O
Passing through the archaic path of Kyoto’s Ninenzaka, it was as though time had stretched centuries back. The Heian stone pavements and wooden machiyas carried the weight of a distant memory, containing within it a sensibility which bears delight in slowness and tranquility. However, its incorporation within modern marketing raises an intriguing contradiction between the aestheticization of the ‘bland’ and the entertaining noise of business advertising. It is a friction between the slow, quiet transitions of events and the rushed, persistent recurrence of consumerism. While Adorno and Horkheimer mentioned in the Dialectic of Enlightenment that in the case of the culture industry, all mass culture under monopoly is identical,1placeholder Kyoto’s consumerist recoil might provide an alternative view regarding the self-defeating nature of modern advertising in the face of traditional Japanese aesthetics.
The famous Starbucks of Ninenzaka, possessing the taste of traditional Japanese architecture, is advertised across digital spaces as an atmosphere demonstrating calm, quiet, and nostalgic mise-en-scène. Its praises, images, and descriptions circulate around social media platforms primarily expressing its desirably composed and sensitive characteristics. Expecting visitors look forward to its laid-back demeanor only to eventually discover that inside it resides heavy congestion of customers, as well as their constant production of noise and motion regardless of the narrowness of space. Captured photographs intended for social media posts become frustrating provided that no camera angle ever attains the place’s aesthetic ideal. The crowd majorly occupying the background simply does not fit the entire picture.
Some customers leave the café with disappointment, and newly arrived guests rush towards recently vacated seats. Others would simply be standing around the edges of this small room as they hope for more customers to leave the café. As I occupied one of the tables, some of those who were standing and waiting around the room mindfully anticipated, attentively awaiting my departure as I finished drinking my brewed coffee. As much as I wanted to remain unbothered and relaxed, it led to this experience being quite awkward. Having this view in mind not only disheartens people’s expectations from the place’s aesthetics but also causes tension between customers due to the restlessness concentrated within a small establishment. The café’s spatial arrangements are meant only for a limited number of customers and populating it with such crowd leads to aesthetic incompatibility. Unlike the extravagances of concerts that feed from the plenitude of crowds, the elegance of such traditional aesthetics is augmented by the mundane. Though people might think that this frustration is a consequence of advertising failure, I’d rather propose that this is, in fact, an aesthetic success. Perhaps, it could be considered as a silent – perhaps an unintended – critique of consumerism entrenched in neoliberalism.
I
The Japanese word shizen contains in ancient times obscure and spontaneous elements detached from the modern-day interpretations of nature and environment.2placeholder While it is often translated as nature in English, it originally meant ‘if, accidentally’ which reveals the spontaneity of things and recognizes the transitory character of the world. It is somewhat similar to the meaning of the Chinese ziran which refers to the unaltered principle of the world that must be permitted by the people and is the ephemeral law of the Tao.3placeholder
The earliest writing that integrates shizen in literature was from the Kanginshu. It is an anthology of 311 Japanese songs originating from the Muromachi period which was centered on 15th century Kyoto. The English translation of the song where the word was expressed is as follows:
“Wind and rain are the songs of heaven and earth, floating water and dropping leaves are the songs of all things. The voices of dragons, tigers, cranes, phoenixes, spring nightingales, autumn grasshoppers, animals and insects are the songs of shizen.”4placeholder
These elements of the world: wind, leaves, animals, etc. are contemplated as songs of shizen which, like music, are vibratory and harmonic in essence. It is ‘how things are’ without subjecting them to human notions of order. Unlike the transitory and force-like character of the word, the development of the Latin natura had a different trajectory in the Western sensibility. It referred to the entirety of the natural and physical world which characterizes more of a fixed state, such as the scientific laws associated with particles, motions, and oscillations. Human products are then perceived to be mere imitations of the natural process.5placeholder
The development of Western ideas and practices, particularly in their instrumentalizations of science and technology, revere their conceptualizations of nature as embedded with permanent laws and theories instead of recognizing the expressions of these ideologies as products of humanistic systematizations. Modernity’s notion of order is used to subjugate natural chaos through refraining physical matter back into repetitive models. These models tend to repress the dynamisms of reality through regressing them into the aesthetic and logical structures of consciousness. As Berardi put it in his work Breathing: “The silence of God resounds as chaos, as we have grown unable to breathe at the rhythm of our own respiration, which has been captured by the apocalyptic force of the algorithm of financial capitalism.”6placeholder Since the infinity of chaos constantly waiting at the edge of our established structures is stronger than this artificial order, we should not strive to subjugate chaos to order. Waging war with chaos will only reproduce more chaos. We must instead search for ways to befriend this chaos.7placeholder As Deleuze and Guattari pointed out in their work What Is Philosophy?,
“art, science, and philosophy require more: they cast planes over the chaos. These three disciplines are not like religions that invoke dynasties of gods, or the epiphany of a single god, in order to paint a firmament on the umbrella, like the figures of an Urdoxa from which opinions stem. Philosophy, science, and art want us to tear open the firmament and plunge into the chaos.”8placeholder
Tanizaki’s work entitled In Praise of Shadows recognizes the house as a simple order or structure situated in the middle of this entropic cosmos. Can there perhaps be a kind of beauty that comes from plunging the house into chaos? With much creativity, he utilized architecture, landscaping, and interior design as artistic means of embracing chaos through the literal and metaphorical integration of shadows across space. As the house became more normalized over the ages, its concept has become so overlooked that we have forgotten that it is indeed one of these micro-orders we persistently formed amidst the uncertainties of life.
