo was published in 1969 by Bunka Shobo Hakubunsha. Book Three of Rodrigues'
Arte
is essentially a guide or treatise on epistolary style. See Jeroen Pieter Lamers, ed. and trans.,
Treatise on Epistolary Style, João Rodriguez on the Noble Art of Writing Japanese Letters
(Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, 2002). For examples of Japanese letters, see Adriana Boscaro,
101 Letters of Hideyoshi
(Tokyo: Sophia University Press, 1975).

2
  See Basil Hall Chamberlain,
Things Japanese, Being Notes on Various Subjects Connected with Japan
. Fourth revised and enlarged edition (London: John Murray, 1902), 378.

3
  Michael Cooper,
They Came to Japan
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1999[1965]), 243.

4
  
Japan's Modern Myth
(New York: Weatherhill, 1982).

5
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 180.

6
  Ibid., 251.

7
  Michael Cooper, trans. and ed.,
This Island of Japon, João Rodrigues' Account of 16th-Century Japan
(Tokyo: Kodansha, 1973[1620]), 332–333.

8
  John Blair and Nigel Ramsay,
English Medieval Industries
(London: Hambledon and London, 2003), 365.

9
  Cooper,
This Island of Japon
, 333.

10
  
Poidouros
.

11
  Sir Rutherford Alcock,
The Capital of the Tycoon, A Narrative of a Three Years' Residence in Japan
(London: Longman, Green, and Roberts, 1863), I, 443.

12
  See
Chapter 1
of Nigel Ready's
Brooke's Notary 13th edition
(Auckland: Brookers, 2009) and Serena Connolly,
Lives Behind the Laws
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).

13
  Alcock,
The Capital of the Tycoon
, I, 442.

14
  Cooper,
They Came to Japan
, 176–177.

15
  
Treatise on Epistolary Style
, 72–73.

16
  
Vaza to
. It is surprising that Frois would use Japanese for an ordinary expression such as “on purpose” (
waza to
), particularly as his occasional use of Japanese is largely confined to physical objects.

17
  Missionary correspondence often was collected and “edited” by superiors and then published in volumes that were read by Jesuits, particularly novices, as well as the general public back in Europe. These books of letters reinforced the Society's particular values and beliefs. Because they often recounted martyrdoms, miracles, and exotic heathen practices, they also made for exciting reading for a secular elite that had grown up reading the lives of the saints.

18
  Brian W. Ogilvie,
The Science of Describing
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 82.

19
  Akio Okada, trans. and ed., Yoroppa-Bunka to Nihon-Bunka [European Culture and Japanese Culture] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1965).

20
  G.B. Sansom,
Historical Grammar of the Japanese Language
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928), 44.

21
  Boscaro,
101 Letters of Hideyoshi
, xi.

22
  Edward J. Morse,
Japan Day By Day, 1877, 1878–1879, 1882–1883
. 2 Vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), II, 410.

23
  Bosacaro,
101 Letters of Hidyoshi
.

24
  
Yoroppa-Bunka to Nihon-Bunka
.

25
  David Landau and Peter Parshall,
The Renaissance Print 1470–1550
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 15.

26
  J.A. Abranches Pinto, Yoshimoto Okamoto, and Henri Bernard, S.J., eds. La Premiere Ambassadi du Japon en Europe.
Monumenta Nipponica Monographs
6 (Tokyo: Sophia University, 1942), 88.

27
  Andrew Pettegree,
The Book in the Renaissance
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 7. See also Stephen Greenblatt,
The Swerve, How the World Became Modern
(New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).

28
  Marques,
Daily Life in Portugal
, 231. John Correia-Afonso, S.J.,
Letters from the Mughal Court
(St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1981), 15.

29
  Joaquim de Carvalho,
Estudos sobre a Cultura Portuguesa do século XVI
, Volume II (Coimbra: University of Coimbra, 1948), 7; Luís de Sousa Rebelo, “Language and Literature.” In
Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, 1400–1800
, eds. Francisco Bethencourt and Diogo Ramada Curto, pp. 358–390 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

30
  Manuel da Costa Fontes, “Between Ballad and Parallelistic Song:
A Condessa Traidora
in the Portuguese Oral Tradition.” In
Medieval and Renaissance Spain and Portugal
, eds. Martha E. Schaffer and Antonio Corijo Ocaña, pp. 182–196 (Rochester: Tamesis, 2006).

11   Houses, construction, gardens and fruits

1. Our houses are tall and multi-storied; in Japan they generally are low and at ground level
.

European cities, including Lisbon, experienced dramatic population growth during the sixteenth century, which led to the erection of apartment buildings with upwards of four and five stories.
¹
As Frois suggests, the Japanese also erected multi-story buildings but more frequently their
Shoin
-style homes were single-story structures that were virtually wall-less. Chamberlain, following Morse, noted:

The side of the [Japanese] house, composed at night of wooden sliding doors called
amado
, is stowed away in boxes during the day-time. In the summer, everything is thus open to the outside air.
²

Even with the floor raised a foot or so off the ground for the sake of ventilation, the
Shoin
-style house
³
had to deal with an ever-present threat of mildew and fleas (see
#11
below). To block the rain and provide ventilation, the roof tended to extend well beyond the walls. This design feature also limits the amount of sunlight coming in from overhead. The potted plants that most Japanese kept (and still keep) outside, and the inner gardens of the wealthy, all would suffer from multi-story dwellings. For these reasons, Japan in recent decades passed “sunlight laws” to ensure that new development did not take away people's right to sunlight.
⁴

