Japanese Housing at Century's End

Only one of the rooms in Sasaki-san’s 4DK manshon in Tokyo Metropolitan Prefecture is Japanese in style, with tatami mats on the floor and thin sliding doors separating it from the rest of the dwelling. The other rooms are thoroughly western in their design and furnishings. This lopsided division between two radically different modes of living – one floor-sitting and the other chair-sitting – is pretty typical of urban Japan nowadays, and even in the countryside a decline in floor-sitting domestic architecture is underway, as older farmhouses are demolished and substantially western-style houses built (or assembled by the purveyors of manufactured housing) in their place.