The Oriental sensibility, which is the aesthetic foundation of what Tanizaki referred to as East Asian countries like Japan and China, forms connection between pleasure and the inevitable because it finds meaning and contentment in things as they are. This is why Orientals experience no discontent in darkness as an act of resignation to this inevitable void. As Tanizaki stated, when light is scarce, light is scarce; and yes, you read that correctly. Orientals immerse themselves in darkness, finding its particular erotic beauty.9placeholder The Western development of lighting technology from candles to electric bulbs led to the eradication of even the slightest shadows, innately expressing their discontent in darkness.
We can concretize this by briefly comparing window designs from traditional Japanese with modernist European architecture. The contemporary westernization of modern houses increasingly utilizes clear glass in windows. It delivers a feeling of bright coziness associated with the smooth, flawless construction of interiors. Even among walls and partitions has this transparency already been applied either partially or entirely. An example of this inoffensive design includes the Farnsworth House of Chicago, where everything internal has already been exposed to the external; there is nothing hidden. Mystery and its erotic beauty have no belonging in these places of transparency. Modern urban centers increasingly became prevalent of these banal structures rooted in the analgesic principles of clarity and transparency, turning spaces into what Byung-Chul Han described as instagrammable: free of rough edges, of conflicts or contradictions that could cause pain.10placeholder
Han criticized transparency widely in his book The Transparency Society due to the neoliberal dispositive to utilize it in dismantling social barriers for the purpose of heightened surveillance, turning people into more predictable beings. Moreover, his particular critique of transparency concerning beauty proposes that transparency is not the medium of the beautiful.11placeholder He said that beauty can only be revealed if it is detached from the act of veiling since unveiled things remain self-identical under the conditions of the veil.12placeholder What he meant was that if things have to be revealed for them to be considered beautiful, then this act of revealing becoming the basis of beauty is merely subjected to its exhibition value.
Han further elaborates Agamben’s thoughts and says that exhibition, such as selfies and personal expressions, empties the face into a site preceding expression.13placeholder This is evident among porn stars, whose roles are usually to transparently expose their bodies, naked, demanding also their faces to be overloaded with expressions until these faces burst with exhibition value.14placeholder However, even when a body is still clothed, if its face can gain attraction only as a product of being complemented by a naked body, or even the excess of its expressions, this already makes the basis of its beauty utterly pornographic.15placeholder The face is reduced to the state of being unveiled and can only be considered beautiful under the same conditions of exposure. Thus, exhibition value, despite the differences among veiled things, compels the beauty in revealing them into merely becoming the expression of the same.
Heidegger’s essay Plato’s Doctrine of Truth also contains an important conception of this process of unveiling. He borrows the Greek word Aletheia (ἀλήθεια) to represent the idea of unhiddenness, proposing that being hidden is always composed of two essential characteristics. The first characteristic is the accessibility of that thing which appears and what allows this thing to appear. The second one is the constant overcoming of hiddenness of the hidden, which comes in the forms of closing, disguising, and dissembling.16placeholder This essential and fundamental Truth is partially revealed by the constant presencing of ‘being’ through an overcoming of some of its concealments.17placeholder An important question that emerges here is whether the essence of a thing can ever be completely unconcealed or not.
