The commonest rooms are those with four and a half, six, or eight mats, that is to say, rooms which are three or four yards square or four yards by three. Such rooms would be very small in a house built in European style; there would hardly be elbow-room and one could not move an inch without knocking down some piece of furniture. But in a Japanese room there is but little furniture, and certainly none that one could bring down by knocking against it with the exception, perhaps, of the screen. Our rooms look very bare to foreigners and appear to lack comfort to those who have lived in European apartments; but from the Japanese’s point of view, rooms furnished in the approved European style suffer from excess of furniture and partake too much of the nature of a curiosity shop or a museum. This may be going too far; but there is undoubtedly something repugnant to the Japanese canons of taste to find all the art treasures of the house exhibited from day to day on the walls or in the corners of the rooms to which guests have access. The absence of movable furniture in a Japanese room, by allowing more free space, makes it look larger than a European room of the same size. We squat on the mats, and our line of vision, being consequently much lower than if we sat in a chair, gives the room a further appearance of greater size. The illusion is kept up by the lowness of the ceiling, which though seldom more than eight or nine feet high, seems to be loftier as we squat under it. The size of a mat being, as already stated, roughly six feet by three, the yard has naturally become the unit by which other parts of a room or a house are measured. Thus, the sliding-doors are usually a yard wide. As these doors are always in pairs and move in two grooves each at top and bottom, there are a pair in grooves six feet long and two pairs in those of twelve feet; but in grooves nine feet in length there are either a pair or two, commonly the latter, in which case the sliding-doors are each three-quarters of a yard wide. The sliding-doors are of two kinds: the _shoji_, or paper sliding-doors, which are partitions admitting light, and the _fusuma_ (also called _karakami_), or screen sliding-doors, which merely serve as partitions. The _shoji_ consists of a wooden frame, an inch or more in thickness, with thinner cross and vertical pieces forming lattices about nine inches wide by five high. It is covered on the outside with thin rice-paper, which admits light but is not transparent. It is of use when there is light on one side as at the verandah or window or where a room or a passage would be too dark if _fusuma_ were put up. The _fusuma_ consists of a wooden frame with a few pieces within, which is pasted over on both sides with thick paper and covered with ornamental paper. It is quite opaque. The frame and lattices of the _shoji_ are of plain white wood; but the frame of the _fusuma_ is often varnished, though it may also be left plain. The _fusuma_