Tokonoma

This area in a traditional Japanese house is known as the Tokonoma. It is typically dressed with a scroll that expresses some wise words or a painting and a beautiful ikebana flower arrangement for artistic appreciation. However in Obachan chi's she used it to house her butsudan a decorative wooden display box, which she used to pray to her dearly departed husband and ancestors. 

Being respectful to his Obachan, my husband thought about it a lot before removing the butsudan. We both felt that the best way we could pay our respects was to give this little area some love, as you can see it was pretty overdue for a paint and the spiders liked living high up in the dark corners. Our idea is to freshen it up, put in some lighting and some fresh flowers....to remember Obachan, even though I only met her once on my first trip to Japan. Our assistant has also made the suggestion of placing a photo of her Obachan, her great-grandmother in a frame. But first things first...painting!

I went for white because it blends with the rest of the main living area.The area doesn't typically have a cupboard underneath, but we found that if we removed it, it would cause the mud wall to crumble. So for now we are going to leave it.

So once I had finished painting we started researching what type of lighting we could install. Keeping to a tight budget we found these black stick on battery operated lights, since we really didn't want to get into rewiring. All we need to do is just push them in the middle to switch on. They'll do the trick for now!

Pulling from the garden what we have on hand, the vibrant red higanbana brought an autumn flavour indoors! 

But the small vase was looking a little pathetic, so I changed it for something I have wanted to buy for awhile now. Behold......

                           

My sansaikago or small harvesting basket!  My assistant was happy to model how it is traditionally tied on the hip to collect wild vegetables collected from the mountain. There is also a much larger one that you wear on your back that has colourful straps, which would look great as a larger vase at the entrance to our genkan, but slow steps first. We need to beautify the front a bit more before I can buy that one ;) But here is my small harvesting basket in all its glory and I love it!

It's a big improvement from this......

To this..........

I feel it could do with a beautiful scroll or some printed Japanese material, so I'm on the look out and will share when I find it. The white and yellow flowers found a new home before we left Izu. On our way to Obachan chi's we pass her grave and it is our tradition to pay our respects when we leave; to thank her for looking over us as we give her little house some love and to take care of us as we travel home. She gets us home safely every time! Our assistant also loves to pray to her great-grandmother.

One more photo...just because! 

Oops! I must fix up where the roller brush got away from the wall and landed on the cupboard!