He points that our ideas of truths in things are still based on the values we assume to be valid, which, in his reading of Nietzsche’s metaphysics, is something absurd, since values can always be revaluated. Even the idea of truth itself is bound by other ideas and the values that presuppose it. As Heidegger directly states, “Whoever wants to act and has to act in a world determined by ‘the ideas’ needs, before all else, a view of the ideas.”18placeholder This is indeed a plausible conclusion that recognizes the elusive character of unhiddenness due to the nature of idea. It somewhat liquifies the rigid binary between veiling and unveiling because a complete revealing for him is an impossibility. Nevertheless, the main problem with this perspective is that it still fails to effectively overcome the dichotomy of veiling and unveiling with regards to beauty. It still subjects beauty to the acts of revealing and concealing. This claim can be observed from this passage:
“However, once the sun itself is truly seen – or, to drop the metaphor, once the highest idea is caught sight of – then one may draw the conclusion – gathered together (from the highest idea itself) – that obviously for all people this idea of the good is the source both of all that is right and of all that is beautiful.”19placeholder
Tanizaki’s aestheticization of shadows effectively overcomes this dichotomy through the erotic nature of Japanese design that is further elaborated in the next chapter. Even Heidegger became fond of Japanese thought, most especially when he met and read the works of some Kyoto School philosophers like Kitaro Nishida and Daisetsu Teitaro Suzuki because of their dedication to the philosophy of Zen in Japanese Metaphysics. The writings of the Kyoto School were largely complementary to the philosophy of Heidegger himself. Needless to say, Tanizaki’s aestheticization of shadows offers a promising concretization of this metaphysics which deserves to be explored in its own right.
Returning to Tanizaki and his concretization of veiling, the use of Japanese papers instead of glass in windows produces a condition of gentle obscurity that incorporates elegance. The quality of elegance requires filth – dissimilar to the clarity ingrained in crystals that consolidate each ray of light into an extravagant brightness. The traditional Japanese window contains such gentleness by allowing a minimal amount of light envelop softly into the room. He even compares such gentleness with the soft surface of the first snowfall, which, when touched, crumpled, or folded, creates no sound.20placeholder This is what it means when the Orient finds beauty in darkness instead of eliminating it with bright illumination. Shadows become part of the aesthetic whole, integrated in both taste and sensibility.
II
Shadows are aestheticized by Tanizaki in three fluid ways: the appreciation of decay (mono no aware), the recognition of the unknown (yūgen), and the admiration of crudeness (wabi). A way of overcoming the subordination of things into the binary of veiling and unveiling is to aestheticize the veil itself as something which reveals meaning; therefore, dissolving their rigid opposition. Aestheticized shadows are physical applications of this synthesis, and internalizing this aesthetic initiates the development of a sensibility that experiences satisfaction in the presence of darkness, helping us harmonize with the unpleasant aspects of this entirety we call nature. Everybody loves nature until they literally step on shit.
Fecal matter seems to be a great representation of wabi which modern houses and cities are aesthetically incompatible with. Steve Odin translated the aesthetic concept as ‘rustic poverty’ through its expression of, for lack of a better term, ‘rural brusqueness’ that allows offense, vulgarity, and negativity to freely manifest.21placeholder Unlike the neoliberal obsession with positivity, likeability, and painlessness, the traditional Japanese toilet welcomes such rustic brusqueness in their bathrooms. As Han pointed out this obsession in his book The Palliative Society:
“Today, a universal algophobia rules: a generalized fear of pain. The ability to tolerate pain is rapidly diminishing. The consequence of this algophobia is a permanent anesthesia. All painful conditions are avoided. Even the pain of love is treated as suspect. This algophobia extends into society. Less and less space is given to conflicts and controversies that might prompt painful discussions. […]
We live in a society of positivity that tries to extinguish any form of negativity. Pain is negativity par excellence. This paradigm shift is also present in psychology, where there has been a movement away from a negative ‘psychology of suffering’ and towards a ‘positive psychology’ concerned with well-being, happiness and optimism. Negative thoughts are to be avoided.”22placeholder
Tanizaki described the Japanese toilet as present with spiritual repose. Though fecal matter may seem like an odd presence in the modernized city, he reverses this judgment based on the aesthetic whole of Shinto shrines. He says that an impeccably clean toilet situated in a traditional Japanese temple would seem much more unmatched than an old, dimly lit lavatory.23placeholder The silence and dimness allow the individual to be lost in meditation and become sensitive to even the slightest sounds, causing us to listen to the hum of a mosquito or appreciate the sound of a softly falling rain.24placeholder
However, cleaning a traditional Japanese lavatory is quite a task. First, its flooring would either be made from wood or tatami matting. Second, the traditional toilet is lowered and almost flat above the surface of the floor. Any urine or feces that goes beyond the lowered toilet leads to the wooden or tatami flooring absorbing these organic materials. Since wood can easily decay when stained by these, the lavatory guests and cleaners must be mindful of their care and usage of the place. Guests would have to maintain discipline while cleaners would have to regularly condition the area. Thus, the purpose of the place is not reduced to its mere functionality but encourages the collective to value the objects of the world. Today, there is a palliative demand and valuation of tiles and concrete that are practical in terms of cleanliness and durability, since these materials transform spaces into inoffensive territories.
