Word: tatami
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...BATH AND TO BED An overnight homestay is a popular way to experience modern Japanese culture. Sleep in a tatami room on a futon. Enjoy a meal with a local family, and take a bath with them. Most Japanese families draw one large bath per evening. Since family members take turns using it, it's imperative to shower and scrub thoroughly before enjoying a relaxing soak. To arrange a homestay, contact the Nagasaki International Association...
...true Japanese experience, stay at a ryokan, a Japanese-style B and B. The Miyazaki Ryokan in Obama has luxurious, outdoor hot tubs overlooking fragrant, pink azaleas. Sleeping quarters are spartan but comfortable, usually little more than a feathery futon laid out on a tatami floor. The $195 a night includes a traditional dinner of sashimi, clear soups and grilled fish. Wherever you stay, pay attention to Japanese etiquette. Shoes should be removed and exchanged for slippers whenever entering a traditional hotel or restaurant. Visits to the restroom require yet another change of footwear; the inevitable lapse will...
Slumped on the cool tatami mats of a Japanese restaurant in Beijing, Jiang Wen looks spent. China's gruffest actor and boldest director has been slouching and smoking and dishing out melancholy in front of the camera all day, and he can look forward to more of the same through the night. His 1.83-meter, 98-kilo frame crumples against the wall, his eyes beat and basset-hound weary...
...booming, the government thought it could have it all. Farmers, who traditionally voted for the long-ruling LDP, were shielded from competition from imports; Japan's consumers shouldered ridiculous bills for homegrown farm products. Today, thanks to the weak economy and the wrenching opening up of Japan's markets, tatami prices are half what they were 10 years ago. Farmers can't pay off the loans they were once encouraged to take. "Thirty farmers have committed suicide the past four or five years," says Yoshiharu Takahama, a town assembly member...
...relentlessly confident 1980s, the tatami makers of Kagami sent a delegation to teach Chinese farmers how to raise igusa and weave tatami. "I had a slight feeling of dread," admits 33-year-old farmer Yasushi Furushima, who visited China a few years afterward. "But their quantity wasn't very good." China, of course, caught up fast: today, its exports account for more than two-thirds of the tatami market in Japan. In a last ditch measure to protect its farmers, Japan last year slapped import duties on Chinese tatami, along with leeks and shiitake mushrooms, other endangered cash crops...