Design Friday – “In Praise of Shadows” and the traditional Japanese aesthetic

If you’re looking for a great design-related read, try picking up a copy of “In Praise of Shadows” by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. It’s an essay, only about 40 pages long, about the traditional Japanese aesthetic.

Tanizaki covers everything in his essay from the meditative experience of using Japanese style toilets to the seductive beauty of Japanese housewives. He rails on the dizzying, disturbing brightness of Western style electric lights then beginning to proliferate in Japan, and describes in detail the murky beauty of tarnished silver, candle-lit paper and miso soup.

The beauty found in the simple and imperfect, an aesthetic called “Wabi Sabi” is another element of traditional Japanese design. Wabi Sabi glorifies the old, the impermanent and the decayed and draws up emotions related to the passage of time and the weathering effects of natural life. Trying to pin something down at an exact state or level of antiquity (whether sparkling new or on the verge of crumbling) is a failure to accept the transient nature of objects. Traditional Japanese objects are designed with aging in mind; if you feel the need to replace it, repaint it or scrub it perfectly clean rather than treasure it even more deeply in 20 years, then either you or the artist have done poorly.

In Tanizaki’s essay, it becomes apparent that what gives such dark, murky and even dirty objects their beauty is the environment that they are placed in. Traditional Japanese houses were places of shadow, covered by massive roofs with deep eaves that allowed very little light into the rooms themselves. Before Western electric lighting, houses were lit with candles and other small flames that left rooms dim and glowing. In this state of half-light, dark lacquerware was dramatic and mysterious, grime had a glow and materials like jade and tarnished silver had the depth of a thousand years. Even something as bright and untarnishing as gold takes on a new character in this atmosphere, reflecting back tiny sources of light with a vibrancy that makes it obvious why ancient peoples valued it so.

Have you had any experiences in which an object looks much better in a certain room, atmosphere or lighting level than others? Do you have any objects you value for the coat of dark age on their surface? Comment below or request to contribute to the Design Fridays Pinterest Board in the Contact section.

Thanks for reading!