ABSTRACT
There has been a long history of Western observers projecting Eurocentric ideas onto Japan in general, and its architecture in particular, as a means of demonstrating both their avant-garde credentials and their universal nature. As a result, Western accounts of Japanese of architecture have often reflected the shifting focus of Western architectural theory, and have variously described Japanese buildings as everything from organic, to modern and postmodern, for example. These projections can be seen as efforts to take possession of the other without changing the self.
