Nature and the Built Environment:
Harmony, Resilience and Survival in Japan

Margot Gerondeau [e-mail]

It is a generally held belief that Japan has a profound sensitiveness and closeness to nature. Traditional values and popular practices place a great emphasis on the appreciation and respect for the natural environment. However, Japan’s relationship with its natural environment is not as straightforward as common beliefs may make it appear. This paper investigates how Japan’s complex relation with nature is expressed through its built environment, using elements such as shōjis , traditional paper sliding doors, Japanese gardens and pagodas. Considering Japan’s history and context, and using theories borrowed from the fields of environmental anthropology and anthropology of materials, this essay identifies three main aspects of this relationship. First, the essay focuses on the harmony between the built environment and nature by studying the materiality of light as an element of the architecture. Then, the essay investigates how the Japanese built environment reflects attempts at domesticating and controlling the natural environment. The final part discusses how the built and the natural environments are sometimes in conflict, looking at how different forms of architecture reveal a perception of nature as a destructive force. Therefore, while the Japanese built environment reflects a deep understanding and awareness of nature, this relation cannot be understood as simply seamless and harmonious, but as complex and multifaceted. This essay reveals that although natural elements are appreciated and integrated in some instances of the Japanese built form, nature is often also controlled, adapted or rejected in others.

Introduction

It is a widely accepted belief that Japan has a profound sensitiveness and closeness to nature. Traditional values and popular practices place a great emphasis on the appreciation and respect for the natural environment. Hanami, the traditional cherry blossom viewing festival celebrating the arrival of spring, has become a central symbol of Japanese identity (Moriuchi & Basil, 2019). 

However, nature proves particularly merciless in Japan, which has suffered major natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and typhoons throughout history. Moreover, since World War II, the Japanese natural environment has suffered from the consequences of industrial development and most of the rivers and seashores are lined with cement (Kerr, 2002).While forests still represent the largest part of the Japanese archipelago, residential areas have turned into continuous and seamless landscapes where nature has dissolved into a never-ending urban landscape (Kira, 2000). 

This essay aims at understanding how the Japanese built environment reflects the nation’s paradoxical relation to nature. Taking into account the Japanese geographical and intellectual context and relying on the fields of environmental anthropology and anthropology of materiality, I identify three gradual typologies in Japan’s relationship to nature and investigate them successively through a selected sample of the built environment.

The first angle of analysis corresponds to harmony, or the Japanese “oneness” with nature. The second focuses on the attempt at domesticating and controlling nature. The last tackles the necessity of getting to grips with the fear of nature. 

Context

Through personal travel and professional experiences in Japan, I have had the opportunity to glimpse into the Japanese culture and way of life. I have been struck by the dichotomy between aesthetics promoting harmony with nature and the practical experience of everyday life in Tokyo. The sea walls meant to protect from the dangers of the ocean but also walling people in further disturbed my initial belief of the Japanese harmonious coexistence with nature.

A visit to the Teshima Art museum is a physical and spiritual experience of the awareness of proximity with nature through a highly complex and man-made building. The museum, devoid of pillars, is opened to the outside through two large openings in its concrete shell. The artwork is the light, air, smells, noises and rain falling in and filling up the building. The inside and outside become meaningless distinctions.

Key geographical features contribute to the background context of Japanese intimacy with a nature that is more than often merciless. The archipelago’s four distinct seasons mean cold and snowy winters and hot and humid summers. Rainy season and typhoons cause heavy precipitation: the nation's average annual precipitation is more than 150% of the world average. Japan is located in the Circum-Pacific "ring of fire", with many of its biggest cities built on fault lines. Sixty out of its two hundred volcanoes are active. Natural disasters are an essential part of Japanese history. 

Japan covers 377,727 km2 over a length of 2000 km but only 300 km in width with four main islands and more than 6,800 smaller islands (Petry, 2003). The insular reality and the associated feeling of scarceness is reinforced by the imbalance in land utilisation and population distribution. According to a Japanese survey (OECD, 2017), 67% of the national land area is mountains with forests and 12% is cultivated fields.

