Floor culture / chair ?

[Sapporo Ichiban]

Does anyone know why Japan retained their floor culture for so long? From what I've read online, the Chinese learned to appreciate chairs around the time of the Song dynasty. I can guess and maybe partially understand why Koreans kept their floor culture as, historically, floors were heated from underneath. But I don't believe the Japanese used this kind of heating system.

[Bruce Mitchell]

One gues is that the Tokugawa Shogunate had strict controls in place around the use of timber. Japan realized early on that it's resources were limited and households were restricted based on, I believe class, as to how much wood they could use in the construction of their homes. Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" has a chapter on this. Besides, what they had worked, no real need to fix it.

[Sapporo Ichiban]

Hi Bruce:

I didn't know about the Tokugawa lumbar restrictions. Very interesting. When this question first crossed my mind I also thought along the lines of 'why change' and 'tradition' (when in doubt, yell 'tradition' real loud :) ). But, currently, floor culture is dying in Japan and I don't see why it would change now in the modern age and not earlier. Chairs and stools are clearly more comfortable. That would have been equally true in the past as well as the present.

I did know that Japan has always been resource poor. Someone else had mentioned to me that the practice of eating sushi and the clean minimalist style associated with Japan isn't really a 'style' but rather an outgrowth of poverty. Of course, that comment was from a friend who is rabidly anti-Japanese. Besides which . . . unless you are starving to death, a stool isn't very expensive.

I also read somewhere that the poor standards of housing construction was due to earthquakes and fires. If you use stone to build you'd get crushed. If you use wood you'll just have to build it again anyway so make it as cheap and as sparse as possible. I find that explanation more plausible. And that might apply to furniture as well. But, even so, I'd still have thought the Japanese would have switched to chairs a long time ago . . .

[MikeWilliams]

I didn't know about the Tokugawa lumbar restrictions. Very interesting.

Yep, lumbar restrictions might well explain why they found the floor more comfy than chairs.

:D

(sorry, couldn't resist)

[Bruce Mitchell]

Hi Bruce:
...But, currently, floor culture is dying in Japan and I don't see why it would change now in the modern age and not earlier... But, even so, I'd still have thought the Japanese would have switched to chairs a long time ago . . .

My guess would be that floor culture started dying in the late 1800's when Japan started to adopt Western Culture. But the country didn't really achieve finacial solvency until after the war, so my guess is that the change started quite some time ago, but it is only more recently, i.e. the last 50 years, that it has reached a national level. It is also far easier (and cheaper!) to import goods from overseas (read China). I see this in naginata in that most if not all of the wooden and bamboo weapons these days are being produced in China.

[Sapporo Ichiban]

Mike:

When I try to be funny, there's not a giggle to be found. When I try to be serious, suddenly I'm pretty funny. Lumbar. Oy. :)


Bruce:

Thanks again,
Richard.

[Sukeyasu]

One also has to consider that traditional Japanese houses do not have much in the way of ANY furniture of size. Large furnishings were built into the existing structure of the house to allow flexibility in using the (limited) floor space for immediate needs. A room could serve equally as a working space, a place for meals, or a bedroom depending on the items in use. As any modest house would have fewer than three or four rooms, tables and chairs would only serve to occupy valuable space. Remember, until the modern era the Japanese didn't even eat on tables; one's bowls were placed on a small tray on the floor, or if the person was more affluent he used a zen. Both were easily housed in closet space.

In further illustration, I remember visiting an Edo-period house where a piece of the flooring could be removed to allow one to stand indoors with a long bow and practice archery by firing into the back garden. This way of utilizing space was apparently unique to Japanese design, and quite different from Western or Chinese approaches that gave the individual rooms of a house a set function (excepting, of course, one-room cabins of the type Honest Abe was born in, but I hope we can exclude frontiersmen from the present discussion).

In the case of China, too, an argument could probably be made that relative to Japan the country's much longer experience with urbanization was what led to an earlier development of the chair. Perhaps tellingly, urban culture in China flowered during the Song Dynasty; whereas proper cities didn't develop in Japan until the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Before then, the only sizeable population center in Japan was Kyoto, which was little more than a collection of noble estates. It was the establishment of the great castle towns that led to the rise of the chomin class, and that was still a small percentage of the population. The question becomes, how much time does a largely agricultural society actually spend inside the home and how does that affect their concerns for domestic "comfort?" I think the answer is clear.

