Affordances of the Squeaky Gate
Comments: 3
Our front gate is of a design fairly common throughout Japan. Returning home, you open it from left to right and the aluminium latticework of the gate concertinas into itself to admit entry. The concertina arrangement is in turn hinged to the wall, so there are two ways to open the gate, sliding it or pushing it into its hinged arc.
Our gate squeaks if you slide it, but the hinges are silent. Coming home at 4:30 a.m. the day before yesterday after helping a friend move house (the driving part apparently had to happen at night because the traffic is not so bad, and we had a lot of distance to cover), I realised an interesting social property of squeaky gates.
During the day you can open it via the noisy method (the silent, hinged method is for late at night). The noise is loud enough to be heard by neighbours but not so grating that it causes irritation (to my mind). This alerts neighbours that you’re coming or going so, for example, if the house is empty while you’re off shopping or whatever, neighbours are cued in a sense to interpret any noises coming from your house as those of a possible intruder.
I’m wondering if I’m just imagining this but it struck me that my neighbours use subtly different ways of opening their doors or gates, or of making bicycle noises as they leave to go somewhere throughout a day, to signal their house’s state of occupation. This could be a legacy of denser urban living where proximity ensures that everyone knows what everyone else is up to. This back-of-the-mind paying of attention, while certainly invasive in some situations, does have the benefit of creating a collective watchdog layer of protection in a immediate neighbourhood, and it’s perhaps the desire for this neighbourly network of awareness that lives on vestigially in squeaky gates and door-opening behaviour.
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Posted to General Rants • 2003.08.12 (Tue) • 12:10
Comments
Posted by MJ 2003.08.12, 15:53
My neighbors don’t care about that kind of stuff. They bang their doors and windows at all times of day and night.
And the have the gumption to complain if we have music on after 10pm…grrr
Posted by Peter Marquis-Kyle 2003.08.12, 22:18
Jeremy, this is a wonderful subject. Would you like to say more about how this Japanese auditory sensitivity works indoors? I ask this as someone who lives in an old Queensland house, where the rooms are contained by walls made of a single thickness of pine boards and a fart issued in one room is audible in another. I won’t mention the sounds of lovemaking…
In old Japanese houses, with rooms defined by shoji screens, a sigh would be heard right through the house, no? Are there social adjustments — do people pretend not to hear things? Or are they utterly controlled (you know, tight-arsed)?
Posted by jh 2003.08.16, 13:59
Peter —-
As you know, walls in Japanese housing (even the plasticy, prefabricated modern kind) are rarely structural. Exterior walls are generally of wood (with or without shoji screens) or plaster (over straw batting), while interior walls are traditionally wood, or more often sliding doors called fusuma (light wooden frame covered with thick patterned paper on both sides which allow for flexible room arrangements).
This is by way of saying that the acoustic properties are exactly as you imagine.
In his book “Barcelona” Robert Hughes makes the point that the Catalans, like other mercantile cultures such as the Germans and Japanese, have a scatalogical sense of humour and I can certainly confirm the truth of his statement as far as the Japanese are concerned! There’s a healthy acceptance of all … aspects, let’s say, of life. A common perception of the Japanese does include a certain tight-arsedness, but I think this is a small part of a more formal, public persona. En famille, the truth is, as in most places, very different.
> I won’t mention the sounds of lovemaking…
Ah, but we need to mention the sounds of lovemaking because the acoustic transparency of traditional housing gives rise to —- you know what I’m about to say here —- the love hotel, where rooms can be rented by the hour by couples looking for some privacy.
People tend to live at home longer in Japan than many Western countries and this presents some obvious problems as one’s activities begin to venture beyond the house’s abilities to contain them.
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