The notion of "organic unity" between Japan and nature has become debatable as the natural environment has been profoundly modified. Though forests still represent more than two-thirds of the national land, the primeval forest has steadily decreased and artificial coniferous plantation forest represents now about 40 per cent of the total forest area (Statistics Bureau of Japan, 2020). 

Most rivers have been modified with dams or concrete embankments and almost 50% of the coastline of Japan is impaired with port facilities, seawalls and other protection works (OECD 2010). 

The Japanese concept of nature is often associated with Shintoism, the indigenous faith of Japan that qualifies more as a way of living than a religion. Shintoism supposedly derived from a primitive form of religion that worshipped nature and the sacred spirits present in mountains, rocks, rivers and trees. Its influence on nature's perception in Japan fits with the animist ontology proposed by Descola as a way of analysing nature (Jensen and Blok, 2013). According to Descola’s theories, the Japanese perspective on nature can be linked to animism as human and nonhuman actors as seen as dissimilar in their physical bodies, but continuous in their interiority. In that sense, human and non-humans are similar as they are agents on their environment and have subjective perceptions of the surroundings. Their varying physical bodies, however, creates different worlds, not simply understood in term of perception, but as a continuity to their physical form (Descola and Lloyd, 2013). Therefore, taking that theory into consideration, all beings considered in Shintoism appear as linked to humans by a common interiority, but disjoined in their physical appearance and abilities.

Additionally, Buddhism developed Mujō, the concept of impermanence, as an answer to the threats of nature. Mujō can be traced to the Buddhist teaching that life leading to enlightenment is transient and full of suffering. Kinji Imanishi’s description of the Japanese view of nature in A World of Living Things (2002) identifies nature as inherently harmonious with all living creatures on the same level. Imanishi claims that Western science centred on the competition between humans and with other species gives a false view of nature. 

In A Climate: A Philosophical Study (1935), Tetsurō Watsuji had already blamed the inadequacy of the Western conception of nature, and developed the concept of Fudō according to which nature imposes its characteristics on humankind who is an integral part of the environment. Mujō and Fudō integrate man and nature as harmoniously as possible within a framework resembling environmental determinism. Both concepts are still popular in Japan and can provide an interesting perspective on the built environment’s relation to nature. 

Theoretical framework

For the purpose of the essay, I retain an extensive definition of the built environment (Lawrence and Low, 1990) to include all types of buildings created to shelter, define, and protect activity but also specific elements, spatial subdivisions of buildings and materials. I also identify two relevant subsets of anthropological studies: anthropology of materiality and environmental anthropology. These two subsets provide complementary perspectives, as materials, people and their environment interact on each other, the environment providing materials that humans use and transform to adapt to the environment.

Anthropology of materiality focuses on materials and how societies transform and use them to create finished forms. Cultures can understand and see themselves as reflected through the forms they create from these materials. Materials appear double-faceted: the brute materiality, physical aspect and characteristics of materials on one side, and the relation of the material to humans, how humans perceive, appropriate and interpret the materials on the other. This second aspect gives rise to the transformation of materials into form, as humans assign both design and meaning to materials.

Following the dichotomy initially postulated by Aristotle that things are a combination of form and matter, anthropologist Ralph Holloway suggested that culture emerges when man-decided form is applied to the environment (1992). According to him, humans can create arbitrary forms on the formless matter provided by the environment. However, criticism of this theory arose, arguing that form emerges from the encounter of the forces of matter and human processes. Therefore, the characteristics of materials themselves take part in the creation of the form (Ingold, 2012). Additionally, materials are neither homogeneous nor constant: specific changes in resistance, elasticity or texture will impact the processes through which form is applied, and therefore the form itself.

Environmental anthropology is a subset of human ecology, which focuses on human biology and culture and their environment, considered as interconnected in webs of life. It deals with material, social and cultural aspects. Environmental anthropology investigates how people survive, understand and then pass on their knowledge of the environment.

