ONGOING SERIES:

One of the pleasures of Japan is the high quality of visual art and design there, even in something as mundane as food wrappers.  It is hard to ignore. Indeed, many Japan Studies professionals — local and foreign — who spend their work lives explaining Japan to the English-speaking world also have a deep interest in some aspect of Japanese visual culture. Many of us get considerable enjoyment from it. Yet far fewer of us are entirely comfortable with the idea of a unified single Japanese Aesthetic Tradition, even when the case for one is made as elegantly as it was by novelist Tanizaki Jun’ichirō in In Praise of Shadows.¹ In that famous essay, Tanizaki not only mourned the retreat of shadows, allusion, and subtlety from the harsh glare of electric-light illumination, he also claimed the former as quintessentially Japanese qualities. Nearly a century later, we are still uneasy about the ways that aesthetic sensibility powered the intense spiritual mobilization that made possible an extraordinarily disastrous war. Or how much the ideology of One Japanese Aesthetic Tradition shapes cultural expression even today. I wondered how my colleagues thought about this issue, particularly when pursuing side projects, chosen for their own enjoyment. This curiosity has turned into an ongoing series: Japan-Adjacent. As it turned out, every person I asked had an entirely different set of concerns, all Japan-adjacent, but so far none fulfilling my expectation that they would speak directly to my original question. But they do cast relevant shadows…

Notes:

1. In Praise of Shadows (Inei-raisan, 1933) Jun’ichirō Tanizaki; translated by Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker. London: Vintage, 2001, 1977.