Chabudai

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Chabudai (卓袱台) is a short-legged table used in traditional Japanese homes. Occupants are seated on the tatami floor rather than using chairs. The four legs of a chabudai are retractable.

Aside from the kitchen, bathroom, toilet and genkan (entrance area), a traditional Japanese house does not have designated utility for each room. Any room can be a living room, dining room, study room or bed (futon) room. This is possible because all the necessary furniture is portable, being stored in Oshiire, a small section of the house used for storage. Large traditional houses often have only one room under the roof while kitchen, bathroom and toilet are attached on the side of the house as extensions. Somewhat similar to modern offices, partitions within the house are created by fusuma, sliding doors made from wood and paper, which are also portable and easily removed. Fusuma seal each partition from top to bottom and can create mini rooms within the house. In large gatherings, these partitions may be removed to create one large meeting room. During normal days, partitions create much smaller and more manageable living space.

Chabudai are used for various purposes, such as a study table for children, a work bench for needle work, and most importantly, a dinner table for the entire family. In the winter, the chabudai is often replaced by a kotatsu, which looks like a chabudai except it has a removable top and a heater underneath.

[edit] Chabudai Gaeshi

In the anime version of Star of the Giants, an old-fashioned, short tempered patriarch of the family flipped the chabudai when he suffered a moral indignation (his son lied), consequently ruining the dinner for everyone. In the original manga version, the father hit the central character. The scene was used in the ending song of the anime, so was aired repeatedly and subsequently created a cliche of an inexplicable outburst by an authority figure which ruins everything.

This practice is also known as Flipping Chabudai, and has been used figuratively by Shigeru Miyamoto to scrap projects he was not satisfied with. Eiji Aonuma, whose initial one year long development of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was scrapped by Miyamoto, has described "Chabudai Gaeshi" as an "action of old-fashioned Japanese fathers", and that "doing so now would destroy the family".[1]