In this context, several perspectives emerge, the first of which places humans as animals, adapting to their environment as a way of surviving and filling basic needs. However, it fails to explain the varied cultures that emerge within similar environments. Thus, notions of individuality and purposeful problem-solving are added to the analysis of human behaviour. Additionally, considerations of power relations and politics present within an environment take part in the study of human cultures (Sutton & Anderson, 2009: 17-18).

Three main traditions of environmental anthropology emerge. The imperialist perspective considers that humans control and have dominion over nature. Meanwhile an opposite tradition originating from ancient Greece suggests that cultures should adopt a harmonious way of living, where nature and culture cohabit. Lastly, the scientific tradition believes in geographical and environmental determinism: people and their potential are defined by the characteristics of the environment in which they live. this was later disproved by anthropological studies suggesting that if the environment fully dictated the cultural and biological development of a society, then similar environments should generate similar societies, and one single environment should not give birth to different responses. Yet, this is not the case, as some societies developed differently despite existing in similar environments (Freilich, 1967: 29). Other elements, such as culture and technology must then influence the way people respond and adapt to their environment.

From this observation emerged the concept that the environment does not determine society, but rather enables some behaviours and limits others. This approach also understands culture as an enabling and limiting agent: just as nature might enable or prevent the use of iron by providing ore, culture can limit or prevent it through the technical knowledge of society. Therefore, environmental anthropology focuses on what choices a society makes given the possibility it is given.

Both these subsets take into consideration the influence of the environment on the material world. While environmental anthropology concerns itself with how culture evolves and adapts as reaction and through the characteristics of its environment, study of materiality raises the subject of agency of materials onto the built form. Both these fields argue for the interaction between humans and their material environment: humans, the environment, the materials and their further appropriation are bound together and figure as actants in a global system.

Building on this theoretical background, this essay will now investigate the relationship between Japanese culture and nature, through the study of the built environment. To do so, I will consider three main axes: oneness with nature, domestication of nature, and lastly fear of nature. These three points will be considered using a combination of environmental anthropology and anthropology of materials, looking at how natural elements are used or adapted in the Japanese built environment.

Building on Japanese harmony with nature

I analyse Japanese intimacy with nature through the use of natural material as a predominant feature within the Japanese built environment. For this section, I suggest studying light through shōji, the traditional Japanese paper screen. For this study I will focus on the role of shōji in traditional houses to better understand their origin and how they convey elements of the relation between Japanese culture and nature. It can however be noted that, although shōji first appeared in traditional Japanese homes, they now exist in modern homes in Japan and abroad as a design element to control and diffuse light. These modern shōjis can be made of the traditional paper and wood, or more modern glass and metal (Kubota, 2016).

From an anthropological point of view, light can be considered in its material aspect as a concrete phenomenon: different material understandings of light consider light as disturbances in the ether, as corpuscles or as waves. It can also be understood as perception: we do not see and understand light as a material as much as we see in it (Bille and Sørensen, 2007). In this essay, I argue that light is both an active element of the environment, acting on humans and the form they create, and a material, and that the very characteristics of its materiality have agency in the design of the form and on how buildings are experienced. 

“The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadow towards beauty’s end”

(Tanizaki, 1933: 40)

In his novel In Praise of Shadows (2019) Tanizaki argues that the environment, to some extent, determined the Japanese culture, which in turn appropriated environmental features for its own aesthetic and practical objectives. How is this statement justified in the Japanese built environment?

Traditional Japanese houses faced the complex task of handling the specific climate. Several material solutions emerged, one of which was the shōji, traditional paper screen. The shōji served many purposes, among which was the control of light and ventilation. The modular features of these paper screens allowed for adaptation to the needs of the season: in summer, layers of paper, bamboo and wooden screens can be removed or added, opened or closed, to allow air and light in or to limit them (Beita, 2010: 20). Additional openings and designs were constructed to adapt to environmental constraints through the use of natural characteristics such as wind, to enable air flow for example. These forms have therefore emerged as essential defining elements in Japanese design and aesthetics, and remain part of the Japanese built form today.

