Introduction
In the early twentieth century, a little under a hundred years ago, one of Japan’s most famous novelists wrote an unusual essay in praise of the beauty that lives in shadow.
What he wrote about was a kind of beauty that was quietly slipping away as Japan grew more and more Westernised.
A beauty held in dim, subdued light.
The soft light that comes through a paper screen.
I love that quiet, gentle side of Japan. There is something about it that feels deeply comfortable to me.
So today, I want to use one book as a guide and look at this beauty that lives in shadow together. Where this very Japanese sense of beauty came from, and how it has slowly been disappearing.
Hi, I’m Satomi Takayama, a Japanese artist based between London and Japan. On this channel, I think about the senses we’re starting to forget, through Japanese aesthetics, craft, and philosophy.
In Praise of Shadows
The book at the centre of today’s video is Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, and I love this book. For me it’s almost a bible for how I think about beauty. The ideas in it are wonderful, of course, but more than anything, the Japanese itself is just beautiful to read.
When this book was written, in the 1930s, Japan was modernising and Westernising rapidly. Electric lighting, glass, and other modern technologies were becoming increasingly common in everyday life, and Tanizaki felt that much of it did not quite sit naturally with Japan’s older sense of beauty.
And the question he was really asking was this: when we take in something new, what are we giving up in return? One of the things being left behind, he felt, was shadow.
Why Shadow Became Beautiful
So why did people in old Japan find beauty in shadow in the first place?
Here’s the interesting part. It wasn’t that they decided darkness was beautiful and set out to make their rooms dark on purpose. Back in those older times, long before electric light, the darkness of those houses came from practical conditions: the way the houses were built, the climate, and the simple fact that there was not much choice.
Old Japanese buildings, more than Western ones, were made so that strong sunlight never came straight into the room. A deep eave juts far out from the roof, and under it there’s the engawa, a kind of veranda, and then the paper screens. So by the time the light from the garden reaches the back of the room, it’s been softened, step by step, over and over.
Tanizaki describes this light as something faint and powerless, reflected off the garden and slipping in through the paper of the screens.
“Our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, and in time they even began using shadow to make things beautiful.”
So at first, they lived in dark rooms because they had no choice. But somewhere along the way, they noticed the beauty inside that darkness, and in the end, they began shaping their spaces on purpose to make use of those shadows.
The West, as Tanizaki describes it, was reaching for more and more brightness, from candle to lamp to gas to electric light. That was the path the West took, and it suited the way they lived. And he says that even before all that, the West never grew as fond of shadow as Japan did. Japan, with its dim rooms, had simply gone a different way. Maybe that’s part of why the two came to feel so differently about light.
So the beauty of a Japanese room was never really about having one striking thing to admire in it. It was more about how everything sat together, how light and shadow were arranged.
And here’s what I find lovely: the Japanese did not merely accept those shadows. They started making things that only truly come alive inside them.
Washi, Lacquerware, and Gold Screens
So what exactly were these things that people in old Japan found beautiful in the dark? Tanizaki gives a few examples, and I want to share some of my favourites.
First, washi, Japanese paper. Tanizaki says Western paper and Japanese paper behave completely differently with light. Western paper turns the light back from its surface. Washi drinks it in. And washi is soft to the touch, it makes no sound when you fold it or crease it. Touching it is as quiet and still as touching a leaf.
When he puts it like that, it does ring true. You see Isamu Noguchi’s lanterns everywhere now, and the white of washi really isn’t a flat white. It has warmth in it, and at the same time a white that sinks slightly inward. I love that texture.
So what happens when you stretch that washi over a screen? It connects to what I said before: the garden light passes the eave, the veranda, and finally through the paper of the screen. Tanizaki calls it filtering the outside light through the paper. As it passes through, the light loses its strength, and you get this strange state where it isn’t dazzling at all, yet it’s softly bright. That indescribable, just-right light in a room with paper screens. It’s bright, but never glaring. The whole room takes on this quiet softness.
And the same thing is true of lacquerware and of gold screens.
In Japan, we often use lacquerware for our tableware. And in a bright room, like a modern dining room, lacquerware can just look like a black, glossy bowl. But seen the old way, by the weak light of a candle, it’s completely different. It drinks the light in, and seems to give it back slowly, from somewhere deep inside.
There’s a passage Tanizaki writes about a lacquer soup bowl that I love. “In the moment between lifting the lid and carrying it to your lips, you gaze at the still, silent liquid in the dark depths of the bowl, its colour hardly different from the bowl itself. And it is the working of a silent music, played together by the candle-flame flickering in the dark and the lacquer.”
He says that without lacquerware in those gloomy rooms, without the strange dreamlike light that candles and lamps give off, so much of the magic would be drained away.
And most people today, including myself, have almost never eaten from lacquerware in a dark room. The idea that there was this whole beauty I had never experienced before really struck me.
Gold screens are the same.
Today, we usually display these screens in museums under electric light. But really, they were meant to sit deep in a dark room, catching what little light reached it, glowing dimly from somewhere low and deep.
Tanizaki says this too. In the West, people have tended to like things that shine. Silver polished until it gleams, that sort of thing. But in the East, that same shine has often made people a bit uneasy.
Even with bowls, they’d often prefer one that had aged a little, whose surface had clouded over, to one polished to a shine. In the West, the kind of thing you’d scrub off as grime, in Japan, it gets treasured as character. The fact that this creates such different sensibilities is fascinating to me.
