Fusuma

Fusuma (Japanese袄) are sliding screens or doors that serve as room dividers in traditional Japanese houses. They usually consist of a wooden frame covered with fabric or paper. Common are also the terms Fusuma Shoji Shoji Karakami or short Karakami. They run across the entire width of the wall, with behind it can be located both another room, as well as a cabinet or a storage room, or they still leave room for a Tokonoma.

Etymology

While the term Shoji comes from China, the word Fusuma leaves neither in Korea nor in China demonstrate and is a genuinely Japanese term. The basic idea was the beds to be separated by sliding doors in the imperial palace. The dormitories are also called Fusuma - dokoro (衾 所), which originally meant Fusuma futon or bedding.

There is also the assumption that the Kunyomi reading Fusuma the character衾, Onyomi kin, the term臥す 間( Fusu ma), space is derived to lie down. What is certain is that the character is the etymological origin of衾Fusuma.

Construction

In the old houses the door height is only 1.70 meters. After Japanese by changing eating now but spread to other body sizes, the door height is 1.90 meters in modern homes. On the walls of the upper door edge slats are mounted on the ground and in the amount on which slide the doors. Traditionally, these rails are waxed, a sliding strip of PVC is in modern homes instead attached.

The doors themselves are made of a two to three centimeters thick wood frame that is covered with a layer of cardboard. Some doors are also covered only with a thin, translucent paper, called Shoji. Only on the outer wall is mounted a second rail, to be advanced on the heavy wooden doors, such as typhoons. Due to the thin walls of old Japanese houses are very noisy.

Opening can be Fusuma with a handgrip, the hikite (引き 手).

Fusuma livery

A characteristic feature of the Shoin - zukuri (书院 造), an architectural style for houses, especially in the middle of the Muromachi period, the opulent painting of room divider and the Japanese folding screens. Typically, these paintings, Kimpekishō gahekiga (金碧 障 壁画), ultramarine particularly using the colors green, white, dark red and applied with black ink on a primer of gold leaf. Kanō Eitoku is the creator of this technique. Famous and excellent examples of this wall painting found in the Nijo Castle and the Nishi Hongan -ji in Kyoto.

Kanō Eitoku created this new style in painting commissioned painter for the Ashikaga shogunate (足 利 将军 家) by a compromise between the techniques of Chinese painting, Kara -e (汉画) and the traditional Japanese Yamato -e of the Heian period. During the Heian period, the mural was dominated in aristocratic houses and temples topic of historical events and the landscapes of China, Eitoku chose the four seasons, the beauty of nature and landscapes as a motif and created a peculiar and Japanese painting style. A little later in the Azuchi - Momoyama period, Oda Nobunaga served for example in Azuchi Castle (安 土城, Azuchi - jo ) and Toyotomi Hideyoshi in jurakudai Palace (聚 楽 第) and the Osaka Castle such Fusuma and wall paintings to put their power on display.