Taipei Part III: The Tatami Room
The rooms upstairs were nice, and, most important of all, air-conditioned! Kevin was in a large bedroom which seemed to have been recently inhabited by one of his older cousins. My room, on the other hand, was possibly the coolest room I have ever seen. According to Kevin, it was built in a very Japanese style. The outside of the room had two wooden ledges which you needed ascend like stairs. The outer wall was entirely composed of sliding shoji screens, while the flooring inside was wall-to-wall tatami mats. It was gorgeous; the pictures do not even come close to doing it justice. The existence of this sort of room joins other small indications I have noticed of a Japanese presence on Taiwan that is almost nonexistant on the mainland. The multiplicity and prevalence of Japanese food, products, traditions, and even the language is easily understandable when one considers the island’s political history.
The question of the strong Japanese influence on the island ought to be the subject of a whole other post, but I for one am glad that this little fragment of Japanese culture made its appearance on the fifth floor of A-ma’s apartment. The whole room had a faint woody smell, almost like tea, which I suppose came from the tatami (which is, after all, made of bamboo). The room next to mine (in between mine and Kevin’s) was the apartment’s shrine – pictures above and below – so that a faint smell of incense also wound its way in to this remarkable little room. If I am ever lucky enough to design and build my own house, not only will it have a library with a spiral staircase, but it will now also have a tatami reading room.
After chilling out (both literally and figuratively) in the air-conditioned tatami room, Kevin and I unpacked, regrouped, and headed out to explore the area a bit.
posted by Kelly @ 6:01 PM
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