Interior decoration in Japan was much influenced by Chinese ideas, especially between the 8th and 12th centuries, but it developed along lighter, more austere and elegant lines. It has altered little since medieval days. The most important differences in modern design are that the matting has been extended to cover the whole of the wooden floor, and sliding doors have replaced single-leaf screens or curtains. Two sides of a Japanese house frequently have no permanent walls, and interior partitions are of paper on a wood frame which admits a soft, diffused light. These partitions are usually moveable, allowing the interior to be rearranged.
The Japanese interior is a carefully thought-out arrangement. Wall decoration hardly exists, and the walls provide a neutral background for the rest. Since the Japanese invariably cover their floors with rice-straw mats and sit on them instead of on chairs, tables are low and are also used as an armrest. Tiers of shelves are common, usually covered with lacquer, and painted decoratively. They occur in a variety of forms, and the asymmetrical quality of Japanese art may be seen in these pieces of furniture, the number and position of the shelves differing on either side, and set at different heights.
In contrast to Western practice, the Japanese do not decorate their rooms with several works of art, but have a special place in the room, a focal point, at which one work of quality is displayed, and this is changed from time to time. Both the Chinese and the Japanese venerate the work of former times, and the Japanese possess the oldest art collection in the world, in the Shōsō Repository at Nara, which was formed in the 9th century ce.
At that time, doors were pivoted in the Chinese manner, and instead of the sliding shōji, windows were made of wooden latticing that pushed outward, as may still be seen in shrines and temples. There was a curtained dais for the most important person and separate mats on the wooden floor for others. Then, as now, there was a connecting corridor outside the rooms. The Seiryo-den, or ordinary residence of the sovereign in the Kyōto Imperial Palace, belonged to this period and was reconstructed in the 19th century on the model of the original. A present-day family could live quite comfortably in its simple suite of rooms with walls and standing screens decorated with pictures in the Chinese classic manner.
Late in the 15th century the interior began to assume its present form as a result of a slow blending of the older court style with the more austere type of house favoured by the military caste, which was much influenced by Zen Buddhist architecture. Toward the end of the 16th century came the rise of the tea masters. These connoisseurs of the “way of tea,” which involves the construction of the tearoom and its garden and correct deportment in them, established hereditary families and schools who remained the aesthetic advisers on most aspects of domestic architecture, interior decoration, and garden planning. They aimed to achieve beauty with frugality, asymmetry, and economy of movement, and much of the simple grace of Japanese interiors is due to them.
In a modern Japanese house built in traditional style, decoration is almost entirely structural, and the residences of all classes are equally neat and free from vulgarity. Their harmony and delicacy derive from an endless variation of detail in a setting that is completely standardized. Ordinary rooms are reckoned in terms of multiples of the floor-mat unit, 6 × 3 feet (1.8 metres × 0.9 metre); the sliding doors 5 feet 8 inches (1.7 metres) high by 3 feet (0.9 metre) wide; the supporting pillars 4–5 inches (10–13 cm) square, set at 6-foot (1.8-metre) intervals; and the ceiling boards 1–1.5 feet (30–45 cm) wide. All woodwork is unpainted and rarely lacquered, but there is great variety in the fusuma, or sliding doors, which divide the rooms and which are covered with paper of many patterns or decorated with paintings or calligraphy. Thus, the whole side of a room may present a landscape either in black and white or in colours, often on a silver or gold background. A change of these fusuma will alter completely the appearance of a room, and their removal will convert two or more rooms into one. All rooms can be used as bedrooms, since the bedding is stored in spacious cupboards. The reception rooms provide more scope for decoration than the others, for one end of the room is occupied by a tokonoma, an alcove with a canopy above it supported by a pillar of fine or uncommon wood, in which is hung the picture or set of pictures that, with the flower arrangement that usually accompanies it, is the only ornament. Both are changed frequently according to the season or mood. Next to the tokonoma, there is often a built-in writing table. Beside this is usually a chigai-dana, an asymmetric arrangement of cupboards and shelves somewhat like a sideboard. Between the top of the fusuma and the ceiling is often a ramma, an openwork frieze carved with patterns or landscapes in wood or bamboo. A framed tablet with a poem or painting on it sometimes may be placed there. Other walls are of plain plaster in subdued shades, mostly of gray or brown. The ceilings are usually of thin boards, slightly overlapping, upheld by bars about an inch (3 cm) square, the whole suspended from the roof or floor beams. In large apartments, as in shrines and temples, the coved and coffered “Chinese ceiling,” with lacquered woodwork and pictures and patterns in the coffers, is sometimes found. Fancy varieties made of bamboo and reeds and plaited wood are not uncommon. Bamboo has many uses in the Japanese house as pillars and window bars and ceiling material, when split and flattened, it may take the place of boards. Windows are of many shapes—round, square, bell-shaped, jar-shaped, gourd-shaped, diamond-shaped, fan-shaped, and purely asymmetric—and make centres of interest in a blank wall.
The furniture in a traditional Japanese house is sparse, perhaps consisting of a cabinet of blackwood or lacquer, a low writing table or a screen, either twofold or sixfold (the latter generally in pairs), decorated with landscapes on a gold or silver background and mounted in brocade. A single-leaf screen sometimes stands in the entrance hall. Among the well-to-do, other valuables such as scroll pictures, charcoal braziers, articles of pottery, spare fusuma, books, and curios are kept in a detached fireproof storehouse and produced only occasionally to ensure a constant variety in the rooms. It is a principle that rooms that are only occasionally occupied may be more showy and fanciful than ordinary living rooms, and these are most often met with in hotels and restaurants and other places of entertainment. Just as much care is taken with the interiors of the bathroom as with the other rooms, and the doors and windows and walls of these are usually of excellent workmanship.
