Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
There's a poetic term in Japanese I've been thinking about recently, it's "真秀等場", pronounced "mahoraba". Like many archaic terms from Japanese literature, it eludes a good English translation, but means something like "a place of splendour", although its common use is more akin to our "home sweet home". The term can be found most commonly in the marketing for twee traditional inns and bathhouses, meant to elicit notions of traditional comfort and relaxation. Its not a term that gets used often, and seems to be a purely poetic turn of phrase. We may get a better insight into the term if we break it down: first is "真秀" meaning complete, genuine, true; next "等" meaning something like class or quality here; and finally "場" meaning place. Altogether we get "A place of genuine quality", although this translation is lacking in cultural context, which we can find through its use in art.
The 2005 anime "Mahoraba Heartful Days" is a two-cour adaptation of the manga of the same name. Its one of my favourites and how I was introduced to the term in the first place. It follows the lives of the tenants of a shared accommodation building called "Narutaki-House", an old & traditionally built house in urban Tokyo with the high school girl Kozue Aoba as its acting landlord. Although the show starts from the perspective of a new renter moving in, by the latter half the episodes drop any one protagonist, with each of the seven occupants having their own focus and episodes. In a way the building itself becomes the foremost protagonist, framing and connecting the characters and events. In multiple episodes the house even takes a starring role, such as in the "hide-and-seek" episode, where we get to know the building inside and out. Over time the residents grow strong bonds with each other, and Narutaki-House becomes the place that they all belong: their mahoraba. Each nook and cranny of the building gets an event attached to it, and by having the building so integral, we learn to love it too by its association with the shenanigans of the story. It's always impressive when fiction can describe to you a location so well that you feel like you could find your way around it, but doubly so when it is able to endear you to it at the same time. The clubrooms of Genshiken and GJ-bu, the Hidamari apartment block, or Alpha's seaside cafe. All of them become dear to you go through their respective series, and your memories of those places become nearly as real as those places from your own life. When I return to shows like these, it almost feels like I'm stepping back into a building I haven't frequented in a while.
^ Annotated floorplan of Narutaki-House
I have lived in quite a few shared houses in my time (and half-lived in several more), and although the inter-tenant intimacy portrayed in Heartful Days may be a little fantastical, the connection you grow to buildings from the memories and experiences you have in them is very real. Each house has its own personality, defined by the stage of life you were in, the people who lived there at that time, and the characteristics and layout of the building itself. Every house has its own quirks, ways in which is differs peculiarly from others you've experienced, and over time you'll grow to cherish those peculiarities just as you cherish the peculiarities of your friends. One house I lived in had a soft-toilet seat that became an object of much interest. Another I spent a lot of time in had a hole in the wall and a (very noisy) boiler in the living room. These little quirks make houses unique and loveable. But these houses are transient too. No one lives in shared houses like these forever, and within a year or two you will move out as will those housemates you had connection with. Its actually an everyday tragedy, even though it must be silly to be sentimental over such things. Whenever I pass by these houses I find it strange that the people in them now know nothing of us previous residents, and all the things we did there; just as we never gave second thought to the people who lived there before us. And now those places that felt like home are locked off forever, it'd be a crime to walk in there when just a few years ago it was as natural as breathing. Over time buildings will inevitable change, but there's nothing quite like the anger I feel when I see a building once important to me be altered with new decoration or extension, or even worse demolished in its entirety. How dare they! I often walk past my grandparents' old house. I can still recall childhood images of it vividly in my mind, and could sketch a perfect floorplan of the place. The paisley wallpaper and William Morris carpets. The old well covered over with mesh and glass. The intimidating sobriety of the Green Room, the childish innocence of the Blue Room, the forbidding quietness of the Pink Room. I have so many primordial memories from that place, but for the last decade its been occupied by foreign souls, who care nothing about the legacy that house has for my family. The day they painted over the iconic bottle-green gables with a drab black I had to stop myself from knocking on the door and teaching them a thing or two about colour theory. But if I had done that I probably would have seen they'd taken out the carpets...
In the Kojiki, one of the foundational texts of the Japanese people, the errant yet noble Prince Takeru wrote a poem from where the term "mahoraba" was first coined:
倭は国の真秀等場 畳なづく青垣山籠れる 倭し麗しHere the prince describes his return to the land of Yamato: the heartland of the Japanese people. Its beauty, its privacy, its homeliness. This is where he belongs and where he feels safe. Although there may be many other valleys like it, this one is his. It's where his people live and where he grew up; those memories have impregnated the very soil with character and significance. He's back home.
