Japan's Mistresses of Fire
Hibachi charcoal braziers in old Japan were mostly ruled by women
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PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | APPENDIX
This is Part 4 of an essay about how people stayed warm in old Japan.
Two young Japanese women in a studio pose next to a hibachi. Women generally ruled this humble, but all-important heater.
The previous article in this series introduced the hibachi, a portable brazier for heating and cooking. This article looks at informative descriptions of hibachi during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) — mostly by foreigners visiting Japan.
One of the most informative descriptions comes from British journalist and poet Sir Edwin Arnold (1832–1904). Arnold lived in Japan during the 1890s and married a Japanese woman who later followed him to Great Britain.
Deeply familiar with the culture, he considered the hibachi crucial to Japanese society. “The entire existence of the Japanese centres in this very peculiar little institution,” he wrote in his 1894 book Seas and Lands:1
You must realise then, or try to realise, the prodigious import and positive universality of the domestic “fire-box” in Japan. There must exist at least as many as the inhabitants of the country — that is to say, about 40,000,000.
Every shop has one in front of its shelves and bales, and every teahouse or hotel keeps them by scores, because the first thing brought to a traveller, or customer, on arrival, is the hibachi, either to warm him, or to furnish a chronic light for his pipe, or simply from habit and hospitality.
The tradesman and those who come to buy at his shop gather over the bronze fire-box to discuss prices; and at a dinner party a hibachi is placed between every pair of guests.
Seas and Lands (1894), 379–380
Hibachi were most conspicuous at public places like teahouses, inns, and shops. But they were just as common at regular homes, where their fire was generally watched over as if sacred.2
In the interior of an ordinary Japanese home, however, one sees the national institution in its simplest use. There it stands, always lighted, at least during the autumn and winter months, and in its copper receptacle the bed of ashes, and the glowing nest of genial fire.
Seas and Lands (1894), 380
Arnold’s description of the hibachi being “always lighted” can be taken fairly literally. American zoologist and archaeologist Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925), who first visited Japan in 1877 (Meiji 10), describes this in Japanese Homes and their Surroundings, published in 1886 (Meiji 19):3
A sentiment prompts many families to keep the hibachi fire burning continually; and I was told that in one family in Tokio [sic ] the fire had been kept alive continuously for over two hundred years.
Japanese Homes and their Surroundings (1886), 216
Arnold’s account is one of the few contemporary sources to emphasize that the hibachi was the domain of the “mistress of the house, who has the seat of honour before it.” He describes how Japanese women meticulously cared for the charcoal fire, picking up, “stick by stick, and fragment by fragment, the precious pieces of charcoal which have fallen from off the central fire.”4
Japanese author Jukichi Inouye, who described middle and upper middle class homes in Home life in Tokyo (1910), mentions the wife having a designated seat behind the hibachi:5
Behind the brazier is a cushion where the wife sits; this is her usual post. There is also a cushion on the other side of the brazier, where the husband or other members of the house may sit.
Jukichi Inouye, Home life in Tokyo (1911), 51
The space next to the hibachi has been called the “traditional accoutrement of the wife’s authority” — the place where “she made tea and smoked.”6 At the time, the spot appears to have been experienced more like a seat of duty than honor, similar to the predetermined seating and roles of the irori.
This is beautifully revealed by early 20th century satirical illustrations of role reversals between husbands and wives. Some show ‘henpecked’ men furiously tending the fire of the hibachi, while their wives leisurely enjoy its warmth, or merrily chat with a visiting kimono salesman.
Whether it was honor or duty, women were indispensable to the hibachi’s fire. Not only did they feed it, they gave it life:7
With what silent interest everybody watches her purse up her lips, and gently but persistently blow upon the sleeping fire, till the scarlet life of it creeps from the central spark into every grey and black bit of the heap, and the hibachi is once more in high activity! Then the hands of the household meet over the kindly warmth, for this is the only “hearth” of the domicile, and when the palms and wrists are warm all the body will be comfortable.
Seas and Lands (1894), 380–381
Another foreign visitor who was deeply enamored with the hibachi was American writer and educator Alice Mabel Bacon (1858–1918) who worked in Japan in the late 1880s and early 1900s. In A Japanese Interior (1894), she describes the purchase of her first hibachi. Her excitement is palpable:8
On Saturday, Minè and I went to a kwan ko ba and bought a fine hibachi, or charcoal brazier, and a pretty copper tea-kettle, with a spray of cherry blossoms beaten out on it, in repoussé work, and Chinese letters in brass raised on the surface.
