History of Japanese Architecture | History of Architecture | Asian Architecture

History of Japanese Architecture | History of Architecture | Asian Architecture
Japanese architecture, the built structures of Japan and their context. A pervasive characteristic of Japanese architecture—and, indeed, of all the visual arts of Japan—is an understanding of the natural world as a source of spiritual insight and an instructive mirror of human emotion.

General characteristics
An indigenous religious sensibility that long preceded Buddhism perceived that a spiritual realm was manifest in nature. Rock outcroppings, waterfalls, and gnarled old trees were viewed as the abodes of spirits and were understood as their personification. This belief system endowed much of nature with numinous qualities. It nurtured, in turn, a sense of proximity to and intimacy with the world of spirit as well as a trust in nature’s general benevolence. The cycle of the seasons was deeply instructive and revealed, for example, that immutability and transcendent perfection were not natural norms. Everything was understood as subject to a cycle of birth, fruition, death, and decay. Imported Buddhist notions of transience were thus merged with the indigenous tendency to seek instruction from nature.
Attentive proximity to nature developed and reinforced an aesthetic that generally avoided artifice. In the production of works of art, the natural qualities of constitutive materials were given special prominence and understood as integral to whatever total meaning a work professed. When, for example, Japanese Buddhist sculpture of the 9th century moved from the stucco or bronze Tang models and turned for a time to natural, unpolychromed woods, already ancient iconographic forms were melded with a preexisting and multilevel respect for wood.