2. Our houses are made of stone and mortar; theirs are made of wood, bamboo, straw and mud
.

Stone was fairly plentiful in Mediterranean Europe and both rich and poor took advantage of it to erect houses that ranged from humble to palatial.
⁵
In Frois' Portugal granite was a popular building material in the north, while houses of mud and stucco were common in the south.
⁶
Structures of wood were more common in northern Europe (e.g. the wooden churches of Scandinavia, which are often said to appear oriental). As Frois indicates, wood was the main material for Japanese building. Frois' Jesuit contemporary, Rodrigues, elaborated:

All the houses of the nobles are constructed of various sorts of precious woods, the usual kind being very fine cedar which is most pleasing on account of its luster; all the pillars are made of this cedar or of even more precious wood. Ordinary folk make use of pine or other inferior timber, although well-bred people build at least their guest house with cedar.

Rodrigues went on to note that wood, being light, was mobile, and “Thus they can move an entire house of this sort to another place nearby without dismantling it, apart from removing the roof from on top because of its weight, and this we have seen them do many times.”
⁷

3. Our houses have foundations that are deep in the ground; Japanese houses have a single stone under each hashira and these stones rest on the ground
.

The
hashira
are large square, wooden pillars standing at each corner and in two walls to support the center-ridge of the roof. All but the smallest houses also have a central
hashira
, which usually retains at least part of its natural features. Some were and still are completely natural, a reassuringly powerful piece of unpainted, polished natural wood that can be seen and felt inside the house. The butt of each
hashira
rests on a stone, the bottom half of which is slightly under-ground and visible from the outside. Hashira are usually of cedar and resist rot and termites. These pillars may rest freely on their non-foundations, but they are linked together on top by transverse beams. This is another reason the houses can be moved without being dismantled, as Rodrigues pointed out.

4. Our doors generally hang on hinges; Japanese doors almost all slide on sills
.

Sliding doors save space and do not push in or pull out air, which is why they increasingly are the choice for modern buildings. Japanese windows, whether door-size or occasionally small, likewise slide on sills. One exception to this rule was noted by Morse: the Japanese privy often has a hinged (butterfly joint) door.

5. The partitions dividing our rooms are made of stone and mortar or brick; Japanese rooms are divided by doors made of paper
.

Japanese houses generally have no internal walls
per se
. The house is divided into rooms by lightly framed sliding “doors” made of paper. The items described in this and the previous distich are referred to as “doors” in English and Portuguese. The Japanese actually use different terms. The outside front door is called a
to
, the translucent paper inner door and veranda doors are called
shoji
, and the generally opaque and lightly ornamented room partitions are called
fusuma
. The
fusuma
are grooved above as well as below in such a manner that they can easily be lifted and removed from their tracks, turning several rooms into one.

6. Our roofs are made of tile; in Japan they generally are made of wooden planks, straw, or bamboo
.

The homes of Portuguese nobles may have had tile roofs, but the majority of people in Portugal lived in simple rectangular homes with roofs of thatch; even some city dwellers had roofs made of broom straw.
⁸

Japanese nobles, like their European counterparts, often had tile roofs. Indeed,
raku
ware, which was invented in the 1570s for the tea ceremony, was the work of a gifted artisan who made roof tiles.
⁹
That said, most roofs in Japan, particularly in rural areas, were similar to those on farmhouses in Portugal or England. They appear as an extension of the landscape or even a veritable flower garden. Here is a nineteenth century description by Morse:

In many cases the ridge is flat, and this area is made to support a luxuriant growth of iris, or the red lily (fig. 41). A most striking feature is often seen in the appearance of a brown somber-colored village, wherein all the ridges are aflame with bright-red blossoms of the lily; of farther south, near Tokio [sic], the purer colors of the blue and white iris form floral crests of exceeding beauty.
¹⁰

Sometimes light and dark colored straws were alternatively laid so that the cleanly cut eaves (up to three feet thick) were decorative. They offered superb insulation and came in a great variety of regional styles, especially in terms of the central ridge design. Note that housing-related Chinese characters show a Far Eastern tendency to identify shelter with the roof (i.e. the house radical is a roof).

7. The wood in our rooms is highly finished and polished; the wood in the rooms where they hold their tea ceremony
¹¹
is just as it comes from the woods, in imitation of nature
.

Rodrigues wrote many magical pages about the
sukiya
, the name for a tea hut.
¹²
Because meeting to drink cha was for “the quiet and restful contemplation of the things of nature, … Everything employed in this ceremony is as rustic, rough, completely unrefined and simple as nature made it.”
¹³
Such taste is understandable among
literati
(and that includes many samurai), who respected sage-poets who lived simple lives in the mountains.
¹⁴
What is perhaps more impressive is that some ordinary houses showed similar taste. Kaempfer wrote:

The ceiling is sometimes neither planed nor smoothed, by reason of the scarcity [rare] and curious running of the veins and grain of the wood, in which case it is only cover'd with a thin slight couch of a transparent varnish, to preserve it from decaying.
¹⁵