I’ve heard Italians who have visited Japan countless times on business say that they would love to see inside a Japanese home—even just once. They can somewhat get an idea of how everyday Japanese live from staying at hotels or inns, but I sometimes wonder what foreigners who have never seen Japanese life imagine it to be. Maybe they picture us walking around in kimono all the time arranging flowers, preparing tea… the men wearing hakama and sitting on tatami mats like samurai, maybe?
Now that I think about it I also find myself glancing into the windows of people’s homes while I’m traveling in foreign countries, trying to imagine what life is like for the people there.
One of the most interesting ways of living I’ve experienced was in Paris. I visited a friend who was living in an ancient apartment building with just a tiny door leading in from the street. Once you were inside, you traveled through a narrow hallway until you came to a spiral staircase leading up to their flat. The staircase itself was so narrow, tilted, and warped that you had to contort your body and watch your balance to get up there. You then found yourself at the door with no landing whatsoever. Clearly it was built before the city had fire codes!
I had another interesting experience when I visited a friend in Venice. Almost all of the buildings in Venice get flooded when there’s a storm tide, so typically people can’t live on the ground floor. You can’t drive cars into the city, either, so it’s terribly inconvenient to move—though not impossible to do it by boat. Plus (partially to preserve the historical streetscapes), building new structures is no easy task, either. But if someone were completely strapped for cash, would they then have no choice but to consider living on a ground floor? You’d constantly be in fear of high tide… or waking up in the middle of the night with your bed floating along with the tide. Crazy!
In Milan, there are some old stone buildings that retain the specter of the era of Austrian control—imposing structures from the Fascist era—mixed in with modern buildings that were recently constructed. One of the distinctive features of the old buildings is how high the ceilings are. They’re so expensive to heat in the winter that people have to make sure that the apartments have central heating before they rent or buy them.
Recent residential laws require a space between the bathroom and other rooms in the house (kind of like a landing) that is separated by doors on both sides. Meaning that a typical Japanese one-room apartment floor plan is now an impossibility in Italy. Maybe it’s easier to picture if I say that there has to be one door to get into the bathroom, and another door to get into the other rooms in the house.
It seems ridiculous that people would chop up a living space with all these doors, and there are plenty of people who secretly remove them. Sometimes they’re arranged so that you can’t open the door to the next space if you leave the first door open, which means you have to keep repeatedly opening and closing them. A Japanese-style sliding door seems like it would be a great solution, but it’s taking the Italians forever to catch onto the idea—perhaps because people are quite free to put holes in the walls in rented houses to hang pictures or whatever and that makes it less possible to have such doors.
