Nowadays, Western style furniture, such as beds, tables, sofas and chairs, can be found in most of the Japanese households. But it does not mean that the traditional Japanese household has disappeared. The rooms with Western style furniture are called “youshitsu” which means “Western-style room”, while those with tatami floors are called “washitsu”. If you’re going to visit Japan soon, you’ll also be able to find Tokyo serviced apartments in both western and Japanese styles.
The typical Japanese accommodation is “ikenya” which is always a two or three-storied solitary house. Most of the “ikenya” come with both Western-style room and tatami floor rooms. Tatami mats are made of straw and measure roughly 180 cm x 90 cm. You should always take off your slippers when walking into tatami floor rooms in order to protect them from damage. The tatami floor is good for health because it can absorb the moisture in air and keep the room dry.
Traditional tatami rooms have an alcove (tokonoma) in which a hanging scroll (kakejiku) and a flower arrangement (ikebana) or piece of pottery is displayed. The room entrances are sliding paper doors (fusuma) and sliding paper screens (shoji), which can be removed completely.
In Japan earthquakes are happening with increasing frequency so that the closet in Japanese house (oshiire) are big enough that can be embedded in the room. And there is not a lot of movable furniture for safe. Japan has a long history of woodworking in both architecture and furniture making. Among the best-known types of Japanese furniture is the tansu. Tansu are wooden boxes, chests and cabinets, which composed of an often-asymmetrical combination of sliding doors and pullout drawers, and are usually fitted with iron handles and hardware.
Japanese do not measure the room with square meters but LDK, jou (1 jou = 1.525㎡). LDK is an abbreviation frequently used in the world of Japanese real estate to describe apartments. It stands for Living, Dining and Kitchen area, and is preceded by the number of rooms. Some examples are:
- 1K= one room apartment with kitchen
- 1DK= one room apartment with dining and kitchen area
- 1LDK= one room apartment with a living, dining and kitchen area
In addition, most apartments come with a bathroom, a toilet room and an entrance area (genkan) where the shoes are taken off. The main purpose of taking a bath, besides cleaning your body, is relaxation at the end of the day. The typical Japanese bathroom consists of two rooms, an entrance room where you undress and which is equipped with a sink, and the actual bathroom, which is equipped with a shower and a deep bathtub. The toilet is almost always located in an entirely separate room. When bathing Japanese style, you are supposed to first rinse your body outside the bathtub with a washbowl. Afterwards, you enter the tub, which is used for soaking only. The bath water tends to be relatively hot for Western bathing standards. After soaking, leave the tub and clean your body with soap. Make sure that no soap gets into the bathing water. Once you finished cleaning and have rinsed all the soap off your body, enter the bathtub once more for a final soaking. After leaving the tub, the water is usually left for the next member of the house. It is to keep the bath water clean for all members of the house that washing and rinsing is done outside of the actual bathtub.
