12 Jan 2009 2317H

Notes on “Designing Design,” by Kenya Hara

Today we have absolutely no means available to realistically imagine the extent of the brutality of the cultural revolution called the Meiji restoration (1867), which managed to transform completely the purely Japanese “Edo Culture” into a Westernized one. However, people in those days probably expended a stupendous amount of energy on information gathering and study about the West. And no doubt they were also pained by the discrepancies between their traditional culture and Western culture.

Self-colonialism and the shame of defeat at the hands of America first under the threat of Admiral Perry’s gunboats in 1854, then by atom bombs 90 years later, still leaves a stigma in the national imagination that will not heal. Yet Hara forgets to mention the great military victory over Russia in the Meiji era, which not only put Japan on the map in the Western mind, it also frightened the West into creating the notion of the Yellow Peril, and, then too, there is a list of Japan’s own militarist imperialist exploits in Taiwan, Korea and China. Finally, Japanese design doesn’t exist in an economic vacuum, and arguably has not only already changed American design forever but through Japan’s ascendant economic hegemony of the 1980s influenced the design of Pacific Rim countries like Hong Kong and Korean, even into the present day.

Even in Asia, the intentional simplicity of the Japanese culture and tension generated by an object placed all alone in an empty space are unique. Any example of ornamentation or decoration from another Asian region will reveal dense, elaborate details. On the opposite end of the scale is the Japanese concept of contentment with simplicity and emptiness.

Perhaps this is where Japanese exceptionalism and historic amnesia collide. Wasn’t this sensibility acquired originally from Daoist and Chan Buddhist aesthetics from the Chinese mainland, and later refined by the Zen schools?

Here’s my idea: if Japan had not modernized towards Westernization, but had been able to impregnate its own traditional culture with modern science and developed naturally, surely it would have produced a unique design culture that could have competed with the west. This design culture would have been completely different from that developed by the Japan that endured the Meiji Restoration. If we read [Tanizaki's book] as a design book, we should be able to bring into bloom, in a place still far beyond traditional Japanese culture, a modernity that is neither known nor has ever been experienced before.

This theory, the first time I have heard anyone else but myself express this notion of design colonialism, I continue to turn over and over in my mind vis-a-vis Chinese design. It irks me. What if? Perhaps that is nostalgia and romanticism for a time and place that may not exist but in our imagination.

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2 responses to "Notes on “Designing Design,” by Kenya Hara"

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18 Jan 2009 1445H

Tim writes:

I do wonder about the sensibility. At Nara, where some of the early Buddhist temples were built, there is a lot of color.

20 Jan 2009 2047H

Gino writes:

It is what it is.

And now it's your turn.

Fire your weapon, soldier. Just be careful of friendly fire. NAME & EMAIL required.

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