I think it has or had practical reasons. It rains a lot in Japan, and its prime occupation used to be flooded field rice farming. So it is/was normal for shoes coming home to be in a somewhat gross state.
Old farmer style houses in Japan have an entrance area behind the main sliding doors in bare soil[1], and a wooden platform at waist height between it to hallways. The platform can be sat on to take off shoes or to drop off bags of produces, and then hallways and tatami matted areas are further raised an inch or two - the walking floor level of houses are therefore give or take a whole feet off the ground. These together create multiple mental boundaries for dirtiness.
Modern houses have it miniaturized into just a cinder-block high gap or sometimes just industrial colored tiles before a bump. But IMO it's still nice being able to leave wet shoes and umbrellas there.
1: 土間 or doma, meaning soil-space. Oddly this transliteration coincides with "home" in Russian(and of course rhymes with Latin domus).
Old farmer style houses in Japan have an entrance area behind the main sliding doors in bare soil[1], and a wooden platform at waist height between it to hallways. The platform can be sat on to take off shoes or to drop off bags of produces, and then hallways and tatami matted areas are further raised an inch or two - the walking floor level of houses are therefore give or take a whole feet off the ground. These together create multiple mental boundaries for dirtiness.
Modern houses have it miniaturized into just a cinder-block high gap or sometimes just industrial colored tiles before a bump. But IMO it's still nice being able to leave wet shoes and umbrellas there.
1: 土間 or doma, meaning soil-space. Oddly this transliteration coincides with "home" in Russian(and of course rhymes with Latin domus).