The recent “tiny house movement” may be relatively new but that is not the case with tiny houses themselves. And in fact, strictly speaking, the tiny house movement isn’t new either. Before the modern era, most houses were tiny unless they were for the wealthy. While we tend to assume that the vast majority of people lived in poverty and had no options but to live in a small house, even 1,000 years ago the tiny house was already a “choice” for some. Surprisingly enough, there were people who sought rural houses, smaller than the then-average (Just imagine what kind of places people lived in the Middle Ages!) for almost exactly the same reason we might be attracted to tiny houses today. In medieval Japan, people called their version of the tiny house “草庵 (so-an)” which meant “thatched grass hut” built away from home – usually in the depths of nature – or as outbuildings on a farm. Practitioners of Buddhism, artists and/or wanderers created the “tiny house movement” a thousand years ago in Japan by combining monastic religious pursuits and a plain lifestyle of “have-nots” that sought beauty in nature, and created so-an as a base for freer, ideal life.

So-an survives to this day conceptually and aesthetically but it’s not easy to physically replicate because the original buildings have have rotted away long ago leaving few archeological remains. We can only guess at their form from literature and traces remaining in old, rural communities.