Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 2.djvu/89

 extensive impetus to the manufacture of tiles. In the better class of house the roof-boards were held in place by girders, but humble folk used logs of timber or stones to prevent wind-stripping, and these weights imparted an untidy, rude appearance to the structure.

The "hall of the origin" (gen-kwan) served a new purpose, and underwent a corresponding modification towards the close of the fourteenth century. It has been stated that in Kyōtō the guards of a mansion were usually quartered in a back-room, whereas in provincial military mansions they occupied barracks on either side of the inner gate, which the samurai, in their zeal for the Zen doctrines, called the gen-kwan. The Kyōtō nobles, in the Muromachi epoch, finding it expedient to have guards close to the entrance, enlarged the vestibule of the main building so that it became a "spacious chamber," and, by a process of derivation at once apparent, gave the name gen-kwan to the vestibule of this chamber. Thus was reached the final form of the aristocratic mansion,—a double vestibule (gen-kwan), the larger section being for the ingress and egress of the master of the house and his guests; the smaller for that of the womankind, the soldiers, and the servants, and a hall (hiroma), around which, as well as in the vestibule, weapons of various kinds were ranged in upright racks.

In the same epoch (Muromachi), when the tea ceremony, which will be spoken of presently, had