Japanese aesthetics: A podcast(!) and Q&A

On "In Praise of Shadows"

Welcome to my personal newsletter. I’m publishing weekly essays on digital technology and culture, in the run-up to my January 2024 book FILTERWORLD: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. Subscribe or read the archive here.

---

Here’s a big experiment: The first audio project that I’m publishing on my own! It’s kind of a “podcast” but also just for fun. I recorded a conversation with my friend Nate Gallant, a scholar and translator of Japanese (you can subscribe to his nascent Substack here), about one of my favorite essays of all time: Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 “In Praise of Shadows.” (Psst you can read it here online or buy a copy.) Here’s our “podcast” audio (about 45 min long, future episodes will aspire toward 30):

One Thing: In Praise of Shadows

It’s also on Soundcloud here to easily play in your browser. Readers of my book The Longing for Less will be familiar with Tanizaki’s essay, since it features heavily in the fourth chapter. It’s a meditation on personal taste, how technology shapes art, and how aesthetics cut across cultural forms — in other words, everything I like, and all very relevant to today.

I’m calling this podcast One Thing, because theoretically each episode will be about one thing, an essay, person, object, or idea. If you listen, or like the transcript, PLEASE let me know if you like it in an email reply or comment — it was fun to record this and I’d be happy to do more.

An edited transcript of Nate and my conversation is copied below.

---

Transcript

KYLE CHAYKA: The "one thing" that I wanted to start out this project with is the essay "In Praise of Shadows," by Junichiro Tanizaki (1886 - 1965), who is a Japanese novelist from the early 20th century. This essay is something that I mentioned in The Longing for Less, the book on minimalism that I wrote, but it's one of my favorite essays that I've ever read. How I discovered it initially was at this bookstore called Spoonbill & Sugartown, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The owner of that bookstore always kept this little book out. And it's this black and white cover with the kind of Japanese design on the front, like a shoji screen, and the title, "In Praise of Shadows." 

And it just looks so evocative and interesting. I was fascinated by how the bookstore owner always kept it there, no matter how often it sold out. Every time I went in there, there were more copies. So eventually, I just picked it up,  out of spite, just to see what was so valuable about this one book. And what I found was this really beautiful kind of meandering essay about aesthetics, history and technology, and change and personal tastes and identity all wrapped up in this like forty-five page little volume. And I just thought it was really beautiful. So I've been obsessed with it ever since. And I wanted to start off by reading the first few sentences of this book because they always stick in my head. Tanizaki writes: 

“What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms — even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn. For the solitary eccentric it is another matter, he can ignore the blessings of scientific civilization and retreat to some forsaken corner of the countryside; but a man who has a family and lives in the city cannot turn his back on the necessities of modern life — heating, electric lights, sanitary facilities — merely for the sake of doing things the Japanese way.” 

So, this essay is kind of about home renovation, and Tanizaki thinking through what he likes and why he likes it. But Nate, I wanted to ask you: why are we listening to this guy meander about his preferences for toilets and light bulbs? 

NATE GALLANT: Thanks for the introduction. I'm really happy to be here chatting with you about this. There's so much in this essay that feels unrelatable like, designing your own home and having to make those kinds of decisions. But there's so much that sticks with me, that's very germane to the period in Japanese history when he's writing that still feels like it carries over to today: What defines traditional Japanese aesthetics? How do they relate to everything that happened to modernize Japan, in the early 20th century, or even the late 19th century, and how does that legacy stick with us today, especially given how pervasive Japanese culture remains in the US or even Western Europe? 

KYLE: We should say that their Tanizaki published this originally in 1933. And it was translated and published in the US in 1977. But at the time, I think Tanizaki was a newspaper columnist, in addition to being a very well known novelist and literary figure. So maybe you could explain what Tanizaki 's position was, for him to be writing on home renovation?

NATE: There are a few important things to understanding what's going on in Japan when he's writing this in the 1930s. Tanizaki became famous mostly as a novelist writing in the 1910's and 1920's. Between 1600 and the mid-19th century, Japan had largely kept Western influence out through military and trade restrictions, but the floodgates opened in the 1850's when the US forcibly opened up Japan to colonial interference in domestic politics through flexing its naval might.

Obviously a lot happens because of this, but among them is an eventual period of deep cosmopolitan interest by people in urban Japan. Exposure to European art forms, in particular, the modern novel, and all of the genres that were really popular both in English and French and German occasions this explosion of experimentation, and Tanizaki was very much a part of that. He writes sort of these newer short stories, he's really interested in how genres of traditional Japanese literature like noh and bunraku (puppet theater) can be changed by imagining them within the context of other new artistic technologies like film. 