[Sapporo Ichiban]

Ben, thanks very much. I guess my thoughts were being colored by the Tokugawa era where a decent percentage of the population was samurai (~ 8% ?) and the merchant class was more developed. I had just assumed that the ratio of farmer:merchant:upperclass was approximately the same throughout these time periods.

Thanks again,
Richard.

[Bruce Mitchell]

The question becomes, how much time does a largely agricultural society actually spend inside the home and how does that affect their concerns for domestic "comfort?" I think the answer is clear.

The question that this raises is why then did Western/other Eastern agricultural societies adopt the use of chairs centuries before Japan? The more I think about it the more I am convinced that the answer to why Japan retained their floor culture for so long is cultural choice rather than enviornmental or economic factors. The Japanese would have seen chairs in their journeys to China, and the definetly had the resources and abilities required to make chairs. I for one am definetely going to do some more research to see if anyone has written about this.

[Brian Owens]

...the answer to why Japan retained their floor culture for so long is cultural choice rather than enviornmental or economic factors. The Japanese would have seen chairs in their journeys to China, and the definetly had the resources and abilities required to make chairs. I for one am definetely going to do some more research to see if anyone has written about this.
I agree. Many Japanese would have seen the chairs brought and built by the Dutch and Portugese, ones from China, etc. So it wasn't a lack of knowledge of chairs.

I think it relates to the way that many aspects of Japanese life were colored by concepts of kata: highly structured ways of doing everything from martial arts to flower arranging, following strictly the forms followed by those who went before. So the attitude may very well have been on of "sitting on the floor was good enough for grandma, so it's good enough for me," mixed with a dose of "sitting on chairs is so 'foreign.' It's simply not our way."

Of course, chairs did exist in Japan, even from the early days, but were more limited in use than in the west. There were various types of chairs and stools used in the house, on verandas, in camps, etc., but compared to other countries, Japan certainly did -- and still does -- hold on to sitting on the floor as a firm part of its cultural heritage.

[Sukeyasu]

"The question that this raises is why then did Western/other Eastern agricultural societies adopt the use of chairs centuries before Japan?"

You're right; that is a pertinent question. As an answer, I would say that the widespread use of the chair in the West was really a vestige of earlier Greek and Roman culture. Needless to say, these societies produced large, complex cities like those of Song China, where once more we see the chair coming into use.

Honestly, given another couple of centuries I think the Japanese would have independently adopted the chair. But again, this would have required a fundamental change in the architecture of the Japanese house--not just out of concern for space, which I mentioned above, but also for aesthetic reasons. Having lived in a traditional Japanese house, I can say first hand that sitting above the floor doesn't work. First, a ten foot ceiling as seen from the floor just isn't so high when the vantage point is raised to that of a person seated in a chair. Second, and more importantly, Japanese houses are unusually dark at such heights. Think about the windows in a common Western house; they are most often placed at a level extending from the chest to well above the head (of a standing person) because they are meant to catch the light from the sun overhead. Traditional Japanese houses are different. Their "windows" start at the floor and end at head height. This is done to allow in sunlight diffused from below because the cover provided by the Japanese house's eaves doesn't make it possible for it to receive light in the same way that a Western house does. As a result, the area just above the floor is the most well illuminated.

If the Japanese were to have started using high chairs and tables, their houses' eaves would have to have been pulled back, the ranma stripped away, and the windows positioned higher up in their walls; which, by the way, is exactly what we see in Ming Chinese architecture. It was a much easier choice to keep things as they were and stick to the floor.

[James R. Finley]

I wonder if the fact that many Japanese homes have/had tatami made a difference? When I lived in Japan, my rented house had tatami and I never used a chair partly out of fear that I would damage the tatami (and not get my security deposit back). I honestly have no idea if this is/was a factor and I have no knowledge of Japanese architectural history so take this as just thinking out loud a bit. It is a fascinating topic though. James.