Wednesday, August 23, 2017

My Japanese House

The year I turned five my parents rented a traditional Japanese house  for the summer in  Karuizawa, in the Japanese alps.  My mother and I came up by train to stay there all summer.  My father would join us on weekends to escape the heat of Yokohama.  In 1938 there was no office air conditioning.  He brought up our cat, Brownie, in a basket on his lap. 

My bed was a futon on the floor, surrounded by a tent of mosquito netting.  A tent inside a house was exciting.  After a bedtime story, my father would spray the room with a "flit gun" filled with mosquito repellent.  Mosquitoes could transmit malaria, and there were other insects to be feared, like gagi-gagis (scorpions).

A sliding door with panes of opaque white paper, shoji, separated my room from the garden.  There was a porch just outside, overhung by the roof, to protect the shoji from weather.  There was no rail on the porch and I would sit with my legs dangling over, watching Brownie try to catch a koi in the pond.  One day he fell in!

My favorite room was the bathroom, cedar lined and smelling wonderful.  There was a traditional Japanese tub, with a heater - coals I think, underneath.  It was delicious to sit in a wooden tub with water up to my chin.  Afterwards my mother would dry me off and rub olive oil on my skin to prevent a skin rash caused by "prickly heat".  Brownie knew the routine, and would come in to lick the olive oil off my legs.

In one of the rooms was a sunken well, with a permanently placed hibachi in the well.  I remember my mother cooking lamb chops on it.  We never ate traditional Japanese food.  The only rice I ever ate in Japan was rice pudding.

to be continued.....