Rokugan Local Governance:
The Samurai House
Individual homes for Samurai households vary widely. For ji-samurai and ronin families, they may be only a single room, but most clan samurai would have three to four rooms in their homes.
Samurai homes would more often have tile roofs compared to heimen roofs of rice thatch, but be built primarily of wood. Around them would be a small garden, and often a wall around the larger property, though it may not be high.
Below is a floorplan of a traditional village home.
Individual homes for Samurai households vary widely. For ji-samurai and ronin families, they may be only a single room, but most clan samurai would have three to four rooms in their homes.
Samurai homes would more often have tile roofs compared to heimen roofs of rice thatch, but be built primarily of wood. Around them would be a small garden, and often a wall around the larger property, though it may not be high.
Below is a floorplan of a traditional village home.
Some of the features of a traditional Samurai home would include:
- Shoji: Waxed paper screens that make up the exterior walls of the house, able to allow in light into the interior.
- Engawa: The covered pathway that surrounds the exterior of the home. When the storm shutters (Amado) are closed around the house, or during the winter, this pathway will be protected, a narrow corridor surrounding the inner rooms. When the storm shutters are open, this corridor is on the outside of the house, while the shoji are free to let in light.
- Amado: The storm shutters used to encase the house during storms or in the cold, made of heavy planks of wood.
- Fusuma: Sliding walls that act as walls and doors in the interior of the house. The interior configuration of the house is very customizable due to these screens.
- Tokonoma: An elevated area within a room to display a prized artwork or ikebana to greet guests at.
- Genkan: A lower area where one removes one's shoes as one enters the house.
- Tatami: The woven straw mats that cover the floors of a samurai's house.
- Chabudai: Low tables at which one kneels while eating in a samurai's house.
- Zanbuton: Thin pillows used to sit or kneel on tatami mat floors.
- Kamidana: A small household shrine to the Fortunes within the house.
- Ofuro: For those households large enough and with sufficient servants to supply the heated water, this is the bath for a household. One would always wash off thoroughly with buckets of water before entering the bath. Baths are usually wooden washtubs and are heated with buckets of hot water brought in from elsewhere in the house.
- Irori: A sunken hearth, often placed in the middle of a room, used to prepare food and heat the room. It is a stone lined square pit built into the center of a floor, often with a decorative hook above it from which a cooking pot may be hung.
- Byobu: Folding screens, used within a larger room for privacy.