as per April 2026, working link:
https://files.blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/wp-content/blogs.dir/4905/files/2016/09/In-Praise-of-Shadows.pdf
Found via the excellent "Glamour" book by Virginia Postrel, shows an intriguing (to the Western eye) view of Japanese or "Easter" approach.
Charles Moore in the Foreword:
Flowers and gardens serve as testimonials to our own care, and breezes loosely captured can connect us with the very edge of the infinite.
[bathrooms, tiles]
The effect may not seem so very displeasing while everything is still new, but as the years pass, and the beauty of the grain begins to emerge on the planks and pillars, that glittering expanse of white tile comes to seem as incongruous as the proverbial bamboo grafted to wood.
The Japanese toilet truly is a place of spiritual repose. It always stands apart from the main building, at the end of a corridor, in a grove fragrant with leaves and moss. No words can describe that sensation as one sits in the dim light, baskingin the faint glow reflected from the shoji, lost in meditation or gazing out at the garden. The novelist Natsume Soseki counted his morning trips to the toilet a great pleasure, "a physiological delight" he called it. And surely there could be no better place to savor this pleasure than a Japanese toilet where, surrounded by tranquil walls and finely grained wood, one looks out upon blue skies and grean leaves.
[...]
Here, I suspect, is where haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their indeas.
A beautiful woman, no matter how lovely her skin, would be considered indecenet were she to show here bare buttocks or feet in the presence of others, and how very crude, and tasteless to expose the toilet to such excessive illumination. The cleanliness of what can be seen only calls up the more clearly thoughts of what cannot be seen.
And indeed for even the sternest ascetic the fact remains that a snowy day is cold, and there is no denying the impulse to accept the services of a heater if it happens to be there in front of one, no matter how cruelly its inelegance my shatter the spell of the day. But it is on occasions like this that I always think how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science. Suppose for instance that we had developed our own physics and chemistry: would not the techniques and industries based on them have taken a different form, would not our myriads of everyday gadgets, our medicines, the produtcs of our industrial art - would they not have suited our national temper better than they do?
