Glossary

Roofing with thin copper sheets; light and durable, it develops a green patina over time and is common on shrine and temple roofs, cusped gables, canopies and purification pavilions.

A roof with almost no pitch, usually a reinforced-concrete slab, which can be used as a roof terrace and is edged with a parapet; common on modern Western-style buildings and industrial plants.

Tiles of semicircular section laid face-down along the very top of a roof ridge to cap it against rain; walls and small buildings sometimes have a simple ridge of these tiles alone.

A gabled roof with the top of each gable clipped back into a small hip, common on modern Western-style buildings and houses, sometimes combined with dormer windows.

A pyramidal roof in which four slopes meet at a single point, with no ridge, used on halls and towers of roughly square plan.

A roof laid from thin layers of cypress bark, flexible enough to follow curved surfaces and long used on shrine halls and reception buildings.

A tiled roof laid with flat pan tiles and half-round cap tiles alternating, heavier than pantiling and used on temples, shrines and buildings of standing.

A roof that is gabled above and hipped below, so the triangular gable appears only in the upper part while the eaves run round all four sides beneath it.

A small raised roof set on top of the main ridge, with openings in its sides for letting out smoke, ventilating and admitting light; common on silkworm-raising farmhouses, breweries and workshops.

A roof that slopes in two directions from a single ridge, closing each end of the building with a triangular gable.

A roof of thin split wooden shingles laid in overlapping layers, lighter in effect than cypress bark and used on shrine halls and tea-influenced buildings.

A roof of thickly layered grasses such as miscanthus or reed, so demanding to maintain that many surviving examples are recorded as covered provisionally with sheet metal.

A roof with the ridge set off-centre so that one slope is short and the other long, common on small ancillary buildings and recorded under more than one name.

A roof on a plastered storehouse in which a separately framed timber roof covered with tiles or sheet metal sits over the clay-sealed roof beneath, the lower layer resisting fire and the upper shedding rain.

A tiled roof laid with wave-profiled pantiles, lighter than the round-and-flat tiling it replaced and widespread on townhouses and ancillary buildings from the early modern period onward.

A roof of repeated single-pitch slopes like the teeth of a saw, its vertical faces glazed to draw steady north light into a factory floor.

Roof tiles fired in the Iwami region of western Shimane, glazed with a slip made from Kimachi stone and fired above 1,200°C to a red-brown; resistant to frost and salt, they were laid widely along the Sea of Japan coast and beyond.

A roof broken by a step partway down its slope, so that the upper and lower sections are laid separately; found on hip-and-gable and hipped roofs and echoing ancient Buddhist halls.

Roofing of flattened cedar bark laid in overlapping courses and held down with bamboo or battens; light and rustic, it is common on gates, walls, tea rooms and buildings in the sukiya manner.

A roof with part raised up to create a lofty space beneath it; in silk-raising farmhouses the middle of the roof was lifted to form an upper floor for ventilation and light.

A roof that slopes on all four sides from a short ridge, so no triangular gable appears at either end.