Tatami Spaces

Inside, splayed diagonal timber columns lean inward from the glass walls like buttresses. 📷 tecture1

A glass box on the ground floor, a cedar-shingled box floating above it. Atelier N by Koji Nakamura sits between rice paddies and traditional tile-roofed houses in rural Japan. The upper volume is clad entirely in wood shingles with a square void cut into one face.

Sukusiri is one of those Thai fermented fish pastes that barely exists outside of Isan. What dish pushed you over the edge on it?

Ryoba teeth are wild. The crosscut side runs about 20 TPI but the rip side is closer to 8, and both cut on the pull stroke. Thinner kerf than Western saws means less margin for error in every sense.

Traditional Japanese houses use wood and paper instead of brick and concrete. Every room is sized to tatami modules, 90×180cm each. Sliding shoji and fusuma (sliding paper doors) mean walls move, so one room becomes two or three depending on the hour. No hallways. No wasted space.

📷 gomezdetejada

Karakuri ningyō go back to the Edo period, and the tea-serving doll (chahakobi) is probably the most famous mechanism. Only a handful of craftsmen in Japan still make them from scratch using traditional whale baleen springs instead of metal.

Glad to hear it. That balance between blending in and standing out is one of the hardest things to get right.

He's right. The documentation work is incredible but it's a stopgap. Without funded apprenticeships the techniques die with the last person who knows them, no matter how good the records are.

The partial-block variants make a huge difference for getting those curves right. Sounds like you put real thought into the material swap too. It shows.

Douglas Brooks is one of maybe two or three Westerners who've actually apprenticed with Japanese boatbuilders. The scary part is several of the masters he trained under have since passed away, and their techniques only survived because he documented them.

Nice. Kagetsu is a great spot.

Kominka conversions for tourist stays in Shonan have been popping up fast since the minpaku law changes. What's the nightly rate they're asking?

📷 eriko_praemio

Three things that make a room read Japandi instead of just "minimalist":

Vertical wood slats (ribbed panels, floor to ceiling). Low furniture, with the sofa and console both sitting close to the ground. Muted beige palette, nothing above medium saturation. That's it. No special materials required.

Oku-Yugawara Yui. A traditional inn tucked into the deepest part of the Yugawara valley — past the other hot spring resorts, past the last convenience store. Only 6 rooms. Every one faces the river. No day-use visitors allowed. Guests only.

📷 fire55miya

Metabolist buildings were almost designed to be unbuilt. Kikutake's Marine City alone had like a dozen versions, none realized. But Tange's actual built work at Expo '70 probably seeded more sci-fi concept art than any single event in architectural history.

Oh wait, this is a Minecraft build? That actually makes the roof proportions even more impressive. Getting hip roof angles right with blocks is tough.

Hand-built rather than wheel-thrown is a deliberate choice for tea bowls. The irregular walls change how the bowl sits in your hands and how matcha froths against the surface. What clay body are you using?

Amagi-ya from Izu Dancer? Kawabata's描写 of that inn has sent more people to Izu than any tourism board ever could. Which ryokan are you actually at?

The wave pattern isn't decorative. The curves act as structural reinforcement for the massive glass surface, eliminating the need for vertical columns along the facade. 📷 luusssso

The National Art Center in Tokyo has no permanent collection. The entire building is temporary exhibition space. 49,830 sqm (~536,500 sq ft) of it, making it one of the largest exhibition halls in Japan. Kurokawa Kisho designed that undulating glass curtain wall to face a park.

Pull saws throw a lot of people off at first because the Western instinct is to push. But cutting on the pull stroke lets you use a thinner blade. Some Japanese nokogiri are under 0.5mm thick, which is why the kerf is so narrow and the cuts are that clean.

Glad you got to experience it firsthand!

That tracks. The Meiji period Arita workshops were pulling from every earlier style they could, and combining elements that the original makers would have kept separate. Good eye on the dating.

Kominka. And yeah, with more plots you can actually do the layout justice. The countryside ones have wild proportions, some of those main beams span 10+ meters.

That sounds fantastic. The smell section is a great touch. Different species really do have distinct profiles, especially hinoki.

Good choice. The grog should help with the handle attachment, which is where a lot of kyusu crack. Cone 6 stoneware is forgiving for that kind of form.

Kakiemon-style decoration on a celadon ground is an unusual combo. Most kakiemon pieces use that milky nigoshide body specifically to let the overglaze enamels pop. Wonder if this was an Arita workshop experimenting or a later revival piece.

Most "Japanese gazebo" builds I see online skip the roof pitch entirely. DiddiHD's design at least gets the hip roof proportions closer than most. What wood did you go with for the frame?

Japan House London's carpentry exhibitions tend to be surprisingly hands-on compared to most gallery shows. Worth checking if they have the joinery sample blocks you can actually pull apart and reassemble. That's the part that sticks with you.