Japan Traditional House

Beautiful of Japan.
Traditional Japanese homes are made of wood and supported by wooden pillars, but today's homes usually have Western-style rooms with wooden flooring and are often constructed with steel pillars. More and more families in urban areas, moreover, live in large, ferroconcrete apartment buildings.

Two big differences from Western homes are that shoes are not worn inside the house and that at least one room tends to be designed in the Japanese style with a tatami floor. Shoes are taken off when entering a house to keep the floor clean. The genkan, or entrance, serves as a place for removing, storing, and putting on shoes. People tend to put on slippers for indoor use as soon as they have taken off their shoes.

Tatami are mats made of a thick base of rushes and have been used in Japanese homes since about 600 years ago. A single tatami usually measures 1.91 by 0.95 meters, and room sizes are often measured in terms of the number of tatami mats. A tatami floor is cool in the summer and warm in the winter, and remains fresher than carpet during Japan's humid months.
- Awesome photo photographed by KOWA SHIMADA