Auspicious and inauspicious tatami mat arrangements

I just started watching a new drama the heroine of which is said to be a Cinderella who lives in a 6-tatami apartment. I investigated this and its actually true that in Japan room sizes can be given in terms of the number of tatami mats that fill the space.

There’s a really cool site where you can actually see what the auspicious and inauspicious tatami mat arrangements are for different numbers of mats. There’s also a diagram of auspicious and inauspicious layouts at ja.wikipedia.org.

What do you think? Clearly the auspicious layouts look a lot more appealing. As far as lining a room (or a portion thereof) with tatami mats, the only downsides I see are that tatami mats are actually quite heavy and also quite large. It pretty much requires a pickup truck to move them and probably a couple strong people to carry them. Even though they’re made of grass fibers, they’re unfortunately not something that an individual could easily just purchase and move on their own. I guess to be really traditional maybe you’d need some kind of wooden cart that you could load them in and pull them home from the Japanese furniture store, possibly with the help of some horses 🙂

Wouldn’t that be cool if you could rent horses in the city by the hour for short moves like this (or maybe some buffalo or other types of ruminants)?