So if you tie all of this together, I think what sits at the root of Japanese beauty is something like this: beauty isn’t held inside the object alone. It only becomes beautiful in the relationship between the object, the light, and the space around it.
You know, when I paint, I often find myself unconsciously thinking about what kind of place the work will hang in. And reading this book, I realised that’s because harmony with the space around something has always mattered to me.
The Meditative Feeling of a Japanese Room
By the way, have you ever walked into a traditional Japanese building and felt something almost meditative? That stillness when you step into a temple, or an old tatami room. A feeling you hardly recreate in a modern house, even if you turned off every sound.
Reading the book, I think I started to understand that feeling a little too.
It’s probably not just that there’s less in the room, or that it’s simple. It’s that dim light we’ve been talking about, the light created by those long eaves and paper screens, working across the entire space.
And then there’s the tokonoma. It’s a kind of alcove, a small space set back into the wall at the back of a tatami room, where you hang a scroll or arrange flowers, and it’s seen as the most important spot in the room, its centrepiece.
What I find interesting is that Tanizaki says the beauty of the tokonoma isn’t about what’s displayed in it. The scroll and the flowers aren’t the real stars. What’s truly beautiful, he says, is the shadow pooling behind them. He writes that a faint light is drawn into that little space, and a dim darkness gathers in the corners, and if you took all that shadow away, the tokonoma would fall back into nothing but empty space. He calls it the magic of shadows.
And even the walls are made to protect that shadow. The walls of a Japanese room are often sand walls, deliberately matte, rough, never glossy. If you let them shine, that soft, weak light loses its gentleness, so they’re kept plain on purpose, made to soak the light in.
Something else Tanizaki says that I loved: the light inside these rooms barely changes, across a whole day or even a whole year. Morning or evening, clear sky or cloudy, the pale white glow on the paper screens stays almost the same. So if you stay in that room for a while, you slowly lose track of what time it is, of how much time has passed. As if that one room had been quietly cut off from the flow of time outside.
Reading that, it really clicked for me. In a temple, in a space like that, there are moments when your sense of time just fades away.
So the light doesn’t come in directly, the far corners are never fully revealed, and even time feels like it’s stopped. Which means your eyes, and you, get the time to slowly settle into the place. And I think that’s what that meditative feeling really was.
It’s not a beauty you get at a glance. It’s one that only comes out slowly if you give it a bit of time. And maybe that’s something we don’t come across so much these days, in a world that leans towards more eye-catching things.
Modern Light and Older Beauty
But thinking about all this, I found myself wondering what Tanizaki would say if he saw Japan now.
Put this way, Tanizaki might sound like someone going on about how the past was better, how we don’t need electricity. But that’s not it at all.
He isn’t rejecting electricity, heating, or any of these new and useful things. He says clearly in the book that he has no objection to bringing modern conveniences in at all. What troubled him was something else. Why, he asks, when we Japanese took these things in, did we not pay a bit more respect to our own habits and the way we like to live, and shape them to fit us?
In fact, when there was no stove made to fit a Japanese room, Tanizaki worked on it himself, quietly fitting an electric heater inside a traditional irori, the kind of fire pit built down into the floor. He wanted the convenience, but he wanted the feel of it to belong in a Japanese room. That was the kind of person he was.
So Tanizaki wasn’t refusing new things. He was someone thinking about how to make the new and our own sense of beauty work together. And I really agree with that.
This spring, when I was travelling across Japan for a month chasing the cherry blossom, I saw temples and old buildings lit up at night with strong, coloured light, and something about it felt off to me. After reading Tanizaki, I think I started to understand why.
It’s probably that the light didn’t quite sit in harmony with the context the place already had, its atmosphere, its history, the beauty of its architecture. That’s what I was sensing, somewhere underneath.
And just to be clear, I’m really not against using modern technology to create something. It’s a bit different, but I think what teamLab does, for instance, is wonderful. The thing is, that lives inside the context of art. Lighting up a temple in strong colours for tourism feels like a slightly different thing to me.
Of course I understand it’s a way to bring lots of people in, and that catching people’s attention really does matter these days.
But when I think back to the moments that really moved me from the bottom of my heart, they weren’t the attention-grabbing kind. They were always something quieter, a more natural kind of beauty.
This isn’t about wanting to go back to the past. It’s just that, before this quieter, more natural beauty the older generations cared about fades away completely, I’d love for us to remember it once more, and find little ways to bring some of it back into how we live now.
Turning Off the Lights
Tanizaki ends the book with this one line.
“Well, let’s see what happens. Let us try, for once, turning off the lights.”
So, perhaps on the next full moon, we could turn off the lights, just once, and look at the moon. Even that alone might bring a different feeling to the surface.
Reading this book, the kind of space I want to create one day came into focus a little more. A space where shadow has a place. Perhaps one that brings together the beauty I have encountered in Japan, Europe, and other places I have lived or travelled through.
And this is something I’m beginning to explore beyond videos as well: how Japanese aesthetics can be translated into real spaces, experiences, and ways of living. If that’s something you’re interested in, I share more through Quiet Japan, which you can find from the description.
So where is the right balance between light and darkness? There probably isn’t one answer. It changes from person to person, and from culture to culture.
I’d love to know in the comments: is there a beauty in darkness, shadow, or emptiness in your own country or culture that you like?
And if you haven’t subscribed to the channel yet, it really would help me keep exploring these ideas and slowly bring this dream closer, so I’d be very happy if you did.
See you in the next video.
