My japanese home

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Together with the owner of the house

I listen to the evening ringing in silence.

Willow leaves are falling.

Basho

The renovation was imminent. He mercilessly forced me to spend days and nights flipping through countless magazines around the interior, sticking to the TV screen during the program "The Housing Question", eagerly looking out the windows in search of ideas, crawling up and down the world wide web and drawing endless plans.

Thoughts huddled and pushed, ideas flashed like fireworks and just as quickly crumbled into invisible stars. The bank account and the two-week vacation impudently made it clear that renovations had to be swift, modest, stylish and, what killed the most, hand-made.

And it was at this time that I managed to drown in the wave of susi-mania !!! The words wasabi, hasi and nagiri are firmly entrenched in the lexicon, and pickled ginger and dried seaweed are nori in the kitchen. Further more: a collection of hokku settled on the bedside table, and during a telephone conversation, the hand traced on pieces of paper not flowers and butterflies, but squiggles similar to hieroglyphs. The husband was meaningfully silent and still silently, but very eloquently fried potatoes with bacon and read "Kysya". Thank you, I didn’t sing out folk ditties with profanity and didn’t demand to embroider his shirt with a cross. A desperate Russophile suddenly woke up in him. The silent confrontation between the two cultures froze while we were leveling the walls, polishing the floor and whitewashing the ceiling. All this time I enthusiastically told my husband about Zen philosophy, taught me to eat with chopsticks and demonstrated the masterpieces of ikebana. A spark of interest in his eyes flashed when I put on a brand new kimono, sat down on his lap and opened an album with photographs of the interiors of Japanese houses. The husband loved space and disliked bulky furniture. That is why the photographs of the apartments, in which it seemed that the furniture was invisible or absent altogether, impressed him and the further conversation about decoration and design already looked like a dialogue between two reasonable people, and not like two monologues of stubborn kids.

Japanese living quarters are exquisite and distinctive "worlds", both in antiquity and up to the present day. The Japanese believe that the most beautiful state is emptiness and peace. So they live in their small and beautiful apartments in their asceticism. They are characterized by sophistication, geometric harmony, spaciousness. Separate rooms are isolated from each other by mats of strictly defined sizes, if necessary, the mats can be removed.

An indisputable truth has become established in the minds of the Japanese: superfluous is ugly. Their homes do not have the number of things that surround us, cluttering up the room and distracting attention. In the Japanese interior, everything is hidden in special closets located throughout the height of the room. They practically merge with the wall, giving the impression of strict cleanliness. All items appear only as needed. The futon (traditional Japanese bed) is rolled up in the morning and put away in the built-in cabinet. Food is served on a low light table (habuzai), which can be easily carried to any place or removed altogether. The custom of sitting on the tatami led to the absence of chairs and armchairs.

The main place in the house of the Japanese is occupied by a tokonoma - a built-in niche, where a vase of flowers traditionally stands, and a scroll hangs on the wall either with a painting or with a saying of an ancient sage written in calligraphic handwriting.

What is this life?

Call it a dream or a reality?

Either reality, or a dream -

As if it is, maybe not, And no one knows the answer …

(Unknown author)

The interior of the house is divided into rooms using fusuma sliding partitions. The base of the fusuma is a wooden frame. Unlike shoji, the fusuma frame is pasted over on both sides with opaque thick paper. Fusuma are often decorated with drawings. It can be flowers, birds, landscapes with images of mountains and waterfalls. When fusuma is removed, the number of rooms in the house changes, which is very convenient if guests come to the house.

Interior asceticism also comes from Zen Buddhism, which was popular in medieval Japan. Teaching about the attainment of the Truth through inner concentration turned any mundane activity into meditation, and excessive concentration interferes. Hence, we must get rid of it.

Minimalism does not forgive mistakes. Surfaces need to be flawless, detail to be precise, and every piece well designed. You have to puzzle over how to fit the maximum amount of things into the minimum furniture.

