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Luminous environment: light, architecture and decoration in modern Japan

2006; Routledge; Volume: 18; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09555800600947223

1469-932X

Miya Elise Mizuta,

Art, Politics, and Modernism

Abstract From lantern to electric lighting, the motif of light has remained central to the Western visualization of Japan. Why has the motif of light been so crucial to the way in which Japan was perceived across the twentieth century? What role, if any, have Western stereotypes of Japan – seen as a mysterious world decorated by paper lights, and later as a vast urban terrain of flashing neon signs, light sculptures and illuminated billboards – played in the development of modern Japanese aesthetics and its lighting culture? Several key works drawn from literature and art may provide insight into the role that electric light plays in the move from traditional genres to the new genres of modern art: Tanizaki Jun'ichirō's ‘In praise of shadows’ (In'ei raisan 1933–4); Mishima Yukio's Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkakuji 1956), as well as his ‘The idea of lighting – the birthplace of my literature’ (Dentō no aidia – waga bungaku no yōranki 1968); and Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographic installation In Praise of Shadows (1999). Crossing genres and media, these works respond in particular to the conception of Japanese illumination both from within and without Japan. Keywords: AestheticslightingilluminationTanizaki Jun'ichirōMishima YukioHiroshi Sugimoto Notes 1. Interestingly, keikōtō, a particularly unartistic form of lighting – ‘Beneath it even the bijin (the beauty) looks like a ghost’, remarks Mishima (Citation2003 [1953]: 130) – was introduced into Japan as an aid in the restoration of the damaged wall paintings at Horyūji (CitationShōmei Fukyū Kai 1988: 284). 2. All gairaigo or foreign loan words are adaptations and differ in meaning to some extent from the original. As the borrowed word migrates across languages, the original meaning is often lost or distorted. It is the manner in which the word ‘illumination’ here is redefined and is taken to mean something decorative rather than epistemological that I find to be of interest. 3. There are, of course, other words for lighting in Japanese. ‘Hikari’ means sharp, direct light, like that of sunlight, and can be thought to describe light that enters a space from the outside. It is considered the equivalent to English words such as ‘light,’ ‘optical’ or ‘luminous’, yet is thought to encompass a much broader meaning in Japanese (CitationShōmei Gakkai 1991: 254). ‘Akari’, by contrast, is the word for soft, reflected light and is used to describe lighting that is perceived as being traditionally Japanese. Another more recent term that relates to lighting is ‘shōmei’ (illumination/lighting), which is also fairly broad in meaning. Introduced in 1928, when it was first used to name a division of Tokyo Electric Company, it can be used in conjunction with things that lie outside the visual field such as a mood, feeling or atmosphere (CitationShōmei Gakkai, 1991: 288). The varying nuances of these terms and the creation of the term ‘shōmei’ prior to Tanizaki's ‘In praise of shadows’ are worth consideration, but beyond the scope of this present paper. 4. For a discussion of ‘Japanese things’ (Nihonteki na mono) as an effect of the encounter with the outside world, see CitationIsozaki et al. (2003) 5. Karatani here is following a tradition from German philosophy to deconstruction that privileges the trope of architecture as a metaphor for knowledge, prominent in the works of Martin Heidegger, Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, for example. 6. Apart from a few experiments with shadows and silhouettes in the late nineteenth century the cast shadow was not typically rendered in classical Japanese art. See, in this connection, CitationSuntory (1995) and CitationKinoshita (1996). 7. In Japanese: Yakero yakero, minna yakechimae. 8. Kinkakuji is in fact a paradoxical symbol since Zen temples are usually associated with the aesthetic of sumi.