Step on a Crack...

Here's a new phrase for you: たたみの縁を踏まない. (or tatami no heri wo huma nai, meaning "we don't step on the borders of the tatami.")

Let's start at the beginning with this one. If you're not sure what tatami is (Dad...), this is the word used for traditional Japanese floors that are made of bamboo grass mats. Every Japanese home (including mine), and most buildings in Japan, have tatami rooms. They are so common that we use tatami count to measure the size of a room. I have a 6 tatami mat, or standard, main room ;)

Now between each tatami mat is a cloth border. In Japanese, the border is called heri, and it's used to cover the edges of the mat so it doesn't get damaged. The color of the mats is fairly generic (wheat color), but there is some variation between the borders. Some can get pretty fancy, with silk, pretty colors and different oriental designs (although the ones in my house are just black material).

Anyways, the reason that I found this phrase (tatami no heri wo huma nai /we don't step on the borders of the tatami) so funny is that it is apparently very rude to step on the borders of a tatami mat. Ok, it makes sense that the border will be damaged if you step on it a lot, but I asked around and it seems most people actually do avoid stepping on the cracks when in a tatami room. TWO YEARS living here and I only just learned this now? I feel like someone just told me I was supposed to take off my shoes at the door ;-p

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We talk about some pretty random things in my staff room, but this all came up as I was helping a coworker do research for a Tea Ceremony class we are doing today and we got onto the subject of borders and cracks for quite some time.

While I was surprised about the tatami border rule, my coworker had a similar reaction when I told her about the children's rhyme: "Step on a crack and break your mother's back, Step on a line and break your mother's spine". The teacher wanted to know where the saying came from, so I did a little research (ie - Googling & Snoping around) and I found some interesting background information about where this rhyme came from. It's a long way off-topic from tatami, but here's a random-fact-of-the-day about the old stepping on a crack superstition. I'll warn you that it's pretty ridiculous, racist, shocking and unheard of by today's standards... but it came from a reliable source, so I think this explanation might be true:

• The superstition goes back to the late 19th - early 20th Century and the racism that was prevalent in this period.The original rhyming verse is thought to be "Step on a crack and your mother will turn black." It was also common to think that walking on the lines in pavement would mean you would marry a (slave) and have a black baby. (Apparently this superstition only applied to Caucasians and because of the rampant prejudice against black people, was considered an activity to avoid.)
• Stepping on cracks also had significance for children. In the mid-20th Century it was popular to tell children that if they stepped on the cracks in the street, they would be eaten by the bears that congregate on street corners waiting for their lunch to walk by.
• Also, the number of lines a person would walk on corresponded with the number of china dishes that the person would break, later in the day.
• Only in the last few decades has the rhyming superstition resurfaced to be the recognized "step on a crack, break your mother's back" and in some areas, two superstitions above are melded together to include the number of lines one steps on will correspond with the number of your mother's bones that are broken.