Our hibachi is made of a section of a tree trunk, smoothed into a regular oval and hollowed out in the middle. The wood is about the color of old oak, and has a beautiful grain. Into the hollowed centre is set a copper pan. This is filled with light straw ashes, a little earthenware inverted tripod is pressed down into the ashes so that only the three points stick up, and then in the centre, between the three points, a charcoal fire is made. This smoulders away quietly under the tea-kettle placed on the tripod, and gives out neither smoke nor gas.
The arrangement is very far superior to an alcohol lamp, as well as much cheaper, and why we do not use it in America I cannot imagine, except that we are not bright enough to think of such a simple thing; and, besides, we like the more complicated and expensive ways better.
A Japanese Interior (1894), 36
Bacon correctly explained that the charcoal did not emit smoke. This was why it could be used in low-ceilinged tatami (rice mat) rooms. But charcoal does emit gas. This rarely created problems as Japanese houses were built for muggy summers and were notoriously drafty, creating more than sufficient ventilation. This was well known, as Sir Edwin Arnold explains in Seas and Lands:9
One happy consequence of this omnipresent employment of charcoal for domestic and culinary purposes is that Japanese cities, villages, and abodes are perfectly free from smoke. The clear air is always unpolluted by those clouds of defacing and degrading black smuts which blot out our rare sunshine in London, and help to create its horrible fogs.
There is no doubt a peril of a special kind in the fire-box. If not supplied from the kitchen hearth with glowing coals already past their first firing, there will be a constant efflux of carbonic acid gas [CO2] into the room, which will kill you, subtly and slowly, as certainly as an overdose of opium.
In European apartments this would prove a very serious danger, but the shoji and sliding doors of wood let in so many little sources of ventilation — and the rats, moreover, take care to gnaw so many holes in the paper of the mado — that the fatal gas becomes dispelled or diluted as fast as it is created.
Nevertheless accidents occur, especially in bath-rooms where the fune, or great tub, is heated by a large mass of raw charcoal, and there was a case a week ago in Yokohama of a sea-captain found dead in the furo-do of his hotel.
The Japanese are too wise to sleep with a large hibachi in their apartments. They know well that the deadly gas, being heavy, sinks to the bottom of the room, where their futôns are spread upon the mats; and they either put the fire-box outside, or are careful to see that it has “honourable mature charcoal” burning low in it.
Seas and Lands (1894), 382–384
A Farewell to Charcoal
The charms of burning charcoal, described by lady Sei Shōnagon ten centuries ago, survived all the way through the 1950s. Then new technology took over. Gas hibachi were introduced as early as the 1930s. When Japan’s economy boomed after the end of WWII, charcoal hibachi were finally undone by kerosene heaters, and then electricity. During the 1960s they quickly vanished from Japanese homes and businesses.
During the past two decades there has been a cautious revival of old-fashioned charcoal hibachi. They are mostly used at home, but there are some cafes that have jumped on this trend as well. Specialized businesses have sprung up to cater to this trend. But places with charcoal hibachi are still so rare that one has to consciously search for them.
In the next article we will look at the five main types of hibachi seen in vintage photos of old Japan.
Coming Soon! Part 5 : Forgotten Shapes of Warmth.
Warning
To prevent carbon monoxide poisoning or fire, a traditional hibachi requires a well-ventilated space, specific types of charcoal, and knowledge of safe handling. Study safety requirements before using one indoors.
Notes
Arnold, Sir Edwin (1894). Seas and Lands. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 379–380.
ibid, 380.
Morse, Edward S. (1889). Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings. New York: Harper & Brothers, 216.
Arnold, Sir Edwin (1894). Seas and Lands. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 380.
Inouye, Jukichi (1911). Home Life in Tokyo. The Tokyo Printing Company, Ltd., 51.
Sand, Jordan (2003). House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space and Bourgeois Culture 1880-1930. Cambridge (Massachusetts) and London: Harvard University Press, 231.
Arnold, Sir Edwin (1894). Seas and Lands. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 380–381.
Bacon, Alice Mabel (1894). A Japanese Interior. Boston, New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 36.
Arnold, Sir Edwin (1894). Seas and Lands. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 382–384.
Thank you for this interesting history lesson on a relatively mundane, but once critical tool for keeping warm during the colder months. I wonder if the shichirin (七輪) still used for portable grilling is the closest modern equivalent to the hibachi. What do you think?
I loved this article! You’ve made sense of something I never quite understood, which is that my 95 year old Japanese mother is incredibly skilled at lighting her charcoal barbecue grill. She’s very methodical about it. Now I can guess why!