Donald Richie
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The Futon is, despite appearances, not about using the floor for a bed. Rather, for the Japanese, whose home is a private family place without shoes or strangers, it might be more accurate to say that the Japanese use a bed for a home.
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Japanese fashion is, in part, a response to the fact that people tend to look alike (one hair colour, unless it is dyed; only two eye colors, brown and black), and so their natural appearance does not exhibit the physical diversity seen in some Western countries.
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London is a city whose pattern is a combination of probity (the House of Lords, Westminster Abbey) and trendy (‘swinging-city’ punk).
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Mono no aware is a state of mind characterized as an acceptance of things just as they are. It is a philosophy of acceptance.
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Rome is a city whose pattern is a combination of the ancient (Imperial Rome) and the more recently elegant (Armani, Valentino, Gucci).
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The Street , in Japan, in comparison to European streets, are closer to a market with shops spilling out into the streets. European streets are, by contrast, something like a stage.
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Tokyo is, unlike the Western city, an anthropomorphized city where the merely human is emphasized. The Western city, by contrast, emphasizes the more-than-human monumental,
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Tokyo is a city giving off the feeling of unreality to a Westerner because their assumptions concerning urban grammar are not there to be read. The buildings do not ‘fit’ the streets.
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Tokyo is a city where extremely contemporary-looking structures sit like nomads’ tents, with the difference that the Japanese move not through space but through time. (i.e. they are continually being torn down and new one’s are quickly erected in their place).
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Tokyo is a city where the air of the transient prevails. New buildings are constructed in fashions so flamboyantly modern that one cannot but expect them to be superseded.
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Tokyo is a city where the architectural style is visionary futuresque, but the urban structure remains medieval.
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Tokyo is a city where, unlike Paris or Rome, there his really nowhere to get a proper view of the city, for not only is Tokyo too large and sprawling and too undifferentiated.
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Tokyo is a city whose frenetic carnival flavor is due to familiar things being used in unfamiliar ways. There is a kind of freedom in finding that Doric columns don’t mean banks, nor red roof tiles, Spain.
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Tokyo is a city whose frenetic life is due, more than most cities, to the fact that, dancing on the edge of a volcano as it is, it lives with an apprehension of its own destruction..
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Tokyo is a city whose inhabitants have always shunned the suburbs for this city. For them, the suburbs exist only because they cannot afford to live in crowded, expensive Tokyo.
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Tokyo is a city whose style is an absence of style, the mayhem produced by having no overriding authority.