Quote:
Originally Posted by Kincaid
If possible, please include as much sensory detail as you can. The smell of the wood, texture of the various surfaces, and any other details would help. I'm trying to get a fairly accurate picture of what it would be like to be in one of these houses.
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Old houses like that would have tatami, if you've never smelt one, when they're fresh they have a sweet hay-like scent, similar to those water-hyacinth woven baskets you can get in furniture stores or those woven beach mats you get all over Europe. Old very dirty or damp tatami can smell dank or mouldy. The colour goes from a fresh pale colour to brownish-grey over time. Tatami are fairly smooth to touch; the bumps aren't very big. They are faintly glossy too, not quite matt.
Lacquer-ware is very smooth to touch, it's almost plastically but definitely more organic. think like the feel of amber.
Shoji screens are light weight with smooth darker wood. The paper is taut and faintly waxy to touch. It may be smoother on one side than the other. It's not a true white either; it may be greyish or creamish depending on how and from what it was made.
Roof tiles on old buildings tend to be grey, kind of pottery I guess, or fired like bricks. On unkempt buildings or very old ones, they tend to gather a lot of moss and lichen. More rurally the roofing material is thatch. Again, new thatch has a hayish sort of scent, but less strong and less sweet than tatami. Old, damp thatch smells musty and can also reek faintly of mouse and bird waste if you're very close to it on the outside. Very old, very poorly maintained thatch that has worn thin can also make the inside of the house smell bad.
Lots of traditional things in Japan are made using zelkova wood; in colour it's a bit like dark pine, but a harder wood. It has a woody-spicy kind of scent, but it's subtle.
Sumi-ink and to a lesser extent sumi-paintings have a pine scent.
Uh... and that's about the extent of all I know from visiting old temples.
You might want to remember though that in the 1600's certain smells would be stronger anyway; human waste for example, as that wasn't neatly scurried away in underground pipes. Ditto rubbish.