Visit gallery: Kyoto
During the Edo period, Nijo castle (Nijo jo) served as Kyoto residence of Tokugawa shoguns. The Ninomary Palace (Ninomaru Goten) consists of five connected buildings located on the same level. This architectural layout can be considered as a single-level analogy of a traditional five-story pagoda. The buildings are intentionally misaligned, so that one always has to change direction when moving from one room to the next. This feature made the palace more defensible in case of attack. For example, the misaligned rooms would not be in the pass of flying arrows shot through doorways.
The interior corridor that runs along the main building has a specially-designed wooden floor. The planks are suspended on hinges that squeak when someone steps on them. This is a security feature, designed to alert the castle guards against an attack. The chirping sound made when a person is walking along corridor is similar to a song of a nightingale or Japanese Bush Warbler (uguisu). The wooden planks of the floor are called uguisu-bari (nightingale floors).
My first thoughts when learning about the uguisu-bari were that this squeaking floor could easily be a construction imperfection, which is being passed as a design feature with a poetic name. After all, naturally-occurring imperfections are often praised in Japanese art, as they bring elements of nature into man-made objects. Examples of these “random” features in art are jagged edges of a calligrapher’s brushstrokes, intricate crack patterns on the surface of a glazed ceramics, intermittent wavering sounds of a shakuhachi, wavy patterns of tempered steel at the edge of a samurai sword, etc. However, just as in the examples above, the apparently random features of an art objects are, in fact, carefully controlled by the artist. In the case of uguisu-bari, the architects of Nijo-jo designed the hinges that produced the chirping nightingale song by employing pieces of wood that rubbed against each other under pressure. Indeed, the detailed drawings of the squeaking hinges are part of the castle exhibit.
Photography notes:
Photography is prohibited inside the castle building, but it is allowed in the beautiful and expansive gardens and the castle grounds. The trees and even the grass are meticulously manicured by hand. The gardeners pruning the grass by hand under the punishing August sun are examples of dedication to one’s profession that is evident in so many aspects of Japanese culture.