Shitaji-mado

What a shitaji-mado is

A shitaji-mado is a window made by leaving part of an earthen wall unplastered so that the bamboo or reed lath behind it stays visible. The opening is not cut into a finished wall; it is the piece the plasterer never covered, which is why neither its outline nor the grid behind it comes out regular.

It belongs above all to the Chashitsu. The Tamura Residence tea room in Kyoto, from the late Edo period, is described as having a wet veranda and a noble's entrance on the south side of its four-and-a-half-mat room, and one of these windows above the crawl-in door on the west.

Small buildings in the Roji use them too. The waiting shelter at Chikushi Jogakuen in Fukuoka Prefecture, built in 1940, is described as having log posts, plastered walls with the frame left exposed, and one of these windows on its south gable, in a building only 1.8 metres long.

The privy at the former Matsui villa in Wakayama Prefecture, from the late Taisho period, is described as having ochre-plastered outer walls with a mortared base and windows of this kind in varied shapes on every face, and the entry calls the whole an elaborate exercise in Sukiya-zukuri within a garden setting.

No fixed shape

That last description makes the point. These windows have no standard outline. Round, half-round, roughly square: the shape changes from building to building, and refusing a regular form is part of what the window is for.

The same instinct shows elsewhere in the tea garden. The waiting shelter at the Kamiya Residence opens its wall in a half-moon, treating the shape of the opening as the design in itself.

To identify one, look at the inside face. Where bamboo or reed lath shows through in an irregular grid, the window is of this type, and it remains so even when a paper screen has been fitted in front of it.