KYLE: Yeah. When I was reading his novels and his nonfiction commentary, what was really striking to me was how he did seem to mix in these western tropes, adapting to changing technologies like cinema, and architecture. His fiction too, it's kind of but not quite hard-boiled, I would say. When you read it from the perspective of today, it's like fun and kind of goofy and funny and ironic and it almost feels to me like a satire of those changing times, and how western norms are being encountered. 

NATE: Tanizaki is unique, too, given the super reactionary politics around him that were in reaction to this big cultural upheaval, which peaked over the course of the 1930s when he's writing this essay. A lot of philosophers, a lot of artists, a lot of cultural critics become obsessed with a very long-standing anxiety or problem within the 19th and 20th centuries in Japan, which is what defines Japaneseness? 

After seeing Western colonial conquest, and exposure to American and European military technology and industry, a lot of the people that panicked, say, in the early or, like in the mid- to late-19th century, sort of became obsessed with marshaling all of this Western technology to compete with the West, to compete with Western colonial expansion in Asia, and to protect Japanese interests and make Japan industrially or technologically competitive. But at the same time, not sacrificing some sense of being Japanese or not sacrificing its place in Asia. 

So lots of mottos emerged. There was an initial sense of, "Entering Europe, leaving Asia," and then a reversion around this time in the ‘30s of “Entering Asia, leaving Europe." Another really famous one is, "Western technology, Japanese spirit." There was this idea of breaking down the different facets of society: the material, the technological, the military, but then there's still this essence of Japaneseness. Tanizaki inherits this distinction of where culture belongs, as something that maybe would define Japaneseness or allow people to access that definition and separate it from all of these different things that feel like they signify or represent the West, its colonial ambitions, or even some sense of its superiority. 

All around him, people are really playing out this anxiety and trying to be like, okay, well maybe the West is superior in these ways, but Japan is equal to it or contributed to culture, or superior in these other ways. But Tanizaki takes a completely different tack, like you were saying. He's satirical and ironic in his fiction. And he's also like, well, I don't really care what superior, here's what I like.

KYLE: It's very much about his personal taste. And in a way he substitutes or commingles his personal tastes with like, what is fundamentally Japanese or what best represents the society that he's in? So to me, there’s kind of an ironic or funny edge to it, where he's like, let me tell you exactly what I would do to my house. And by the way, this is also what happens to be the best part of Japanese civilization. 

The fundamental thing that he's struggling with in the essay I think comes from the title, "In Praise of Shadows," with the intrusion of electric light and industrial technologies into Tokyo and into Japan in general. So he's constantly talking about how kind of garish and horrible electric lights are, which is laughable today, because now it's just how we exist. But Tanizaki really records how candles and lanterns and very dim lights were how people existed before the advent of electric lights. 

I always find myself remembering the sections where he complains about how hot electric lights are. I don't know if they were just way hotter back in the day, but he's like, deeply horrified that the lights would be hot on the ceiling, and he feels too hot. 

NATE: It does kind of remind me of the cold light versus warm light aesthetic debate of today. 

KYLE: It also reminds me of the TikTok meme or the life meme, I suppose, of "we never turn on the big lights." The big lights on the ceiling are forbidden. All we do is turn on the little lamps that are around the house, which is something that my fiancée Jess really espouses. The electric lights are still so ugly and bad.

NATE: But also most of the cheap apartments that we live in are plastered with ugly white walls as well. So I kind of wonder what the lighting discourse would look like if rental apartments had painted walls, but that's sort of a whole other thing.

KYLE: Tanizaki is speaking from the privilege here of designing his own house, which he kind of admits and as I recall, he moved through at least two dozen different residences in his life. But his books are full of observations about interiors and art and everything, which is another thing that I like about them, of course. 

He also has this funny moment, toward the beginning of the essay, where he talks about how Japanese toilets are amazing, compared to the Western white, gleaming, clean porcelain, which he sees as a garish intrusion into the aesthetic world. He writes, "Anyone with a taste for traditional architecture must agree that the Japanese toilet is perfection." Which is semi-ironic, but as you pointed out to me there is this legacy or idea that the toilet is this very Zen place, or is a Zen metaphor. 

NATE: We can go all the way back to a really famous Zen Buddhist author, Dogen, who talks about the importance of the toilet and cleaning the toilet. But it remains with us, right? There's totally this idea that Japanese toilets are better, and I have to admit that walking into a public restroom, where the door goes all the way down to the floor and up to the ceiling, and there's a white noise machine — really all the public affordances of toilets in Japan does feel superior, but maybe not quite in the way that Tanizaki was talking about.

