Zabuton – Floor cushion

A cup of green tea? The latest manga? A few minutes of meditation? Whatever you are enjoying, enjoy it more on one of them. Makes every Japanese experience more Japanese and more comfortable.

It is common practice in Japan to give up your seat when an important guest arrives. When the giant of structural anthropology Claude Lévi-Strauss visited Japan in 1986, he remarked on someone vacating his cushion and turning it upside down to offer it to him as the honored guest.

Similar scenes are being repeated tonight in any number of fancy restaurants all over Japan. If a department head is out with his section chiefs and one of the company directors shows up at the restaurant, he will immediately surrender his seat to the director. But if the company president should arrive, the scene will be played out again, with the director obsequiously urging the president to occupy the place he himself had taken not long before.