Additionally, natural elements have impacted the way people experience and live in Japanese buildings. The material solutions adopted in Japanese architecture imply inclusion of nature within the built form. The very characteristics and materiality of shōji, for example, imply that light can never fully be kept from the Japanese home: it can be controlled, darkened and adjusted, but never fully absent. Looking at a still image of the inside of a house might not reflect the agency of light in this context, but studying the passage of time gives an insight into how life revolves around the natural features flooding the home. Japanese homes often appear as minimalist in their design and lack of furniture. However, the study of light can explain the reason for such a design: considering the position of the sun at different times of the year and of the day, the Japanese space is designed to be lived in different ways, through movement of the person and modifications of the home (Angen, 2013: 40). Therefore, this form enables the individual to interact with the built and natural environment, and adapt his or her behaviour to the changes happening around them.

Therefore, nature, light, the home and the human become all elements of a greater system, where all parts play a part in the creation and development of the others.

However, I argue that light is not only an exterior element impacting life and culture but also a material participating in the emergence of the Japanese form. Considering light as a material enables us to explore the notions of materiality, and brute or social meaning of materials. Indeed, light is both a brute material that changes and appears naturally, but it also becomes an appropriated and meaningful element of Japanese culture. While natural light can be considered as brute material, once dimmed by the shōji, or reflected by the tatami, light becomes a transformed element which is assigned meaning and cultural value (Kubota, 2016: 38). 

This form of light takes part in the creation of the Japanese built form as much as wood and stone, and the Japanese home is thought to include natural light as a characteristic element. Just as the brick emerges from ontogenesis of the clay and the mold (Ingold, 2012: 433), this transformed light is the organic product of the confluence of brute light and the paper of the shōji, and similarly to a brick, the output of this emergence is used as an element in the design and construction of the home. This dimmed light is assigned aesthetic values, and is considered as both a product of the outside environment and the outcome of a carefully crafted and developed practice.

Domesticating nature

Despite appearing as coexisting harmoniously with nature, the Japanese built form often exhibits attempts at controlling and dominating its environment. When considering the climate and environment of the Japanese culture, such behaviours can explain how - and be explained by the fact that - Japanese society successfully settled and survived on an island susceptible to extreme climates, tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic activity. This sometimes results in attempts at taming nature, of which Japanese gardens are emblematic examples. Japanese gardens are all, to some extent, a scaled down representation of natural landscape, real or imagined. 

The question might be raised, however, of the relevance of studying gardens in the context of the built environment: to what extent are gardens the product of human cultures and processes? Although gardens might appear as symbols of Japan’s fondness for nature, their form is carefully designed and controlled. While gardens often result from human processes and cultural, social and aesthetic preferences, Japanese gardens appear as a particularly edited and rationalised version of nature (Mather et al., 1998: 62). They are the artificial and selective reproduction of natural elements on a smaller scale: the public gardens, in which people are invited to walk and discover new perspectives and views, and private gardens which are usually surrounded by gates or walls, are both the outcome of a selective and controlled process of growing and recreating nature. So, while nature provides the materials and the inspiration for such spaces, the final form is produced by intense and careful human practice. 

An interesting element is the status of Japanese gardens in natural and social environments. Mentioned in the previous section was the blurring of traditional Western inside-outside boundaries: yet private Japanese gardens, for all their natural aspects, are confidently considered as being inside. So while the inside-outside distinction does not appear clearly in houses, it emerges more strongly in gardens (Inge, 2008: 133). This distinction is linked, I believe, to the exertion of control over gardens. While in houses, a certain level of harmony with nature presented itself as both a solution to climatic characteristics and expression of cultural preferences, in gardens, it is the very control and domination of nature that is searched for and valued. This control and the form that emerges from the garden creation and maintenance processes, replicate a version of nature secured within the boundaries of the home. 

Yet, the final form that emerges through the garden is the result of such carefully considered and crafted processes that, despite this origin, gardens appear to a Western viewer as almost fully artificial. However, through a Japanese lens, the Japanese garden is not artificially recreating nature, but rather selectively emphasising it, by intensifying features, materials and forms found naturally. 

