Introduction
What is the most beautiful animal?
If someone asked you that, what would you say?
Maybe a lion. Or a horse.
Something probably came to mind straight away.
A long time ago, there was a survey in America that asked exactly that question. And from what I’ve read, someone tried to run the same survey in Japan.
But it didn’t work.
And apparently, the people in Japan just couldn’t answer it.
And when they were pushed for an answer, what came back was, “Well… maybe small birds, all taking off at once into a red evening sky.”
Not an animal. A scene.
Why do you think the same question produced two completely different answers?
It seems there’s something quite fundamental hidden in that gap. It’s the difference between the way the West thinks about beauty and the way Japan does.
Japanese gardens outside Japan
I love Japanese gardens.
And Japanese gardens aren’t only in Japan. There are quite a few of them in America, in Europe, in London, where I live part of the time.
There’s a waterfall. There are stones set out here and there. Pretty much everything you’d expect from a Japanese garden is there.
And a lot of the specialists building them come over from Japan.
But I have to admit, when I stand in one of them, as a Japanese person, it somehow doesn’t feel like Japan to me.
Something is different. But I could never put my finger on what it was.
The book that finally gave me an answer was written by a Japanese art historian called Shuji Takashina. The title is “What Is Beauty to Japanese People”.
And the first thing he explains is why those two answers are so different.
In the West, there’s a rule about beauty that goes all the way back to ancient Greece.
That, he says, is the big difference.
Western beauty: the rules make it beautiful
You might already know this, but ever since ancient Greece, the West has thought of beauty as something that lives inside a clear sense of order.
Symmetry, basically. The parts in the right proportion to the whole.
You’ve probably heard of the golden ratio. That sort of thinking.
The Greeks had a word for this. The canon. It just means a standard.
Beauty has rules. So if you follow the rules, you can create beauty. That’s the Western idea.
And he says you see just how strong that idea is when you look at sculpture.
Almost none of the original Greek sculptures have survived.
Most of the ones we see in museums are Roman copies. And they’re still beautiful.
Because the beauty lives inside the rules. Reproduce the rules, and the beauty comes with them. That’s where Western beauty comes from.
There’s one example in the book that made me think, ah, that’s true.
It’s the Venus de Milo. It was made about two thousand years ago on an island in the Mediterranean, and now it’s in the Louvre in Paris.
The place has changed, but the beauty hasn’t. That’s his point.
He says if you put it in the middle of a desert, all on its own, you’d still find it just as beautiful.
Takashina calls this the beauty of the object.
The beauty lives in the object itself. So it can travel, it can be copied, and it stays beautiful anywhere, at any time.
Which I find really interesting.
So what was the rule in Japan, then?
Takashina’s answer surprised me.
In Japan, we’d been looking for beauty somewhere else all along.
Japanese beauty: not what is beautiful, but when
Japanese people, he says, have always been tuned to something different. Not what is beautiful, but when beauty happens.
For example, there’s a poet from the seventeenth century called Matsuo Basho, and this is his most famous haiku.
“An old pond. A frog jumps in. The sound of water.”
That’s it. A pond, a frog, and a sound. That’s the whole poem.
It never says the old pond is beautiful.
It doesn’t say the frog is beautiful, and it doesn’t say the sound of the water is lovely either.
The beauty Basho found is in that one instant after the frog goes in. It’s in the deep silence that spreads out around the pond.
So there’s nothing in that poem that’s beautiful in itself. The beauty is in the situation.
And this isn’t only the seventeenth century. About a thousand years ago, there was a woman called Sei Shonagon who served at the imperial court. She wrote a book of essays, and you find the same kind of thing in there.
She writes something like, autumn is at its best at dusk, and there’s something lovely about birds heading home to their nests.
That’s almost exactly the answer from the survey at the start, isn’t it?
So that same sensitivity still seems to be there, a thousand years later.
And there’s something about that I find really beautiful.
Takashina gave this kind of beauty a name. The beauty of circumstance.
The beauty of the object lives in the thing. The beauty of circumstance lives in the moment.
And once I understood that, the thing I’d been puzzling over all those years in London, the garden thing, finally started to fall into place.
The garden was never an object
So a Japanese garden was never an object at all. It was a situation.
When I think back to the times I found a Japanese garden beautiful, what actually comes back to me isn’t any particular object. It’s a situation.
For instance, if you ask me what a beautiful garden is, the first thing that comes to mind is a garden in the rain.
The soft sound of the rain. The light reflecting off the wet stones. The way the green looks a little deeper because of it.
The stones themselves aren’t what I find beautiful. It’s that whole situation, that moment.
And that moment only exists in the air of that one particular place.
The damp on your skin. The way the mist sits. The birds you can hear. The plants that grow nowhere else.
All of that is part of what I’m calling beautiful.
Yes, you can put a stone lantern on a ship and send it abroad.
But you can’t put the smell of June rain on a ship, can you.
So no matter how beautifully the garden is built, no matter how carefully the specialists from Japan work on it, something is still missing. And that, I think, is what I’d been feeling all along.
But as I read further into the book, something kept nagging at me.
Is this only a Japanese thing?
This isn’t in the book, but I started wondering whether the beauty of circumstance really is only a Japanese thing.
Because I do understand what the book says about beauty existing in the object itself.
And as a Japanese person, I find that beautiful too.
There are so many sculptures and paintings I’ve seen in museums that have moved me. I love that kind of work.
But I’ve had the opposite experience as well.
When I walk into a Gothic church, light comes through the high windows and lands on a chandelier. Shadows stretch out underneath. There’s an organ playing somewhere, and the air is slightly cold.
I find that whole scene beautiful. But what I’m looking at isn’t the chandelier by itself, and it isn’t the stained glass by itself.
It’s that moment with all of it together. And I think that’s what Takashina calls the beauty of circumstance.
Which one is your default?
So what I’d really like to ask you is this. Which of the two is your default?
I grew up in Japan, so when I think about what I find beautiful, it’s probably about eighty percent the beauty of circumstance.
I’d love to hear what you think.
Why this made me stop
The reason I wanted to talk about this today is that I’ve wanted to create Japanese gardens and interiors and things like that outside Japan. But when I read this book, I thought, hold on a moment. It made me stop and think.
Maybe what I want to make works perfectly in my head, but when it actually exists in the world, it might not land the way I imagine.
So that’s what I wanted to share with you today.
I don’t know exactly where this might be useful to you.
But if you ever come to Japan, keeping this difference in the back of your mind might make travelling around a lot more enjoyable.
I’m going back to the UK very soon, and I’m so excited about it.
I’m looking forward to seeing it with fresh eyes this time.
What I’m thinking about at the moment is visiting some towns I’ve never been to. And I’d like to do a bit of research on hotels, so I’m planning to go round a few.
I’d love to go and see some interesting spaces while I’m there.
I want to film all of that while I’m in the UK, so if you enjoyed this video, it would genuinely mean a lot if you subscribed.
And on Substack I write about the things I couldn’t fit into the videos, so please have a look there too.
See you in the next one.
