People have long created private spaces by setting up folding screens. This designer capitalized on the age-old custom by applying skillfully adapted techniques of traditional carpentry (used to create box-like structures in Japanese furniture and Buddhist altars by enclosing the ceiling and floor between special beams) to develop a build-it-yourself Japanese-style room called Hako-Ie, or "box house." It is taken for granted in our current golden age of prefab construction that one needs power tools to assemble a house, but this "box house" combines the techniques of expert carpenters through history who specialized in temples and shrines (as found in the castle-town of Aizu, where the manufacturer is located) to defy this preconception in a small yet authentic Japanese-style room that can be assembled without power tools. Crafted of fine materials and requiring not a single nail or screw, it is sturdy enough to be assembled and disassembled repeatedly.

For many years I had dreamed of creating a Japanese-style room-a traditional space revered in Japan, and not a modern reinterpretation-as a build-it-yourself room that anyone could easily assemble or disassemble. People overseas already enjoy Japanese food, clothing, and other basic cultural exports, but this would even let us introduce a form of Japanese "shelter" all around the world. What proved difficult was designing a room that could withstand extremely arid climates, and this took dozens of prototypes. When I finally succeeded, I relaxed in the finished room, and that's when I felt truly proud of my Japanese heritage.

This is an assembly-type Japanese-style room that you can set up inside a room. It's a temporary partition that might seem rather fake, but this Hako-ie ("house in a box") is a real room, made with tasteful materials and fine techniques, with painstaking attention to the smallest detail. Naturally it has tatami mats, as well as an arched ceiling, a lacquered tokonoma corner, and even a wooden veranda. It can be assembled or disassembled in an hour and requires no nails or screws, just a hammer and battens. It is only three mats in area, but offers a high-quality space in which people can relax in comfort.