The classic house evolved over two millennia through the adaptation and blending of two dissimilar architectural traditions--the tropical nature shrine, which was part of the Shinto religion of the early immigrants to Japan, and the Chinese model, beginning with the palace architecture of the T'ang dynasty and culminating in the designs used in the monasteries of Chinese Ch'an Buddhism. The early immigrants, the Yayoi, today are believed to have arrived from points somewhere to the South, bringing a theology that defied the earth, the sun, and all the processes of nature. Their shrines to these gods were like conventional Oceanic huts. Thanks to a peculiar quirk of Shinto, which dictates that certain of these wood-and-thatch shrines be dismantled and built anew every two decades, it is still possible to see these lovely structures essentially as they were two millennia ago. Spartan and elegant in their simplicity, they were lyrically described by the nineteenth- century Western Japanophile, Lafcadio Hearn: _The typical shrine is a windowless oblong building of un-painted timber with a very steep overhanging roof; the front is a gable end; and the upper part of the perpetually closed doors is a wooden latticework--usually a grating of bars closely set and crossing each other at right angles. In most cases the structure is raised slightly above the ground on wooden pillars; and the queer peaked facade, with its visorlike apertures and the fantastic projections of beamwork above its gable-angle, might remind the European traveler of old gothic forms of dormer There is no artificial color. The plain wood soon turns, under the action of rain and sun, to a natural gray varying according to surface exposure from a silvery tone of birch bark to a somber gray of basalt.1 _ _Although the early immigrants lived first in caves and later in roofed pits dug into the earth, by the beginning of the Christian Era the aristocracy was building elevated dwellings on posts, with roofs supported not by the walls but by a central horizontal ridge pole suspended between two large columns at either end of the structure.2 _ It was, in fact, identical to the Shinto shrine design described by Hearn. As a home for the Shinto gods, this tropical design may well have been adequate, since nature spirits are presumably adapted to the rigors of a Japanese winter, but the Yayoi must have found that it enforced an unwelcome communion with the seasons. Even so, Hearn's description could be applied almost without alteration to the external qualities of the traditional dwelling as it finally evolved. One still finds the thatch roof, the use of pillars to suspend the floor above the ground, unfinished natural wood, and the virtual absence of nails.