‘To build a Japanese home, we first open an umbrella to create shade over the location, and in the dim light of that shadow we construct our house,’ Jun’ichirō Tanizaki writes in his seminal collection, In Praise of Shadows.
Ruminating on the character of the Japanese aesthetic, Tanizaki reasons that if the Japanese house is an umbrella (shunning sunlight and embracing the warmth of shadows with its deep eaves) then the Western house is a hat – one with ‘as small a visor as possible to permit the sunlight to reach far beneath the eaves.’
Tanizaki was writing in
