In striking contrast to their ancestors, contemporary Japanese adore an excess of light, their great cities electromagnetic centers of brilliance, their nighttime living rooms flood-lit like sports stadiums.
The rallying call of those who survived the “dark valley,” as the thirties and war years were dubbed, was akarui seikatsu, a “bright life.” Shadows, side lighting, and intermediate tones were banished, memories of the war subjected to collective amnesia and the eviscerating rays from new forms of illumination. The appreciation of muted light, as the writer Tanizaki Junichiro infers in his long 1933 essay on aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, had already begun to lapse into a cult of quaintness.
The compass of Tanizaki’s interests included interior design, and the treasures that are concealed or obscured in the shadows and dim recesses of temples. The author celebrates the merits of meager light and perishable, organic materials, noting in the case of the zashiki, the Japanese tatami mat room, that walls are made from soil and sand, in order to, “let the frail, melancholic, ephemeral light saturate the solemn composure of their earthy tones.” The writer holds that, for a true appreciation of the beauty of lacquerware, it must be observed in the dimness of half-light. Tanizaki pays keen attention to the shadows that lurk in lintels, beneath temple eaves and in alcoves, and is sensitive to minute details like the solemn, trance-like beauty of gold leaf covered doors and screens, caught in morsels of light entering a room.
There are a number of instances in Japan, where the use and perception of light starkly differs from the West. We recall that, where Western paper reflects light, traditional Japanese paper absorbs it. This older sensibility places the brittle and functional against the soft and pliant. Author Donald Richie, posited that the study of aesthetics in the West was, “mainly concerned with theories of art, that of Japan has always been concerned with theories of taste.”
One would have to go to considerable lengths today to experience the aesthetic sensations advocated by Tanizaki. Such exquisite moments, far removed from everyday life, might include viewing lacquerware in the glow from a votive candle, listening to the scratching of small metal particles placed at the bottom of an iron tea pot, an effect said to evoke the souring of wind in pine trees, or contemplating a Japanese garden, where the darker, more subdued spaces decelerate time, the absence of light heightening our appreciation of what little exists. One recalls that in the ghostlier scenes of Edo era Kabuki, young children were employed to follow actors on stage, illuminating their faces from below with candles, an effect that must have magnified the eerie intensity of the performance.
The Japanese have always revered the qualities of the moon, the ability of its sylvan light to transform landscape. A millennium ago, Heian era courtiers enjoyed boating trips, drifting across garden ponds on clear, lunar nights when the constellations were crisp and visible. Floating on a sheet of reflective water would have created the pleasantly liminal illusion of existing between two dark, subtly illuminated zones. In the manner of Chinese gardens, Katsura Rikyu, a prototypical Kyoto design, has a Moon-Viewing Platform, from which the silvered planet can be seen on the surface of its pond. Clusters of rock islands and the sound of rustling trees and shrubbery would, under the effect of natural, theatrical forms of lighting devised within the boundary of the garden, have created the sensation of being out at sea on a mild, breezy night. If large enough, the surface of a pond will reflect overhead clouds and surrounding scenery, serving as a horizontal screen for a series of perpetually changing borrowed views. Water lavers and basins, placed in the darker recesses of a garden, introduce light and, in connecting the garden with the sky, provide micro glimpses of expanded space and distance.
In Europe, one comes across indoor gardens engorged with tropical plants and trees within conservatoires and orangeries, but a defining requirement of landscape design is that it is open to sky and air. Available sunlight is skillfully manipulated by Japanese gardeners so that, even on an overcast day, its greenery is presented to best advantage. Traditionally graduated greenery, with countless, intermittent tones and hues, was preferred to brilliant flowerbeds and over-assertive blooms. The raked lines inscribed in the sand or gravel of stone gardens, patterns known as samon, create interplay between light and shadow. Purportedly representing waves and currents, shadows form in the furrows between the raised lines, adding depth and emphasizing the organic unevenness of the surface. Gravel provides a non-distractive surface for meditation, but also acts as a light reflector.
If there is a contemporary tendency to try and improve on nature, to tinkle and tweak, this also applies to the appropriation of shadow and light. Is it really necessary, we wonder, to illuminate cherry blossoms and bracts of wisteria with cumbersome, intrusive lamps? Where stars and moonlight once sufficed, we now have batteries of light, supposedly intensifying the experience. In the past, the moon, oil lamps and candles placed in the chambers of stone lanterns, were enough. For largely commercial reasons rather than aesthetic ones, many gardens today are equipped with artificial lights, including clusters of LED lamps and bulbs, which replicate day light rather than the natural, infinitely more nuanced illumination of nocturnal gardens lit by a shifting interplay of moon and cloud. The misconception here is that brilliant lighting reveals gardens in their entirety, when in fact, its effect is to eviscerate their essence. Although some gardens use portable luminaires in the manner of old roji andon, the washi paper lamps once used to subtlely illuminate the stepping stones of tea gardens, artificial lighting all too often results in the unsightly daytime presence of lamp fixtures and electric cords proximate with gravel borders and rocks. When the opaque fills with light, the exquisite inscrutability of shadows becoming transparent, mystery and depth vaporize. Conversely, too much natural sunlight can harden and burn the features of a garden, exposing unsightly aspects, such as scorched moss, weeds, and poorly maintained groundcover. Across this over-exposed planar grid, inky blocks of shadow are banished to the rear or edges of gardens. In such instances, only intermediary, dappled light will moderate the polarization of darkness and light.
Whether as supplicants at sacred sites, modern pilgrims on spiritual quests, or in the simple role of nature lovers, we instinctively return to shadows, to graduated light. Stress and anxiety levels are known to drop, our spirits soothed and calmed by the sight of striated light passing through foliage, or filtering through shrubbery and greenery just after rainfall, an effect known as komorebi in Japanese.
Another word, komyo, refers to light emerging from the Buddha, which in turn symbolizes wisdom and compassion. In Shigemori Mirei’s design for his Kyoto landscape, Hashin-tei (Garden of the Moonlight on Waves), three rock compositions, known as a sanzon-seki, represent Gautama Buddha, Amida Buddha, and Yakushi-nyorai, the Buddha of Healing. These are geometrically yoked with stones placed throughout the garden, each representing rays of light emanating from the three deities.
Like the Buddha stones, light and shadow in the unmediated Japanese garden, settle into their allotted spaces. It’s almost as if the garden is designed in equal measure to trap and liberate light, to bring us into emotional and spiritual alignment with their diurnal gyrations.
Shadows and light, like us, are sentient.