The organicity of wood makes it susceptible to rot. Primarily utilizing wood to build house structures is less favorable to those who aim for durability, given that the strongest of concretes last longer than the toughest of woods. Although, its organicity reminds us of one of the most inevitable forces of nature: death. Japanese aesthetics appreciates this transience, aestheticizing it through mono no aware, which acknowledges the beauty that resides in impermanence. The concept literally translates to the ‘pathos of things’, encouraging the development of sensitivity towards the perishability of things via the passage of time.25placeholder Similarly, in the Hanami festivals of Japan, the existential center of the event is the transient beauty of the sakura that ends blooming in a week or two. This aesthetic contains the value for the transience of life in the face of death. We are reminded of making the most out of the limited time we have on Earth.
Aside from the cherry blossoms, the moss is another symbolism of death that deserves attention. The fact that it is a living thing means it will soon embrace its momentary demise. Amidst the modern city solidified by concrete, the propagation of moss on the surface of concrete not only slowly erodes the material but also covers objects with soft and gentle texture. The eventual erosion of concrete due to the moisture and rooting of mosses reveals the superiority of irreducible chaos over artificial order, and the presence of moss on concrete is its way of participating in the transitory.
Mosses enhance the aesthetic value of a traditional chaniwa or a Shinto shrine. The absence of moss in these places would not have had the same impact on guests because the crude entropy acting as the veil of the inorganic provides an elegant seduction that invites people with its mysteries. For some people, places heavily covered with mosses, especially in the dark, may seem somewhat haunted, while for others, utterly divine. It creates a distance between humans and the world, leaving a resonant space where the other can thrive that reminds us of a world which exists beyond our rigid conditions. These mosses thrive in the balance between light and dark, which the Japanese aesthetic principle nōtan exemplifies.26placeholder This principle creates harmony instead of division between light and dark, or perhaps in a more three-dimensional space can be applied to the procedures of veiling and unveiling. This is where the concept of yūgen enters.
During the late Heian period, Japan borrowed the word yūgen from the ancient Chinese word you xuan, referring to something too deep to comprehend. The Japanese adaptation of the word can be regarded as yū (dimness, shadow-filled) and gen (darkness), or in a much more complete translation, the “artistic effect both mysterious and ineffable, of a subtle, complex tone achieved by emphasizing the unspoken connotations of words and the implications of a poetic situation.”27placeholder It is recognizing and finding beauty in the failure of human language to fully comprehend the mysteriousness of the universe that is beyond our understanding. Capturing the world with our concepts only creates the previously discussed artificial order which, in the near future, will arrive at its eventual collapse. Much like the dispersion and progression of dominant Western theories and praxes mainly aiming for the mastery of the world, these creations are still doomed to fail much like everything else. The only difference is that while these theories and praxes remain and survive, they territorialize the human condition farther from the supple and organic state of things. These dispersions have even reduced Japanese cities like Osaka and Tokyo into territories largely adapting to the architecture and consumerism of the typical Western metropolis.
