How Japan Changes You
When you live in a place like Japan for long enough, it inevitably starts to change you. First it's the little things, like the inability to eat a meal without first saying "Itadakimasu!" (literally meaning "I am about to receive the gift of this food"), or politely turning your headlights down to "park" at intersections to keep from blinding the driver across from you. Before you know it you're bowing to people while talking on the phone, you can't remember your weight or shoe size as measured back home and you find yourself taking a long time to get to the point while talking to anyone. The other day my son asked me how they measure the area of rooms in America, and I vaguely recalled there being a something called "square feet" or "square meters" that I'd known about once. Japan, of course, uses that oh-so-traditional unit of measurement known as the tatami mat, and the size of a room is always expressed in how many tatami would fit inside, even if it's a traditional Western room with wooden flooring. A 6-jo (6-mat) room is a good sized space for one or two people to sleep in, while a 4 1/2 mat room (called yojo-han) is what the cramped rooms poor college students live in are called. After being here for so long I can perceive spaces in Japanese mats pretty accurately, but I have no idea how much 1200 square feet would be.
Tatami mats are used to specify room sizes in Japan.
posted by Peter in Japan at 8:33 PM
9 Comments:
living two years in London was not enough for me to be able to get a grasp of sq. feet, coming from a country using metric. Tatami are easier, as if you time the amount by two and subtract 10% you get the area in pretty accurate sq. meters. I guess one would get square feet by multiplying tatami by 18, so getting from sq. feet to tatami would probably be easiest done by dividing by 20 and then adding 10%
Not entirely accurate but about there.
12:38 AM
Yes. I know that our office in San Diego is a space that's 3000 sq. feet, since it was on the lease, but it's still hard to visualize ^_^
1:13 AM
"...politely turning your headlights down to "park" at intersections to keep from blinding the driver across from you."
That was one thing from Japan that I wouldn't mind implementing in some form in the U.S. Until I got my Blazer in 2000, I always shifted down to parking lights at the drive-thru simply because I liked the idea of not blinding the person in front of me. However with my Blazer, I don't get that option because Chevy felt that when it is night, headlights MUST be on no matter what. Therefor, once the car is in drive, you cannot turn out the headlight without turning off the car. *_*
1:36 AM
AstroNerdBoy, I believe you have the headlights in automatic mode. Most cars these days have three settings, park, headlights, and automatic. The last is for people like my dad, who doesn't want to be bothered with such irrelevant things as being able to see the road -__-
2:02 AM
I read somewhere that, in Scandanavia, all vehicles must burn headlights at all times, like motorcycles do here in America.
3:58 AM
Correct timo.
9:07 AM
sq feet is typically used to determine total size of a building. For room size you would just say it in feet, the master bedroom in my apartment is 12'x14'. I think it would be cool to tell someone my house size by telling them I can fit 50 mats in it!
My car, even if the headlight is in park, as soon as I shift out of park the normal lights kick in.
12:12 PM
I think it's easier to picture rooms in terms of how many mats fit in them rather than square meters/feet. I can't picture none, of course! But one thing I notice is that your perception of big/small changes through cultures. What's big here is medium in the US and huge in Japan...
12:54 PM
Joeblue is right -- in the U.S. we measure room size by the dimensions (L and W), such as 12' by 14'. Square feet is usually used for total area of the house or apartment. And by-the-way, Peter, I hope you haven't forgotten that in your home country a typical 1BR or studio apartment in urban areas is 1000 to 1200 sq ft (that's 92 to 111 sq meters -- huge in Japan). Personally, I wonder why so many Japanese in urban areas put up with being crammed into a 1K.
2:04 PM
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