Ironically, I was held up a bit in writing today's entry thanks to Google's new login system, which, in its efforts to be more user-friendly and secure, actually now requires me to log IN to one Google account, then log back out of it, and then log in to the one that I use to write these. Google enjoys using the tagline, "One password, all of Google," conveniently forgetting that some of us have several Google accounts: one for work; one for other work; one for friends; one for networking; the one we created back when we got our first Gmail invite and thought that a jokey-sounding email address would be great, not realizing that very few university librarians are going to respond to research requests from "xXxBaDaZZ420xXx@gmail.com" and that you'll need something a bit more professional to put on the header of your resume. (Yes, I just checked. It's available, for now. Knock yourself out.)
Unlike Google, which shares with Adobe Photoshop the very definition of the term "feature creep," the simple door, which humans the world over operate on a daily basis, has maintained the same basic form and function for millennia. (Unless you were born in a barn, as my mother would say. This makes no sense. I've spent a bit of time in barns; they also have doors. I keep meaning to ask her about that.)
Doors work pretty much the same no matter where you are in the world. A panel of some material is placed over a basically human-shaped hole in the wall; said human then manipulates the panel in some way in order to swing it or slide it or fold it open.
You can tell a lot about a society and a people by its doors. Big, heavy doors indicate that passage from one side of the wall in which the door is installed to the other is strictly controlled at best and contraindicated at worst. There could be anything on the other side of the door that we want to keep out (or in): miserable weather; wild animals; prisoners; zombies; a particularly cunning goat. Lighter doors indicate a level of civility while still marking a boundary. Thin panel doors, such as those found in American homes, provide a semblance of privacy while still allowing access, in case of an emergency or if the father of a sleepy high school student wants to kick it open at 7 AM and turn on the lights while shouting in German.
Doors, like any interface, both mirror and alter the object passing through them. Imagine an alien species examining an empty American house. They would be able to make a series of basic assumptions, simply by examining a standard door. They would notice that exterior doors provide more security, in the form of sturdier construction and heavy locks, and conclude that the inhabitants lived in a society in which others could not be trusted fully. They could examine the dimensions of the doorframes and make a basic guess at the size and shape of humanity. (Even more so if they had our gravitational constant and the composition of our atmosphere to calculate from.) They could even deduce quite a bit from the study of doorknobs: hand size and shape, strength, arm position and radial movement required. A sufficiently clever species could probably work out the basic size, shape, and composition of a human being without ever seeing one, just from examining a door.
Japanese doors can be similarly studied, especially in terms of their effect on non-Japanese. The doors in my apartment, for example. From them I can conclude that doors, interior ones at least, serve a purely symbolic purpose, as the ones in my home keep out neither sound nor extremes of temperature nor small-to-medium sized insects. They only barely manage to prevent the passage of light by being just dense enough to prohibit the passage of photons.
I can also conclude that Japanese people are somewhat shorter in stature than the average Westerner, another statement that is blindingly obvious to anyone who has ever spent over fifteen minutes in Japan. The shorter Japanese doorsill means that anyone over 5' 9" here begins to walk with a permanent hunch after a while, unless they want a permanent dent in their skull at about forehead level.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like to see the doorway of an alien home, and I wonder how much I could deduce from it.
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