Jun'ichiro Tanizaki - "In Praise of Shadows"

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?

 

   

  

 

Virginia Postrel - "The Power of Glamour"

 

Glamour is, rather, a form of nonverbal rhetoric, which moves and persuades not through words, but through images, concepts, and, totems. (Even when conjured as word-pictures, glamorous images are perceived and remembered as emotionally resonant snapshots, not verbal descriptions.)

Glamour is powerfully persuasive. Yet because it relies on imagery and channels desire, it is often dismissed as trivial, frivolous, and superficial.

the old Scots word glamour described a literal magic spell. Glamour (or a glamour) made its subject see things that weren't there. A 1721 glossary of poetry explained: "When devils, wizards or jugglers deceive the sight, they are said to cast glamour o'er the eyes of the spectator." Glamour could, Scott wrote in 1805, "make a ladye seem a knight; / The cobwebs on a dungeon wall / Seem tapestry in lordly hall." That power was believed to stretch into the real world. In his diary, Scott worried that "a kind of glamour about me" was mking him overlook errors in his page proofs; he wondered whether the right herbal concoction "would dispel this fascination." (As both magic and metaphor, glamour and fascination are closely related.)

Glamour [...] emerges through the interaction between object and audience. Glamour is not something you possess but something you perceive, not something you have but something you feel.

Unlike escapist entertainment that simply provides emotional distraction, glamour is escapist in the profound sense identified by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Echoing Queen Christina's Antonio, Tuan argues that escapism is the essence of culture, which he defines as "the totality of means by which I escape from my animal state of being." This uniquely human escapism allows us to shape the world, and ourselves, through deliberate action.

    A human is an animal who is congenitally indisposed to accept reality as it is. Humans not only submit and adapt, as all animals do; they transform in accordance with a preconceived plan. That is, before transforming, they do something extraordinary, namely, "see" what is not there. Seeing what is not there lies at the foundation of all human culture.

A single static two-dimensional portrait – a selective representation "preserved for posterity" – is, by its very nature, deceptive. Viewers perceive such a portrait differently from a real human being. If, as [Jessica] Coen claims, young women do not realise that "most waists don't really bend without a roll of flesh" or that "a 40-year-old woman actually does have some wrinkles," it is because they've mentally edited away those flaws in the people they see every day. In the flux and movement of life, the mind overlooks imperfections that appear glaring in a still image. Retouching may therefore produce an image truer to the mind's eye. 

Charisma (originally a religious term) is a quality of leadership that inspires followers to join the charismatic leader in the disciplined pursuit of a greater cause. More colloquially, charisma is a kind of personal magnetism that inspires loyalty.
    Charisma in either sense is a personal characteristic like intelligence. A place, an idea, even an object can be glamorous, but only a person can be charismatic. And while glamour depends on the audience's receptive imagination, even unsympathetic audiences can feel the power of charisma.
    Most important, glamour requires mystery, allowing the audience to fill in the details with their own desires. Glamour doesn't persuade the audience to share a leader's vision. Instead, it inspires the audience to project their own longings onto the leader (or movie star, vacation resort, or new car).
    [...]
    Charisma enhances leadership; glamour enhances sales.