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QUESTIONS › WHY DO JAPANESE OFFICES HAVE TATAMI ROOMS?

Question · Working in Japan

Why do Japanese offices have tatami rooms?

Tatami in an office is almost never for sitting. It marks a threshold — shoes off, slow down, this room is Japanese — and it turns up in the most international offices in Tokyo.

Entrance corridor
Entrance corridor

01 · A threshold, not a floor

Indeed Japan puts green and black tatami at the door

The entrance to Indeed Japan’s Tokyo office is small for such a large floor: green and black tatami, with private meeting rooms to one side. The brief was “modern Japanese”, and a foreign designer educated in Japan interpreted tatami, the four seasons and Zen in a way a Japanese designer might not.

Entrance corridor
Entrance corridor
A meeting room
A meeting room

02 · Shoes off with a client

SoftBank’s sunken table over the bay

SoftBank keeps a hori-zataku room among its visitor meeting rooms: shoes off, legs down into a sunken well under a low table, and a view out over the bay. Meetings with clients there are deliberately relaxed.

The hori-zataku sunken-table room
The hori-zataku sunken-table room

03 · Exported

A tatami corner in Ho Chi Minh City

FOURDIGIT’s Vietnam studio is a two-storey villa with a large kitchen, a garage for motorbike commuters and a tatami corner for the local after-lunch nap — a Japanese material used for a habit the Tokyo office does not have.

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