thenewhomestead

though we have ever so many, i thought i'd just put up a very few of the pictures of our little house here in Nagoya, which is actually 名古屋 if you speak Japanese. it's got two bedrooms and comprises the bottom floor of a two or three storey building, and, like all else in Japan, is very narrow and quite deep--a "shotgun" apartment as Jill likes to call it. this means that there is one sort of hallway that goes front to back and all the rooms are arranged on one side or the other of that. what you see in the picture below is actually about the whole width of the place:

the front door of our little homestead, which is actually quite Western in many ways, like the mailbox, for example. please don't fail to note the rather attractive motorbike in the foreground...

inside, our house is cozy, but quite spacious by Japanese standards. i'm told that many young salarymen live in apartments with nothing more than a bed and a toilet, owing to the handy profusion of restaurants and public baths, or onsen. like most Asian kitchens, ours is far too small to be very useful, so we've put a little barbecue grill on the porch, but our bathing facilities are second to none. first of all, the toilet itself is kept in its own room, which is a wonderful idea and only lamentable for the fact that that room is right next to the kitchen. and the toilet is sadly lacking one of those amazing Japanese bidet toilet seats, which are as cool as they seem and maybe even more, by the way.

but the bathroom--which really is that, a room for a bath--is where it's at. you probably won't be able to get the full sense from the picture, but the tub itself is huge, and very deep. the little box on the wall behind it lets you set the temperature and then with one touch fill the tub to a preselected volume. another button will heat the water back up if it starts to cool, though there are covers for the tub to keep the heat in if you want to pre-fill the tub. the rest of the room is watertight when the door is closed, so the shower, which has excellent pressure and is detachable from the wall, can be used to devastating effect--for the dirt. you may be thinking to yourself that the mirror on the back wall is too low to be of any use to man or even very short man; this is a clever observation but know that it is positioned in this way so that the Japanese bather may, while his bath is running itself, seat himself on a stool and actually do the washing of himself in front of the mirror before showering off and soaking, clean, in the tub. this is the preferred method of bathing here, and is either a symptom or a cause of the endless fascination with cleanliness. in either case, behold my amazing bathroom:

thebathroom, quite literally. the little control box even talks to you to let you know its plan, though it's all in Japanese. below, the noren that neatly conceal our little laundry and sink area.



just outside the bathroom is a small area with our washer and quaintly named "dryer", which is actually more of a spinning heater. we also have a little sink there, neatly recessed into the wall, but altogether this room comprises the ugly bits of our house. for this reason, it is sectioned off using noren, short, sectioned curtains that historically have been used to indicate shopfronts, and in many cases bear the marks or symbols of the particular establishment. even today, they are put up over the door of many small shops at the start of business and then removed at the end of the day. the ones that hung when we moved in were a bit dull, so we updated with the noren pictured above, which we bought in Kyoto and depict Mt Fuji under a tsunami--a famous work by the very famous Japanese artist Hokusai.

so that's about it. we use one of our bedrooms as an office of sorts, and the other we use as a bedroom. because even though they don't do it on mattresses per se, the Japanese do sleep.