What Exactly Is the Purpose of the Tokonoma?

Have you ever stayed at a Japanese inn, known as a ryokan, or dined at a Japanese restaurant that serves formal kaiseki cuisine?

Many of the guest rooms in such places are washitsu, Japanese-style rooms. A washitsu is a traditional Japanese room where the floor is covered with tatami mats, the traditional Japanese flooring made of igusa rush grass wrapped around a tightly-bound straw core, and spaces are divided by shoji screens or fusuma sliding doors.

One of the most distinctive features of a washitsu is the tokonoma—an alcove built slightly raised above the rest of the floor. In most cases, flower vases, ceramics, or incense burners are displayed on the alcove floor, while kakejiku hanging scrolls or framed paintings adorn the earthen wall at the back.

However, because Japanese houses rapidly became Westernized after World War II, homes with washitsu have gradually decreased. As a result, opportunities to encounter a tokonoma today have also become more limited.

It is perhaps for this reason that when people do come across a tokonoma at a ryokan or Japanese restaurant, they sometimes sit on it or place their belongings there, unaware of its purpose. Yet this is actually a breach of etiquette and something best avoided. Why is that the case?

In this article, we will trace the history of the tokonoma and explain its meaning and role—something even many Japanese people today tend to forget. By the end, you will understand what a tokonoma truly represents, and your time spent in a ryokan or Japanese restaurant will surely take on a richer significance.

To deepen our understanding of the tokonoma, we must first learn how the washitsu itself came to be.

The prototype of today’s washitsu appeared during the Kamakura period (1185–1333 CE), when the samurai warrior class replaced the aristocracy as the ruling power across Japan. It was in the residences of the samurai that this new room style emerged.

The foundational space in this style of architecture was the zashiki, a room for hosting guests and holding banquets. During these banquets, samurai often shared the same space with nobles, who had previously been socially superior. Previously, samurai had not been permitted to sit with aristocrats due to status differences, but now, in the zashiki, aristocrats and samurai could sit together as equals, freely sharing drinks in this newly created space. This zashiki became the origin of the washitsu.

Features of the zashiki included the following:

1. Formerly, in aristocratic residences, different tatami mats and where they were placed indicated differences in social rank, but these distinctions were removed in the zashiki. Instead, the same type of tatami lay atop the wooden floor and was spread equally across the space. Anyone at a banquet could sit anywhere, and guests were free to change where they sat during the meal.

2. In aristocratic houses only the central area of the room, where high-ranking persons sat, had a ceiling, but the zashiki had a flat ceiling that covered the entire room.

After banquets, Kamakura-period samurai enjoyed various games and wagers in the zashiki using expensive imported Chinese paintings and crafts as prizes. These included toucha or “battle of the tea,” which were contests to identify tea varieties and places of origin by taste; uta-awase, competitions on the quality of self-composed waka poems; sugoroku, which involved rolling dice to advance a game piece; and gambling.

As time went on and these amusements became increasingly popular, dedicated rooms or buildings for them known as kaisho were constructed separate from banquet halls. There, prepared prizes, such as ink or watercolor paintings, were displayed in advance on a wooden platform called an oshiita—a raised, horizontally long area set a step above the regular floor.

Hanging scrolls and paintings are still often displayed in tokonoma today, and these oshiita of the Kamakura period are regarded as one of the origins of the tokonoma.

The kaisho that developed in the Kamakura period had, by the Muromachi period (1333–1573 CE), become increasingly lavish, serving as symbols of political and financial power. But this changed in the late fifteenth century as Japan entered the Warring States period, an era of nationwide civil war. Influenced by the instability of the times, the prior taste for luxury was exchanged for an aesthetic its complete opposite: that of wabi, a serene simplicity.

Among the practices that sprang up under the influence of wabi was wabi-cha, a new style of tea ceremony that valued simplicity and quiet. With wabi-cha, the tea rooms or houses known as chashitsu where hosts entertain guests with tea came to be understated and modest. And this gradually transformed the nature of the kaisho’s zashiki.

What began as a secondary space for games thus, under the influence of wabi-cha, shifted into an official reception hall, and came to hold a central function in the residences of the warrior class.

Even later, when Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan, bringing an end to the Warring States period, and established in Edo (modern-day Tokyo) as the new nation-wide political regime of the Edo shogunate, kaisho evolved into vast reception halls (hiroma) in the castles and mansions of the shogun, daimyo, and samurai.

