In addition, the notion of austerity, where one had to accept what is given and evoke it subjectively, was summarized through two modes of expression: sabi and wabi. Sabi referred to the individual objects and the environment that contained a rustic unpretentiousness or an archaic imperfection, and it extended to the utmost forms of minimalism. For example, a haiku¹⁵ by the poet Basho--"In absolute quietness, the voice of the cicada, is absorbed into the rocks"--suggested a loneliness through a natural environment that evoked the feeling of sabi. The shadowy world of the Japanese interior suggested sabi through the emulation of a dark, rustic hermit's hut deep in the mountains. Wabi, a concurrent aesthetic implying the quietness of tranquility, referred to a way of life ordinarily associated with simplicity. It implied an abstinence from the fashions of society, to cultivate inwardly the presence of something of the highest value, transcending time and social status. Architecturally, the dark forest-like approach to the tea hut was significant to prepare in the visitor a sense of progressing solitude--a wabi state of mind. Mujo, meaning "impermanence," stemmed from the Buddhist teaching of evanescence and the transitory nature of life, and it brought forth the concept of flexibility and transience in expressions of daily life. Thus nothing was fixed in space and time, and all things were subjected to innumerable changes, reflecting the universal truth of life itself. The fleeting shadows in the Japanese room were a constant symbol of this concept.

Several such notions reveal the ancient Japanese psychological nexus between the ideas of light, darkness, and shadows, and the structure of the various esoteric rituals that once formed part of Japanese daily life. And since light is both the conditioner of, and is conditioned by, the subjective evocation of its presence or absence by our thinking and feeling, it is not surprising that light served in the sensibilities of traditional Japan such a vital role in spatial conception and expression. But the significance of understanding these concepts lies in the recognition of their lamentable abandonment in contemporary Japan. In the process of its tremendous transformation and industrialization, Japan has alarmingly displayed a tendency to adopt many pseudo-Western styles of illumination concepts that are arguably both excessive and alien to its distinctive esoteric traditions. In its attempts to both modernize and Westernize, the soft light of the paper lantern has been gradually displaced by the glare of the incandescent bulb. In the period between 1869 and 1882, Japan established telegraph, navy, and postal systems based on British forms, as well as banking and schooling based on French and American typologies¹⁶. The incandescent bulb was one such new typology that entered a changing and ambitious Japan, where for a long time, reality had always been partially obscured by shadows. In the 1930's, when Tanizaki Junichiro confronted the glare of the incandescent bulb (by today's standards perhaps a fairly innocuous entity), he knew he was witnessing an inundation of Japan's deep traditions by Western values. It was this observation that prompted him to write In Praise of Shadows,¹⁷ lamenting the waning significance of darkness and shadows in Japanese aesthetics.

So benumbed is today's Japan with electric lights that it seems to have become increasingly insensitive to the concept of the shadowy world. Today's Japanese room is lit within by glaring fluorescent fixtures, which many onlookers find forced and contradictory to Japan's traditions. Offices and stores are similarly blasted with light. In the urban landscape, pachinko parlors are ubiquitous, their neon displays becoming part of a bright, zesty-lit nightscape that is intrusive to someone who treasures the delicately diffused lanterns of traditional streets such as Pontocho. The novelist Takebayashi Musoan once noted upon his return from Paris that Tokyo and Osaka were far more brilliantly lit than any European city. One has to only walk the night streets of Ginza in order to comprehend the ill-effects of such excessive illumination--from the incandescent to the fluorescent to the neons--the quest for a brighter light never ceases and, what is more, no pains are spared to eradicate even the minutest of shadows. It is ironic and lamentable that in a land where the perception of the dark night and soft moonlight were part of an everyday rhythm, today one can still see the moon--but only with its soft moonlight lost amidst the noisy glare of Japan's dynamic urban environs.