ABSTRACT
There is a well-known thought experiment by Tanizaki Jun’ichirō. In his widely read 1933 essay In Praise of Shadows, the celebrity novelist of the late Meiji, Taishō, and early Shōwa periods attempted to formulate a core Japanese identity distinct from the West. Shadow was the metaphor he used to contrast both. While the West favored clear light—it was no coincidence that Western modernity took off with the Enlightenment—Japan’s appreciation of the world leaned toward the beauty found in semi-darkness. Tanizaki believed that the aesthetics of the in-between, the hidden, and the subtle defined the Eastern philosophy of art and architecture—qualities that the West, in his view, failed to grasp fully.
