Engawa

What an engawa is

An engawa is the narrow boarded strip set outside the rooms of a house. It works as a passage and as a place to sit and look at the garden, standing between inside and out rather than belonging to either.

It often sets the line on which the plan is organised. The reception wing of the Yoshida Residence in Niigata Prefecture, from about 1924, is described as a single-storey building, Kirizuma-zukuri with Sangawara-buki, with two eight-mat rooms ranged along the veranda on its east side and five-mat rooms to north and south of them.

A veranda that lies beyond the shelter of the roof carries a different name in Japanese, and records keep the two apart. The former Bito Residence in Kyoto Prefecture, from the late Edo period, is recorded as an Important Cultural Property with a veranda on the south face and an unsheltered one on the east.

Halls use them too. The Gokurakudo in Ehime Prefecture, built in 1898, is described as a hall of three bays square under a pyramidal roof, with an unsheltered veranda running round all four sides.

Several names, several distinctions

The various Japanese words for a veranda cut along different axes. One pair distinguishes sheltered from unsheltered; another distinguishes Kure-en from Kirime-en by how the boards are laid; a wide veranda has a name of its own. A single veranda can fall on either side of more than one of these, so the terms are not interchangeable.

The pine room at Sumiya in Kyoto, built in 1926, is described as a sequence of rooms of ten, twelve, eight and twenty-three mats arranged in a staggered plan, with an unsheltered veranda along the south.

When writing about a building, keep whichever word the record uses. The types differ in how they shed water and in how they are finished, so substituting one for another changes the description of the building itself.