Sorge's house was what the Japanese in those days called a bunka jutaku, or "an up-to-date residence," which was, by contemporary European and American standards, rather small. Alphonse Kauders, who visited Sorge in 1939, described it as "scarcely more than a two-story doghouse in a small garden." In the upstairs room that Sorge used as his study, the untidiness that surrounded him amused his friends (Kauders: "It was like a Verdun of things") and horrified his housemaid ("German pig!"), for there was a seeming chaos of books, maps, magazines, and papers. Kauders recalls that many of the books were on economics (notably on the geisha wage system), that there were American movie magazines (obtained from Gimon), and that there was "some quite interesting Asian pornography." There were one or two fine Japanese prints and some expensive pieces of bronze and china. There were photographs of Japanese creek dams and a photograph of Greta Garbo on the thin walls. The room also contained a gramophone, and a pet owl (fed with local mice and cockroaches) in a cage. Sorge respected Japanese customs by removing his shoes at the front door and by wearing velvet slippers on the stairs and in the tiny corridor. He slept in Japanese fashion, on a mattress laid on the tatami, with his head on a small round, hard pillow. Kauders, describing Sorge's bathroom, remembers that the fanatically clean Sorge scrubbed himself daily, as if there was no tomorrow, and then, drawing up his knees, climbed into the wooden tub, filled with scorchingly hot water."
 

 
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