An example of this territorialization includes Adolf Loos’ initial attempt for minimalism in his 1908 essay Ornament and Crime, aiming to break away from the Viennese tradition in favor of simplicity. His work became the cornerstone for European modernist architecture that can be likened to the structural designs of Villa Savoye in Paris or the Lovell House in Los Angeles.28placeholder This initial attempt further developed into what architects today call the International Style, which is basically the reproduction of the same. Though Loos’ simplistic movement in design led to the death of the ornament, his intentions were innately pure in the sense that laborers during his time were not paid for the extra efforts required to create ornaments and the manual designing of objects. It brought unnecessary efforts for laborers, and he stated that we already have the arts to take the place of ornaments.29placeholder But what this perspective failed to cover was the intrinsic nature of the ornament in Japanese Geido. Of course, he is primarily criticizing the practices of the West wherein design has evolved altogether with the logic of capitalist accumulation. However, stripping the traditional Japanese house from its ornamental essence would mean discarding the Oriental sensibility embedded in houses that turn them into their homes.
Modernity’s minimalist taste in architecture and interior design, including the preference for the smooth and neutral-toned, or at times monochromatic, originated from Loos’ simple and straightforward sentiments that aim for structures that are both efficient and innocuous. On the other hand, Japanese minimalism contains a mysterious depth that provides us with the gifts of darkness. Unlike European minimalism that reduces objects and structures into mere functionality, Japanese minimalism is more of a disengagement. Let us discuss actual examples from Tanizaki so that we can better visualize the actual applications of this minimalism.
For instance, their gold-decorated lacquerwares are not meant to be taken in at a single glance but should be left in the dark where a portion of it gathers a faint light while its patterns are slowly receding into darkness.30placeholder He further explains that the luster of the lacquer situated under a quiet night reflects the gentle candlelight, inviting one to a state of deep contemplation.31placeholder Ceramics or porcelains which are mostly used in the kitchenware of International Style structures lack the shadows that give these objects enough depth and mystery. Furthermore, Tanizaki describes the beauty of golden objects found among furniture designs. He uses gold leaf that is to be found among sliding door designs as an example and explained that if one were to imagine the bare darkness that lurks within the innermost rooms where sunlight almost never penetrates, this gold leaf design will gather a distant glimmer of light. It will cast an ethereal glow of faint golden illumination that stands out in the middle of darkness; and in this darkness resides an erotic beauty beyond what words could ever speak.32placeholder As Tanizaki puts it:
“And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.”33placeholder
There can be endless concretizations of aestheticizing shadows in the traditional Japanese interior that are beautiful only under the elegant conditions of darkness. Even its wall, which is designed with neutral color, does not serve the same purpose as European minimalism’s inoffensive temperament. While it may first be seen as something which lacks ornament, Tanizaki explained that this Western perception of ornamental lack in plain walls is caused by their failure to understand the meaningfulness of shadows.34placeholder The West may have integrated the same plainness in their modernized architecture; their plainness is still meant to be placed under the conditions of light, whereas the plainness of walls, as well as the positioning of wall decorations in the Orient are created as a contingent space where shadows cast themselves, inviting inside their homes the repose of the tragic.
Japanese minimalism does not simplify but enriches the meaning of things in the world, providing external sources of shared realities and, borrowing from Guattari’s chaosmosis, existential refrains for the human condition and its subjectivities. This form of minimalism is an act of letting nature take its course tied with the principle of yūgen. It is an act of design that does not resist entropy; it instead befriends chaos by preserving the manifestations of transience in taste. The beauty of this act is that it isn’t exactly a beautification of the veil but a certain aesthetic attitude of finding pleasure in one’s will to declare a distance between one’s existence and the world beyond the comprehension of one’s own consciousness. It is a constructive disengagement that finds more value in this enigmatic other than from the structured expressions of individuality — that, perhaps, one has realized that it would be far better not to intervene at all, or if one ever thinks of intervening, will not do it at the expense of the other.
∞
Returning to shizen, these things we have discussed explore the various aesthetic principles that bring us closer to the transient quality of nature. Such ideas propose that instead of perceiving the world as something we must subjugate and control, it can rather be understood as the manifestations of this enigma beyond the borders of artificial order. In this case, we do not aim to master the world but search for reasons why the world is far more superior to us.
Tanizaki may have written the book as a discussion about different little orders; his ideas still suggest the consideration and preservation of the transitory in design. This helps us reflect and contemplate about how conservative Japan found existential belonging in shadows as a manner through which their struggles are imbued with meaning and are expressed throughout their ordinary lives. Perhaps, their relationship with nature and its fleeting destructions have determined their dark sensibility towards the world, encouraging them to respect the occurrences of shadows.
