The first is that Japan is a home of earthquakes, and when an earthquake
starts to rock the land and topple the houses about the peoples' ears, then
a tall, strong house of stone or brick would be both dangerous in its fall
and very expensive to put up again. The second is that Japan is a land of
fires. The people are very careless. They use cheap lamps and still cheaper
petroleum. A lamp explodes or gets knocked over; the oiled paper walls
burst into a blaze; the blaze spreads right and left, and sweeps away a
few streets, or a suburb of a city, or a whole village. The Jap takes this
very calmly. He gets a few posts, puts the same tiles up again for a roof,
or makes a new thatch, and, with a few paper screens and shutters, there
stands his house again.

A house among the poorer sort of Japanese consists of one large room in the
daytime. At night it is formed into as many bedrooms as its owner requires.
Along the floor, which is raised about a foot from the ground, and along
the roof run a number of grooves, lengthways and crossways. Frames covered
with paper, called shoji, slide along these grooves and form the wall
between chamber and chamber. The front of the house is, as a rule, open to
the street, but if the owners wish for privacy they slide a paper screen
into position. At night wooden shutters, called amado, cover the screens.
Each shutter is held in place by the next, and the last shutter is fastened
by a wooden bolt.

The Japanese are very fond of fresh air and sunshine. Unless the day is too
wet or stormy, the front of the house always stands open. If the sun is
too strong a curtain is hung across for shade, and very often this curtain
bears a huge white symbol representing his name, just as an Englishman puts
his name on a brass plate on his front-door. The furniture in these houses
is very simple. The floor is covered with thick mats, which serve for