A traditional Japanese house has a strip of wooden floor running along its outer edge, under the eaves, between the rooms and the garden. It is usually about a metre wide. It has no wall on the garden side, only sliding screens that can be opened fully, and in summer they usually are.
It is called the engawa, and it is neither inside nor outside. That is the whole point of it.
What the engawa is for
The engawa is where you sit to look at the garden without being in it. Where you take off your shoes before stepping up into the house, or put them on before stepping down. Where a neighbour who has dropped by sits for ten minutes without coming in. Where tea is drunk in the afternoon, where laundry is folded, where a child does homework in the light.
It is a threshold that is wide enough to stay on. Western houses have thresholds too, but they are lines: a doorstep, a sill. The engawa is a threshold you can live in, and Japanese domestic life uses it constantly, because most of what happens in a house is neither fully private nor fully public, and the engawa is the room for that.
The three things it does
The first is that it makes the boundary gradual. From garden to engawa is one step. From engawa to room is another. Nobody goes from outside to inside in a single move, and so the inside stays inside, in a way that a front door opening directly onto a living room cannot manage.
The second is that it brings the garden into the house without letting the weather in. The eaves keep the rain off. The open screens let the air through. You are sheltered and outdoors at once, and the Japanese have found that to be the most comfortable state a person can be in for most of the year.
The third is that it gives the house a place to receive people that is not the interior. A guest on the engawa has been welcomed and has not been admitted, and both of those are true and neither is rude.
Making one where there is none
Most homes outside Japan have no engawa, and you cannot add a wooden verandah under eaves that do not exist. But each of the three functions can be built separately, and two of them are cheap.
For the gradual boundary, put a bench or a low stool just inside the door, where shoes come off, so that arriving has a place to pause. This is the genkan principle again, and it is worth repeating because it is the one people skip.
For the sheltered-outdoor state, find the one spot in the home where you can sit with a window or door open and not be rained on. A covered balcony, a deep windowsill, a chair pulled up to an open window under a lintel. Make that the place for tea.
For receiving people, the engawa’s lesson is that a doorstep conversation is not a failure of hospitality. Many houses have a porch, a step, a landing. Putting one chair there changes what it is for.
What people notice
The first is how much of the day wants to happen at the edge. Once there is a place to sit half outside, the phone calls happen there, the coffee happens there, the reading happens there. The interior gets quieter because the edge is doing the work.
The second is the light. The engawa is the brightest part of a Japanese house because it is the closest to outside, and the same is true of whatever you make. The place with the open window becomes the place with the light, and people go to it without deciding to.
Where this fits
The genkan is where the outside stops at the door. The oshiire is where things go when not in use. The tokonoma is the one place things are shown. The engawa is the edge that runs along all of it, the room for being neither in nor out. Together they explain why a Japanese house feels the way it does, and none of them require owning less. They require deciding where things happen.
A free two-week sheet. The Doorway Test gives you three questions to ask at the threshold. The engawa is the threshold made wide enough to sit on. You get it by email, free. → Get the free sheet
If you want the whole thirty days on paper: the Danshari Workbook takes the three characters in order, ten days each, one page a day. A4, A5, and Letter. $6.
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This article is part of a series exploring Japanese philosophy and intentional living: