Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/310

 sides. This kind of alcove is still seen in many Japanese houses. It has undergone no change for six centuries.  —It should be explained, perhaps, that the description given in a previous chapter of the suites of rooms and their intercommunications in the mansion of a prince or high dignitary of State holds equally for this epoch. But the division of interior spaces is now planned on a much more elaborate scale, owing to the improved lighting facilities afforded by paper doors. The decorator soon appreciated and applied the principle of congruity in choosing his motives, and thus each room had its own distinguishing pictorial subjects, from which, also, it ultimately derived its name, being spoken of as the "wistaria chamber," the "chamber of the eight scenic gems," the "crane-and-tortoise chamber," and so on. In the houses of military men some of the rooms owed their appellations to the weapons placed in the immediate vicinity of their entrances, as the "bow room," or the "spear room." But such terms found no place in the nomenclature of the "illustrious mansions."  —These precautions succeeded well, on the whole. After an area had been swept by a conflagration, the fire-proof storerooms usually remained standing intact among the ruins. But the cost of such edifices being large, many folks preferred an underground storeroom (tsuchi-kura), obviously a relic of the time when ordinary habitations were little better than caves. Pawnbrokers specially affected the latter kind of store, so that during the Military epoch the word "earthen edifice" (dozō) was usually interpreted in the sense of "pawnbroker."  —In 1576 Oda Nobunaga built at Azuchi in Omi a castle with a donjon said to have been one hundred feet high. But as there are no remains of that stronghold to-day, and as history contains no exact details of its construction, Hideyoshi's castle at Osaka is taken as the first complete example of such structures in Japan.  —The glyptic work on this gate has been persistently attributed to Hidari Jingoro, one of the greatest carvers of Japan. Jingoro was born in 1574, and the gate was erected in the Momoyama Palace in 1585. Obviously Jingoro had nothing to do with it. 