Taguchi House

XXXXXXXXTatami mat
XXXXXXXXSix feet by three
XXXXThe length and breadth of a body
XXXXBuilding block of the residence
XXXXOn which the residents recline
XXXXUnit of its composition
Rationalisation of construction
Three-hundred years before modernism
XXXXPossibilities infinite
XXXXBy their arrangement limited
XXXXAt each change of scale remaining
XXXXProportionate to the building
XXXXXXXXEight to a room
XXXXXXXXWarp, weft, weave, loom.

XXXXXXXXLike the house shrine
XXXXXXXXEnd to end wide
XXXXSliding walls onto corridors
XXXXMicrocosm of changing world
XXXXDesign born of utility
XXXXArchitect of modernity
XXXXRaised on a pounded earthen floor
XXXXThree hearths covered by wooden doors
XXXXRoof of thatch or wooden shingles
XXXXBound with ropes of straw or willow
XXXXXXXXThresh on the floor
XXXXXXXXBeasts at the door
For kimono stitcher, silkworm breeder
Carpenter, roofer, woodcutter, weaver.

— Takayama, December 2024

• • • • •

For generations the Taguchi House was the home of the head of the village. Although the first floor was used for silk farming, the many rooms below accommodated meetings with other villagers. Originally built in 1808 on the southern edge of the Hilda region, it was one of the thirty traditional Japanese houses from the Edo Period (1603-1868) that were dismantled, moved to the foot of Mount Matsukara and reassembled to make up the Hida Folk Village, an open-air museum that opened to the public in 1971.

As a high-status residence, the Taguchi House had three hearths and an altar room (dei); but what caught our attention when we visited in December 2024 was that, beneath a roof of wooden shingles held down by stones, and reached by an earthen floor at the entrance (douji), a series of rooms were raised on a highly-polished wooden floor covering an irregular open area roughly 12 yards wide by 20 yards long. This could be subdivided by sliding doors, which were flush with the floor but aligned with downstand beams supported by columns, into three large rooms, two of which were square, each with a hearth. Beyond these were three smaller square rooms, with the remaining space composed of corridors, an altar room and two rectangular bedrooms (choda).

The dimensions of all these potential rooms was determined by the straw-woven Tatami mat which, at 6 feet long and 3 feet wide, is a rectangle composed of two squares. This rectangle is the shape on which the human body lies in sleep, reclines around a hearth or sits to eat at a low table. Its length determined the width of the corridors, which could be introduced both beside and between the smaller square rooms. Four of these mats, with two laid vertically side by side topped and tailed by two more laid horizontally, composed a bedroom. The same arrangement, bordered on both sides by two mats laid end to end, made a square of eight mats. The larger square rooms were three mats laid end-to-end on their sides (i.e. 18 feet), with the particular arrangement of the eighteen mats varying.

The mats were edged in black brocade on their long sides but not at their ends, creating the impression, when two were laid end to end, of a plane 3 feet wide by 12 feet long. This was important to the appearance of the smaller square rooms, which were the semantic equivalent of a sentence that, in the text of the house, could be extended by additional word-mats into a paragraph, but which remained its structural foundation. Eschewing a horizontal arrangement of eight mats in four rows of two, their concentric designs have the balance, tension and harmony of a Mondrian painting.

With a technology barely out of our Middle Ages, therefore, the Japanese had created an architecture (shoin-zukuri) founded on the design principles of what, three hundred years later, European architects would call ‘modernism’. Walter Gropius, one of the fathers of modernist architecture, wrote that, in the architecture of Japan, ‘symmetry, the symbol of perfection, was reserved for the temple’; while the home was part of ‘the fluid process of life’, unfinished, irregular, incomplete. This is a principle I have adopted in the different metrical feet of my lines, corresponding to the different configurations of the tatami mat, and the asymmetry between the two stanzas of my poem.