Barrie SheltonThinkers

Japan is a place where new practices and beliefs have been less inclined to supplant old ones. Aesthetically , the result is one of visual superimposition and coexistence with scant attempt at integration.

Japan is a country where the wall is the opposite of the wall in the West. In Japan it is something flimsy hung within the void. in the West, a hole or void is cut from a substantial solid.

Japan is a country where the floor is treated with godlike respect, for it is a surface for sitting, sleeping and other 'clean activities' which no earth-soiled shoe ascends from outside to contaminate.

The Japanese (language) is a language consisting of strongly independent and powerfully graphic characters, each of which contains meaning.

The Japanese (language) is peculiar in that the key element which most determines the meaning of the sentence (i.e. the verb) follows subject and object, thus the Japanese has more flexibility and the listener is kept repeatedly in some greater measure of suspense awaiting indication of past, present, future, command, request, question or whatever. Likewise, the Japanese speaker can alter their intended meaning mid-sentence (i.e. x . . . is what i think . . . . not).

The Japanese (language) is written with a visual flexibility in that it can be multi-directional in layout (top to bottom or left to right)

Shinto is a collection of beliefs that manifests itself over the landscape in a profuse but uneven scatter of diverse natural and manmade forms at many scales and with various degrees of definition.

Shinto is a non-hierarchical, decentralized and fragmented landscape; and intellectually, there is no framework for organizing it into a conceptual whole.

Shinto is non-intellectual, absent of scriptures or origin stories and its gods (kami), are not anything the Japanese have a clear idea of, but rather feel intuitively at the depth of their consciousness.