I've spent the last three decades thinking about Japanese aesthetics, and in particular if and how they can be meaningfully used beyond Japan. I'm the author of several books on the subject: Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan, Place Time and Being in Japanese Architecture, This Here Now: Japanese Building and the Architecture of the Individual, and most recently, The Constructed Other: Japanese Architecture in the Western Mind. I teach about Asian Pacific architecture at the University of Hawai'i, Mānoa.
By Kevin Nute
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By Kakuzo Okakura
Okakura links Taoist and Zen philosophy to the tangible world by way of the aesthetics of tea, which are actually the aesthetics of life itself. The title of this slim volume is disarmingly understated, then. It is the most approachable book on aesthetics I know.
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By Soetsu Yanagi
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By Jun'ichiro Tanizaki
Like The Book of Tea, In Praise appears to be a straightforward lament over the rapid loss of traditional values in modernizing Japan, but it repays multiple re-reading. On closer reading it is found to reflect the "both and" sentiment common in early 20th century Japan and summed up in the term wakon yosai, "Japanese spirit Western learning."
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By Teiji Itoh
This book was far ahead of its time in explaining the active manipulation of space and time in traditional Japanese gardens, from the diminutive tsuboniwa courtyard gardens that transported the city dweller to the heart of the wilderness, to the temple gardens that procured remote features of the natural landscape.
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By Teiji Itoh, Ikko Tanaka, Tsune Sesoko
This beautifully illustrated book is difficult to find now. The images effectively speak for themselves, however, and make up for the inevitable shortcomings of even the most informed attempts to sum up these concepts verbally.
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