To maintain stability and peace, the Edo shogunate emphasized a rigid system of social hierarchy—warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants. The shogunate poured energy into deliberately clarifying class differences and hierarchical or master-servant relationships. Alongside that, the hiroma began to function as a space for highlighting the differences in status and position of the people who gathered there—mainly the upper classes, including samurai.

The floors of these halls were on two different heights: an upper level in the deepest part of the room and a lower level set up front. The level of the floors represented the level of social status of the people sitting upon them. The upper level was reserved for lords of the highest social rank: those belonging to shogun and daimyo families.

In fact, during the Muromachi period—even before the appearance of the hiroma—samurai residences already had a space where the lord would meet with vassals, consisting of two adjacent rooms: the “upper room” for the lord and the “lower room” one step below for the vassals.

Though the circumstances are not totally clear, it is thought that from the Muromachi period to the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573–1603 CE), the oshiita in the kaisho of samurai residences and this “upper room” influenced each other and merged. That is believed to have led to the creation of a tokonoma similar to what we see today in modern-day washitsu (or zashitsu). Firstly, tokonoma are for the display of art and craft pieces, and they also appeared on the upper level of hiroma rooms.

Furthermore, the presence of a tokonoma in a hiroma or in a room for receiving visitors and conducting ceremonies marked it as the most prestigious space in the residence, and the person who sat before the tokonoma was tacitly understood to be the one with the highest status. Yet, unlike the upper room, the tokonoma was not itself a place where a high-ranking person sat, so it inevitably was made smaller.

This unspoken rule persists in Japan today. When multiple people sit in a washitsu, it remains customary that the seat directly in front of the tokonoma is where the person who is oldest or of highest status sits.

Today, the tokonoma in formal washitsu or zashitsu come in two forms: the ita-doko, or wooden-floor type, and tatami-doko, or tatami-floor type—reflecting the tokonoma’s dual origins in the wooden-floored oshiita and the tatami-covered upper room.

In addition to symbolizing rank and status, the tokonoma has yet another crucial role.

As previously mentioned, although tokonoma were also built in the castles and residences of the warrior class, another representative location for them was, and is, tea rooms. The tea master Sen no Rikyu (1522–1591 CE) created the fundamentals of the tea room and perfected wabi-cha, the basis of the modern tea ceremony. He emphasized the importance of consideration toward the guest and the preparation of the space and tools to foster spiritual communion between guest and host.

In the tea ceremony, the host expresses consideration for the visitor by decorating the tokonoma with kakejiku hanging scrolls or flower arrangements. While the artworks on the oshiita in kaisho were game prizes, both served as ways for the banquet hosts to welcome visitors. Although the hanging scrolls and ikebana of the tokonoma carry spiritual significance, while the paintings and craftworks of the oshiita were secular, they do seem to share the commonality of playing a role in hospitality.

Furthermore, for Sen no Rikyu, the tea room was also a place where everyone was on equal footing and could enjoy tea in a pure way. Although in the earliest tea rooms there do seem to have been cases in which people of high rank, family lineage, or social station sat on a higher-leveled floor, in the tea rooms of wabicha, nobles did not sit in the tokonoma itself. With the tokonoma’s origins as a symbol of class difference in samurai society, some later tea rooms were even built without a tokonoma at all.

Tea room architecture as pioneered by Sen no Rikyu strongly influenced the structure of later washitsu and zashiki. The hanging scrolls, flowers, and incense burners now displayed in tokonoma of traditional ryokan inns and restaurants embody the spirit of chado, the way of tea, created by Rikyu—emboding this spirit of hospitality toward each guest.

By now you likely understand why the tokonoma is not a place where you should sit or place your luggage.

So the next time you have an opportunity to visit somewhere with a tokonoma, take a moment to pause and appreciate the flower arrangement, incense burner, ceramics, or kakejiku hanging scroll displayed there.

These decorations are carefully chosen to reflect the season, the purpose of the meal or gathering, and sometimes even the likings of the guests themselves. They are there to warmly welcome you, creating a special atmosphere that exists in no other place or moment in time than this one. Precisely this is what marks one of the truest forms of traditional Japanese hospitality, overflowing with pure Japanese spirit.