ALTHOUGH no houses have been preserved from this period, a great wealth of precise
information may be drawn from contemporary picture-scrolls. The encyclopaedic in-
terests of Kamakura Yamato-e cover every kind of setting for human activity, from the
mansion to the hovel. In domestic architecture the illustrative style at its best is almost as
accurate as a photograph, and is more revealing; since one of its conventions permits the
removal of the roof to show both interior and exterior in a single view.

Japanese historians distinguish at this time the gradual extinction of the shinden-zukuri,
with the court society it had served, and that emergence of two new forms that were to
dominate the higher levels of domestic construction thereafter: the buke-zukuri of the
warrior caste, and the shoin-zukuri of the Buddhist priests. To Western students, accus-
tomed to striking changes of style and to a much greater variety of structural methods and
visual effects, the distinction tells so little that it seems hardly more than an outline-
maker's convenience. The buke-zukuri must have first shown itself as a rural type based
on the farmhouse. What niceties of detail were proper to its social level were borrowed
from the shinden standard. Its use by the military class was signalized by a few, primitive
facilities for defence: a stockade, a strengthened gate, a guard-house, in forms that could
as well have existed in the age of Queen ' Pimiku'. The only buke-zukuri worthy of the
title in Western eyes is the castle form of the late sixteenth century. The shoin-zukuri
owes its name and its claim to special identity to what in the West would be a single,
secondary detail. The shoin was a study, whose lighting was improved by a kind of bay
window: a feature new in Japanese exteriors, but less emphatic than for instance the Late
Gothic oriel. By the period when the two 'styles' are commonly granted maturity, the
heyday of Ashikaga rule in fifteenth-century Kyōto, the reminders of their martial or
scholarly origin had been so thoroughly overlaid by changes and elaboration that the
dividing line between them was virtually meaningless. I shall henceforth refer to them
only in instances where the names are clearly applicable.

The one truly important distinction in Japanese domestic architecture (above the level
of simple utility) is that between the Chinese and the native styles. The process of evolution
from one of these to the other continued during the Kamakura age, bringing to the
shinden-zukuri tradition in particular a further degree of change. The general plan of the
mansion advanced even farther toward asymmetry, and toward an irregular flowing-
together of building masses. Both of these tendencies were doubtless encouraged by the
new modesty of scale forced on the court aristocracy by loss of income; the modern ideal
discouraged duplication, and by drawing the main blocks together worked for a greater
compactness. (It should be remembered, however, that the Kamakura revolution made

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