The three principles of shadows, namely wabi, yūgen, and mono no aware, all pave a path towards a sensibility that finds aesthetic pleasure in the negative and our voluntary disengagements, becoming a deliberate overcoming of the palliative and consumerist characteristics of the neoliberal society.
Wabi, as the admiration of crudeness, challenges the neoliberal violence of positivity that optimizes individuals into becoming motivated, optimistic, and resilient beings that leads to self-regulation rooted in self-exploitation. Neoliberalism regulates people and pacifies rage through this agreeableness scheme where people no longer feel the need to lament, protest, or criticize, or are suppressed within modes of being that prevent them from becoming vulgar. The wisdom of vulgarity can be found in many rural areas where, in lieu of a disciplinary technology that aims to form fragile and inoffensive individuals, permits offense in their spaces which develops a more profound relationship with pain.
Moreover, yūgen, as the recognition of the unknown, teaches us an appreciation of the world based on distance and disengagement. This questions the neoliberal compulsion for an aesthetic pleasure mainly based on consumption, intervention, and possession. Another regulatory mechanism of the neoliberal society includes the formation of glassy individuals that is supported by the trend for authentic expression in social media platforms and the data gathered by internet cookies. By improving the methods of predicting individual and collective dynamics through transparency, their psyche becomes more vulnerable to exploitation for consumerist purposes. Especially these days when algorithms encourage social patterns that idealize self-exposure through influencer culture, as well as the persistent exploitation of the natural environment through heightened consumer demands due to advertising, the Japanese principle of obscurity provides an alternative aesthetic experience of the world based on its ethereal ambiguity.
Lastly, mono no aware, as the appreciation of decay, exemplifies to us the importance of lingering in the world while it lasts. Neoliberal capitalism rests on a negation of death.35placeholder The coping mechanism in the face of death has become this excessive capitalist accumulation. It makes the idea of death less visible, and the excess of productivity in life has become the new source of self-destruction. As Han explains, once factories no longer exist, work can basically take place everywhere.36placeholder Much like today’s remote work settings wherein everyone can literally experience over-productivity and burnout from labor even at the comfort of their homes, or, much more ironic, while on vacation, the division between capitalist work and personal time has become dissolved. Personal time has been subjugated by the accelerated and widespread accumulation of capital.
The neoliberal notion of growth is cancerous. It encourages the individual to self-exploit for the purpose of achievement but is merely used as another disciplinary mechanism. Subjects who strive for achievement are more productive than those who perform based on obedience.37placeholder The achievement-subject’s increased efficiency has accelerated the capitalist mode of production but has led to self-exploitation, causing burnout. The new systemic violence is based on the imperative to achieve, with its positive demeanor blurring the lines between self-affirmation and self-destruction.38placeholder
An embracement of death will constantly remind us of its existence. Tanizaki’s aestheticization of shadows has made death more present in one’s environment through the integration of decay and darkness among physical structures. It allows the transitory state of things to envelop resonantly across spaces instead of restricting its entropy to enter one’s home. The revival of death has been integrated within traditional Japanese design so that we are surrounded by aesthetic principles based on a remembrance of evanescence. Mono no aware not only recognizes the transience of our existence in the passage of time but also encourages us to seek delight in these lasting moments. Savoring such moments does not happen through haste, as imposed by neoliberal acceleration, but in a slow and lingering celebration of life. It requires a dwelling in the world.
Shizen is the entropy that lies beyond the humanistic implementation of structures. While we can scrutinize the world as an interpretable whole, our ability to interpret is completely limited by the artificial structures of human language. Shizen is nature without identity, containing pure changes and processes, including the events of the world humankind regards as hostile and inconvenient. Even though such darkness has been unremittingly negated by us who are utterly mortal and conscious, Tanizaki’s sophistication about shadows can inspire us to elaborate the essence and significance of this short-lived, fragile relationship with the cosmos, and in its harsh occurrences it contains great wisdom for us to learn and cultivate an elegant sensitivity towards the world. Such sensibility richly embedded in the hearts of machiyas proves that the aesthetic principles constituting the structural design of Starbucks Ninenzaka, as a highly advertised business establishment, is altogether an aesthetic success worth celebrating.
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