Very Very Uchi
Comments: 3
All of man’s troubles stem from his being unable to sit quietly alone in a room. —Blaise Pascal
I had a chance to wander around the Minami-Azabu area the other day between sessions of a photo shoot I was doing. I found this remarkable and apparently windowless house.
This house is very, very uchi. This is the house as inward-looking sanctum, as an island apart from the world.
There are two big, pervasive concepts in Japan known as uchi (内) and soto (外) — basically “inside” and “outside.” (Soto is also the “gai” of “gaijin” — foreigner, or “outside person.”) Beyond the literal sense of each word, you can use uchi to mean your house, your company, your family, your group. Uchi can also be used as a first-person pronoun as in “Uchi no kaisha” (“My company” or “Our company”). Soto can have vaguely negative connotations of not belonging or even rejection.
A great illustration of these concepts can actually be found in an unlikely source: John Ford’s The Searchers, starring John Wayne and Natalie Wood.
When we first see Wayne’s character returning from the war, he’s framed through the doorway of his brother’s house as he approaches. The solidity of the house and the idea of domesticity are presented in high relief against the harsh environment of the frontier. The house is nothing less than civilisation. Wayne’s sister-in-law welcomes him and immediately makes him remove his sword. Certain ideas, however noble or worthy, can’t be allowed inside.
An Indian raid on the house sends the family scurrying into a sort of underground bunker they’ve made, while the son and daughter (who will be abducted and grows up to become Natalie Wood; the son, being male, is killed) hide away from the house near the gravestones of pioneering ancestors. The Indians breach this bunker and kill the family (Wayne is off hunting or something). They are the dark, brute force of the land oblivious to the civilising distinctions of inside and outside.
Later, during a cavalry raid on an Indian encampment meant to recover the stolen girl, we see a soldier ride his horse right into a tipi. Ford gives us a kind of cross-section of the action — we see the rider enter the plane of the shot from a gaping tear in the side of the fabric. It’s an astonishingly powerful moment, Ford’s politics notwithstanding. It’s mirroring of the breaching of the family’s bunker in the first part of the movie evokes a sympathy I’m not sure we’re supposed to feel (it would be about the only moment of sympathy for native Americans in the entire picture) and the shot seems more a comment on the flimsiness of Indian ‘civilisation’ in the face of the manifest destiny and determination motivating the European newcomers.
Today we can see the Indians’ lack of uchi/soto divisions as symbolic of their closeness to nature, their realisation that they are an indivisible part of the whole fabric of being (to use an extremely clichéd shorthand), but I doubt this idea was uppermost or even present in Ford’s mind when he made the film. The savage pragmatism of Manifest Destiny had finished off what little was left of the Noble Savage almost a hundred years earlier.
But I digress.
In Japan, the divisions of inside and outside became bedrock social constructs, finding expression linguistically, architecturally, musically, academically — present, in fact, in almost every aspect of life. It may not be going too far to say that the concepts allow socialisation by describing the perimeters of interaction and possibility.
This house, with its fewest number of functioning windows possible, its filling out of the tiny block in such a way as to make impossible anything but the smallest idea of a garden, its resolute refusal to admit anything of the world outside, is strangely, ironically so inviting. Here, it says to its lucky owner, is your space. Here you can be you. The public self falls away as you close the gate and as you come inside you step into your own self, your house, your home.
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Posted to Architecture • 2003.02.10 (Mon) • 16:40
Comments
Posted by Andrew Abb 2003.02.13, 21:00
Hi… I’ve been told that only Japanese women use “uchi” when referring to themselves. It’s not used by men. They’re more like to use “ore”.
Posted by J.J. 2005.09.20, 02:16
Very well said… you win a cookie.
Posted by Shotgun Shells Enthusiest 2005.11.15, 11:22
You said: “All of man?s troubles stem from his being unable to sit quietly alone in a room.”
Thanks… having 4 small children… I NOW know why I have so many problems :)
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