How Many Stories Did Silk-Raising Farm Houses Have In Samurai Time?

In connection to "Japanese Silk Road" from my previous post on May 31st, today I'd like to show an old silk worm-raising farm house from a late Samurai era. It seems like a small plain one-story house from the outside as you can see in the upper left hand side photo. However, it actually has three stories. Since this house kept the typical style of silk worm-raising farm houses in old times, it was registered as an important cultural asset by Akiruno city in West Tokyo in 1998.

Let's take a look at inside of the house. After the front door, there is an un-floored space which is a typical style of Japanese kitchen in old times. Next to the kitchen is a living room on a raised floor and this is the ground floor of this house. The living room has a sunken fireplace as shown in the upper center photo. The fireplace was used to boil water for tea and to cook hot pot/soup, and to make the room warm. The sunken fireplace had one more important function. Since these old houses have straw-thatched roofs, smoke from the fireplace prevented the thatched roof from getting worse. Maybe one of the reasons we don't keep the sunken fireplaces in our modern houses is the fact that we don't have thatched roofs anymore.

Anyway, we will explore other floors. At the edge of the living room there is a staircase as shown in the upper right hand side photo. When you go up 7 to 8 steps, there is a wooden floor as you can see in the second left photo on the lower row. The ceiling of the room is too low to live here and this room was probably used as a storage.

From the storage room, there is another set of stairs to go higher. About 5 to 6 steps on the stairs, it is the top floor of this house. It looks like an attic, but this was the work room for silk worm-raising farmers. They raised silk-worms here because the materials of the upper floors is breathable and the smoke from the sunken fireplace on the first floor prevented molds, then it provided a suitable place for silk worms to grow. It's really a small farm house, but constructed very efficiently with three floors.