So, the essence of our dialogue boiled down to the fact that we live a dynamic, active life, full of events, stress, guests, work, study, love that whirl us in a whirlwind and do not allow us to relax even at home. My husband most of all liked the idea of transforming the space through a built-in wardrobe, screens and a mattress (sorry, tatami) on the floor, I was interested in design details that create comfort and style at least in a single corner of the apartment and a combination of natural materials. And both of us were impressed by the basic concept of the Japanese in relation to their home - in their home, a person must find balance and harmony. Such a worldview could not fail to attract us - those for whom stress is the norm of life, and the TV, as in the song, “replaced nature”.

A hallmark of contemporary Japanese design is the ability to combine traditional materials - wood, bamboo, ceramics and lacquer - with plastic and metal.

Economy and simplicity are characteristic of the architecture and decoration of a Japanese house. The Japanese know how to integrate modern technology into traditional interiors. Technology is another great love of the Japanese and they know how not to oppose it to a person, but to make it a part of their everyday life. The Japanese will certainly soften the cold shine of chrome-plated metal, giving the product a streamlined, slightly swollen shape - like an old thick-walled faience. Everything from a fork to a sofa should have its own inner world.

Find out the true inner beauty of things

you can only move away from the bustle of the outside world.

To calm the mind, one turns to meditation. Remember Lukic's rock garden from the next national series? Even a hermit who lives in peace and quiet needed a meditation garden, or maybe we, if we freeze for a minute and listen to ourselves, will understand that instead of a bottle of beer, a cigarette or the furious rhythm of disco music, we want to sit in silence and plunge into into the contemplation of a rock garden? The Japanese say that a person who spends a lot of time in his garden can see, instead of a platform with stones, an endless water surface, mountain peaks covered with snow and bizarre clouds floating away into infinity.

The garden is an integral part of a traditional Japanese home. The interior of the house forms a single whole with the surrounding nature, and we can enjoy admiring the picturesque trees and flowering bushes reflecting in the calm surface of the pond, and enjoy the measured murmur of the waterfall caressing the harsh rock with its pearl jets. It doesn't matter at all that the trees, the pond, the waterfall, and the rock are tiny, but they are real. Relax, enjoy, contemplate, and soon you will feel that your thoughts are far from everyday fuss.

Japanese paintings are unusual. "The pine needle civilization" is the name of the culture of the Japanese because of their admiration for the details of plants or flowers. "The blank spaces on the scroll are more meaningful than what the brush scribbled." The Japanese will never hang more than one picture, it's like listening to two tunes at the same time.

The art of arranging flowers in vases - ikebana, or ikebana ("the life of flowers") - goes back to the ancient custom of laying flowers on the altar of a deity, which spread in Japan along with Buddhism in the 6th century. Most often, the composition in the style of that time - rikka ("set flowers") - consisted of a branch of pine or cypress and lotuses, roses, daffodils set in ancient bronze vessels. The artist's task is not only to create a beautiful composition, but also to fully convey in it his own thoughts about a person's life and his place in the world. Traditionally, the season is necessarily reproduced in ikebana, and the combination of plants forms symbolic well-known wishes in Japan: pine and rose - longevity; peony and bamboo - prosperity and peace; chrysanthemum and orchid - joy; magnolia - spiritual purity.

The result of our labors is a wonderful bedroom - the most beloved room in the apartment. The mattress from the double bed was covered with a knitted sheet-cover and placed on the floor. True, we did not dare to use a wooden headrest, I confess. But instead of a bedside table, two low tables appeared, made by my husband himself - on each table there are 4 wooden lattices, fastened together and put on wheels.

A bonsai, clay figurines of oriental gods and a few flat seating cushions - almost a dzabuton - settled in a corner of the room.

Real Japanese things are very expensive. Therefore, lacquered cabinets and an elegant screen remain my dream. But my husband gave me a varigo and hasi and a set for making sushi. Now from time to time we arrange modest sushi gatherings in our corner, fenced off from the modern noisy and bustling world, read the great Basho and try to grow bamboo despite the assurances of florists that this is impossible.