Abstract
The intention is to explore the differentiation or evolution of the chest of drawers in traditional Korean, Western, and Japanese furniture in order to know how the drawers currently becoming popular in Korea were developed historically. The Korean furniture centered in $Jang$, $Nong$, and $Bandazi$ used in the tradition generally, the Western furniture involved in drawers, and the Japanese furniture called $Tansu$ in Japanese called the chest of drawers were focused on the study because the Western and Japanese drawers affected the development of the chest of drawers in Korean furniture during the late 19th century and the Japanese Ruling Era, respectively. As a result, the Korean furniture was not shown the chest of drawers but only small drawers that store small items located in the upper part of $Jang$, $Nong$, and $Bandazi$ mostly used as wardrobe, while the traditional Japanese furniture developed from Edo period (1607-1868) had showed a wide variety of chest of drawers like $Isho-dansu$, $Mizuya-dansu$, $Kusuri-dansu$, $Cho-dansu$, $Funa-dansu$, $Kaidan-dansu$, $Nagamochi-dansu$, $Kuruma-dansu$, and so on, for specialized storage. And in the traditional Western furniture were presented the chest like a large-box form, mule chest, chest of drawers, cabinet, commode, highboy, tallboy, wardrobe, secretary drawer and bureau with document drawer invented and evolved throughout the 15th-18th century. Therefore, the chest of drawers in contemporary Korean furniture is supposed to adopt the Japanese and Western drawer form and to ensure the continual production from the obvious utility of the design with decoration for our current everyday lives.