Give a hall an odd number of bays across the front (three, five, seven, nine or eleven) so that the central axis passes through a bay and a doorway, never through a column.
The alcove fixes the order of the room
Place the tokonoma, a shallow raised alcove for a hanging scroll and flowers, in the wall opposite or beside the entrance, with staggered shelves beside it; the place of honour is the seat in front of it.
The alcove descends from the altar table set against the wall of a Buddhist chapel and from the display alcoves of Muromachi reception rooms; the Shōmei’s drawings of a warrior’s main hall show it together with the shelves (chigaidana) and the writing bay (tsuke-shoin) that define the shoin style. The alcove orients the whole room: the guest of honour sits with his back to it, the host nearest the entrance, and even the direction in which the mats are laid respects it.
The post at the side of the alcove, the tokobashira, is often a specially chosen trunk with its bark or natural shape left visible, one of the few places where the regular timber of the house gives way to nature.
Related rules
Lay out the royal city as a square of nine li on each side, with three gates in each wall and, within, nine roads running north–south and nine east–west, each wide enough for nine chariots abreast.
side = 9 li · 3 gates × 4 sides · 9 jing + 9 wei · road width = 9 gui (tracks)
Find true north and south with a plumb-lined post and the shadows of sunrise and sunset, checked by the pole star; then turn the principal hall of every compound to face south.
Set out the posts of a house on a square grid of one ken (six shaku, about 1.82 m) and size rooms, doors, screens and mats to fit the grid.
1 ken = 6 shaku ≈ 1.82 m · 1 tsubo = 1 ken² ≈ 3.3 m² = 2 mats
In the Kyoto system (kyō-ma) fix the mat (6.3 × 3.15 shaku, about 1.91 × 0.955 m) and set the posts outside it; in the Edo system (edo-ma) fix the post grid at 6 shaku and cut the mats to fit between the posts, making them smaller.
kyō-ma ≈ 191 × 95.5 cm · chūkyō-ma ≈ 182 × 91 cm · edo-ma ≈ 176 × 88 cm
Lay the mats of a room so that their joints form T-junctions: no point where the corners of four mats meet, and no continuous seam running straight across the room.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The alcove fixes the order of the room”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/tokonoma. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.