KYLE: Now Japan is known for reinventing the bidet and Toto is well-known, with self-cleaning toilets and things like that. But that's more technological. Today, actually, our porcelain toilets are old school and vintage compared to that. Tanizaki seems to be talking about a bathroom where everything is made of wood. And it's very calm and quiet. And he admits that it might be a little dirty or dingy. But that's how it's supposed to be — you don't want this kind of hyper clean, minimalist, industrial, modern, aesthetic. 

He's saying that's not cool, we should forget about it, or we should adapt those tools to a more Japanese aesthetic approach. And he has this amazing line. He writes something like: If electric lights or if modern medicine, if technology as a whole, had been invented in Japan, rather than the West, we would be living in an entirely different material world, which is a really fascinating observation.

NATE: It’s his way of being a little provocative without offering us a systematic way of thinking here — showing the differences between these two cultures. In a way, too, all the questions that he leaves us with are right between two poles of how people desire or objectify Japan, even today. There's this hypermodern kind of way that bleeds into techno-Orientalist visions of Japan. But then on the other hand, there's Japan as the antidote to or the opposite to modernity. But it's interesting, because for Tanizaki, these things are in tension, and they're moving. 

KYLE: Tanizaki has a sense that Western culture and Western art is clean, perfect, geometric, and static. He makes the comparison between a western cathedral and a Japanese house, where the cathedral is meant to exist forever and it's designed in perfection, immaculately, whereas the Japanese house is this more contingent, shifting, collapsible thing that can easily fall over. 

He identifies cathedrals and Gothic architecture, as attempting to encompass as much light in space as possible — the light and space that symbolize god. Tanizaki writes that Western architecture is built to create as few shadows as possible, whereas he really appreciates the shadows of a traditional Japanese room. He calls attention to the fact that you experience different qualities of darkness. There are shades of darkness just as there are degrees of light in the room. And he appreciates that as its own aesthetic and suggests that the reader do the same.

NATE: He has this distinction between shadow or darkness and the void, which is kind of interesting because what he identifies as the Western aesthetic contains a really binary way of thinking about light and darkness and whiteness. Here, whiteness is tied to the fetishization of illumination. 

It reminds me of the architecture of the national monuments in DC, which have this super ahistorical presentation. They're whitewashed, static, and it sort of makes them seem like they were either built 10,000 years ago by aliens or they were built yesterday. But you can't really tell. In being neoclassical they're reaching towards this transcendental universalizing aesthetic. But I always feel this sort of distance from a city bound by that architecture versus some of the other parts of the city that show their time or age, that show their shadows a little bit differently — that’s what Tanizaki seems to appreciate. 

KYLE: I think showing time, or being in a space or looking at a piece of work that acknowledges its historical quality and age and context is something that we miss a lot these days. I've been thinking about those qualities more lately as “texture.” There are things that embrace having texture. And there are things that deny having texture. I think denying texture is a big part of the internet, and the content that is optimized for digital channels, whereas embracing texture is something that you associate with physical objects and things that age and change. And these shadowy qualities that Tanizaki is also thinking of here.

NATE: We can also talk about the ahistorical quality of the Japanese nationalism that develops out of these ideas about aesthetics, from the anxiety about where Japanese culture fits in relation to Asia. Even as early as the 1600s, Japanese people are trying to throw off the influences of Confucianism and throw off the influences of Buddhism, because they were from China and India. And so what comes out of that is a sense of hierarchy between Japan and the rest of Asia. 

The conversation about what is proper to Japan, what defines its "essence" as a culture, ends up as this big matrix of really difficult relations that people are trying to navigate. Tanizaki throws his hat in the ring here in a pithy, somewhat ironic, and sort of provocative way. But most of the people around him were trying to do that in terms of some kind of shifting racial and ethnic hierarchy, where Japan usually came out on the top of Asia. On top of that, their relationship to whiteness was really fraught. Tanizaki himself seems to think that racism is behind the US in his comments about the Civil War, while at the same time acknowledging colorism in Asia. 

Tanizaki asks a question that's still with us: What's desirable about Japanese aesthetics? Is it something that's particular to Japan? And what's its relationship to all of the stuff that we've come to associate with Western modernity? 

KYLE: And what is the value of modernity? Should we have built the world differently? Is all this momentum for technological change necessarily good? All of this is contained within Tanizaki’s short essay. It's very evocative, it's very beautiful. Everyone should read it.