At home in Japan, part 1: Home is where the shrine is?

I hope I’m not just romanticizing, but I’ve come to the conclusion that ‘home’ usually means a bit more here than it does in the U.S. Or let’s say, something more specific. In America we sometimes talk about homes as commodities; real estate agents trade in them.  And while some of us do have traditions we attach to our homes, there just aren’t as many traditions regarding home as there are in Japan.

The Yoshimatsu family shrine.

To put it simply, home is where the shrine is.  And altar.  And tatami. 

Japanese homes (like some public buildings) have a hierarchy of rooms.  The entryway is where you leave your shoes (always neatly lined up and pointed out) at the genkan, or boundary, where you put on your slippers (which are always neatly lines up and pointed in).  You usually wear slippers around the house, except in tatami rooms, where you take off your slippers.  (The family altar and shrine are always in the nicest tatami room.)  But in the toilet you usually switch to a special pair of toilet slippers. I was also told that Japanese farmhouse kitchens used to have dirt floors (some older ones still do) where people would wear shoes and boots they’d take off before entering the rest of the house. 

The Yoshimatsu family altar

Just as there is a hierarchy of rooms, there can also be a hierarchy of footwear. There are older houses whose piecemeal augmentation over a number of decades necessitates the donning and shedding of various ranks of slippers depending on where in the house one goes.  This can make running through the house very complicated and difficult. And for someone with size 12 feet in a size 8 country, uncomfortable as well.

What I know about Japanese homes, aside from what I’ve read, comes from the three homestays I’ve had during my two trips to Japan.  My first homestay on this trip  was in Obu, a “suburb”  (though not the kind of place to which you could attach the word ‘leafy’) of bustling, workaday Nagoya; my second was in Arida, a small-ish (i.e., by Japanese standards) town in hilly, rural-ish Wakayama on the Kii peninsula, which is on the southern side of Honshu.

Two-year-old Yue Momosawa knows what to do when she enters the house.

I loved my first homestay family, the Momosawas.  They were warm and welcoming and generous, but they didn’t always fit my preconceived notions of what a Japanese family is like, many of which were formed by my first homestay 11 years earlier.  They didn’t have an altar or shrine, they slept on Western-style beds, they seemed to use their tatami rooms for storage, they didn’t use bathroom slippers, they didn’t seem to take traditional Japanese baths, and I didn’t see a low table in the house.  Of course, they didn’t wear their shoes in the house; Tetsuya, the husband did eat natto, that much-maligned concoction of fermented soybeans; and they did start meals with “itadakimas” and ended with “gochisosoma.”  But I got the feeling that some aspects of their lives were evidence of the creeping Westernization I’d seen all over Japan. This may be partly due to the fact that Rina, the mother, is half Chinese and lived in Shanghai until she was 12. Or it may be partly due to the fact that they both work long hours for an arm of the Toyota corporation in Nagoya, and with all the commuting and working and childcare, they’re freaking exhausted.

I had a great time with the warm, generous Momosawas.  But it wasn’t until my second homestay that I fully appreciated how untraditional they were.