Japanese Vocabulary for the Home and Rooms

Home, house, and the word you actually use

Japanese splits the idea of home across several words that are not interchangeable. Ie is the physical building and, in older usage, the household line. Uchi is your own home and the people in it, which is why uchi ni imasu is how you say you are staying in, and why uchi no neko means our cat. Jitaku is the neutral, slightly formal word you write on a form or say at work. Jikka is the home you grew up in, the one you go back to at New Year.

For the kind of building, apāto usually means a smaller low-rise block, often two storeys and lighter construction, while manshon means a larger reinforced-concrete building despite what the English word mansion suggests. Ikkodate is a detached house. None of these judge how expensive the place is, so use them descriptively and let the listener ask for details.

Rooms and household things in one table

Two readings deserve a note. Sentakuki is often said sentakki in fast speech, and both are heard. Denshi renji is regularly shortened to renji at home, though renji on its own can also mean a cooking range, so the full form is safer when you are asking where something is.

The rooms English has no word for

The genkan is the recessed floor just inside the front door. Shoes come off there, and the step up onto the raised floor is the line between outside and inside; that is why a visitor says ojama shimasu at the step rather than at the door. The washitsu is a tatami room that may serve as a sitting room by day and a bedroom at night, and the oshiire is the deep closet built into its wall to hold the bedding when it is not in use.

The beranda is a working space rather than a leisure one in most flats, because laundry is normally hung outside there to dry. And the bath is usually split: the yokushitsu holds the tub and the shower area, the datsuijo beside it is where you undress, the senmenjo holds the basin, and the toire is a separate room again. Learners who ask for the bathroom often get directed to the room they did not want.

Inside a Japanese-style room

Tatami are thick woven straw mats laid edge to edge, and rooms are still described by how many fit: rokujō means a six-mat room. Fusuma are the opaque sliding panels between rooms, so they act as movable walls. Shōji are the lighter sliding screens covered in translucent paper that face a window or corridor and let light through. Both slide rather than swing, so the verb is akeru or shimeru, never hiku or osu.

Futon is the bedding set rather than a sofa bed: a shikibuton laid on the tatami, a kakebuton over you, and a makura. You lay it out in the evening with futon o shiku and put it away in the morning with futon o tatamu. Airing it on a dry day is futon o hosu. Zabuton are flat floor cushions for sitting, and in some older houses the engawa is a narrow wooden veranda strip along the outside edge of the room.

The kanji on appliance buttons

The same twenty-five labels recur across almost every machine in a Japanese home, so learning them once pays off on the washing machine, the microwave, the bath panel and the air conditioner at the same time. Iri and kiri are the readings for the on and off marks; you rarely say them aloud, but recognising them stops you turning the wrong thing off.

When something will not start, the useful sentence is a question about the button rather than the machine: kono botan wa nan desu ka. A neighbour or a colleague can answer that in three words, whereas describing the fault requires vocabulary you may not have yet.

Household chores as verb phrases

Notice how many chores are a noun plus a general verb rather than a single specialised verb. Kakeru does duty for vacuuming and ironing, dasu covers putting the rubbish out, and suru attaches to sōji and sentaku directly. This means the object marker o is doing most of the work, so store each chore as the whole phrase and the particle comes free.

Counting floors and saying which one you live on

Three sound changes carry all the difficulty: ikkai, rokkai, hakkai and jukkai double the consonant, and sangai and nangai voice the k into g. Say those five aloud as a block and the rest follow the plain pattern. The counter is the same for building floors and for the floors of a shop, so depāto no hachikai works exactly like your own flat.

Saying where something is in the house

Position words in Japanese follow the noun and take no, so the shape is always X wa Y no ue ni arimasu. The core set is ue for on or above, shita for under, naka for inside, soto for outside, mae for in front, ushiro for behind, tonari for next door, yoko for beside, aida for between, migi for right, hidari for left and oku for further in. Use arimasu for objects and imasu for people and pets.

Two natural variations are worth copying. In casual speech the ni arimasu often collapses to desu, as in sōjiki wa oshiire no naka desu. And when something has been deliberately placed and left there, oite arimasu is more informative than arimasu, because it tells the listener it belongs there rather than happening to be there.

Talking about your home and asking about theirs

Where you live is standard small talk with a new colleague or neighbour, and the expected answer is short: the area, the travel time to the station, and one comment. Adding a small drawback followed by ga and a positive keeps it from sounding like boasting, which is why semai desu ga, benri desu is such a common shape. Osumai is the polite word for someone else's home, and gokazoku for their family.

At the door as a guest

Visiting someone's home has a short fixed script at both ends. You say ojama shimasu as you step up out of the genkan, not at the front door, and ojama shimashita as you leave. Slippers are usually offered; take them, and remember to leave them at the edge if you step onto tatami. Turning your shoes to face the door after taking them off is a small courtesy that is noticed without ever being mentioned.

How to make these words arrive in time

• Label five things you touch daily, then say the sentence rather than the noun: reizōko o akemasu.
• Photograph the control panel of one appliance and read the labels aloud until you no longer hunt.
• Narrate one chore a day in Japanese while you do it, in the -te imasu form: ima sōji shite imasu.
• Practise the floor numbers as a block of five, because ikkai, sangai, rokkai, hakkai and jukkai carry all the irregularity.
• Describe the same room twice, once with arimasu for objects and once with imasu for whoever is in it.