Japanese gardens are thus designed to enable – through careful processes of framing and selection – a reinforced expression of chosen characteristics of the environment. Similar processes of selectively framing the environment are performed using the shōji. The modular design of paper panels allows not only wind and light control, but also the framing of exterior views (Beita and Fujii, 2013: 32-33). In the case of the Bosen tea room, only a limited section of the outside gardens was visible from the openings left between the shōjis, leaving the rest of the landscape up to imagination, and emphasising selected elements of the garden. 

Therefore, although nature plays a major role in the Japanese built form, the relationship between culture and nature is not always as straightforward as simple harmony and inclusion. In an environment such as Japan, where nature is equal parts providing and destructing, some buildings and technologies have adapted to match the destructive aspects of the environment. 

Getting to Grips with a Destructive Nature

Japanese culture has developed forms and techniques to adapt to the destructive bursts of its environment. Different built forms emerge that can be linked to this aspect of nature in three ways. 

Firstly, Mujō or impermanence plays a major role in the conception of the archipelago's built environment. Mujō brings the advantage of flexibility and easy mobility but also the culture of the perishability and the primacy of land over constructions. 

Shōji is particularly relevant in this context. The frail wooden structures holding paper sheets appear unlikely to survive the test of time. The very organisation and structure of the house in which the shojis are placed suggest impermanence: the paper screens can be removed if necessary, changed, adapted or added (Baek, 2009: 67). Therefore, some built elements do not attempt to remain, but rather reflect a perspective that values movement and change. In this case, ephemerality is not criticised but accepted and embraced. 

Another form that I consider to be relevant to this aspect is resilient designs. Despite a certain level of ephemerality, some buildings have remained intact for centuries. Several pagodas and temples have survived from the 7th century and still stand today. This is argued to be the result of resilient architecture, i.e. architecture that balances rigidity and ductility (Alexander, 2013: 2710). In other words, buildings that can resist shocks, but also absorb it through temporarily adapting their shape. Such buildings usually consisted of a central wooden pillar surrounded by different levels loosely piled up. The materiality of the central log enabled the structure to yield to the elements and regain the initial position afterwards (Genadt, 2019). 

Both these theories adopt the point of view that nature cannot be matched by humans, and thus, culture through the materials and the forms it creates, can only yield through ephemerality or resilience. 

However, a third and more recent perspective can be found in the built landscape, the most telling example of which can be observed located in the towering sea walls. Such constructions began to appear in the 1970s, although their numbers and scale have increased since the 2011 tsunami (Kanda, 2016: 484). The form, structure, materiality and purpose of these constructions reveal a somewhat more confrontational approach than the first two points discussed. Nature is no longer a force to yield to, but rather to fight against. The materials of these walls offer a striking difference from the previous example: the plying and ductile paper and wood have been replaced by concrete and metal structures. This sudden change in behaviour – from yielding to resisting – and using materials made from wood as opposed to concrete could be interpreted as expressing a deeper cultural transition. If material artefacts truly are the mirror through which we can understand culture, this transition questions the relationship between Japanese culture and nature in future material creations. 

While the three perspectives mentioned all deal with how culture and its material forms have adapted to the destructive aspects of nature, and reveal a deep awareness of the environment, their perspectives and solutions diverge. Mujō emerged as a material solution, and appears in culture as a philosophy of change and transition. Resilient forms reveal a deep understanding of the forces and agency of the environment, while the more recent developments suggest a growing belief that nature and the catastrophes that it sometimes brings can be planned for and thus controlled. 

Conclusion

In this essay, I investigated the relation between Japanese culture and nature as expressed through the built environment through three focal points: harmony, domestication and survival. This revealed how the relationship between culture and nature is much more complex than usually perceived. While the first lens on harmony revealed how Japanese culture and its environment coexist and act on each other harmoniously, the second focus on domestication showed that the nature appreciated by Japanese culture is more often the nature that can be controlled, adapted and framed. While nature is sometimes invited in and takes an active role in the built form, at other times it is controlled and subdued. This led to the final point that studied the destructive characteristics of the environment, and how the built form copes with such features. Together, the three focal points reveal a deep awareness of the natural environment in its technical, material and aesthetic forms. Japanese culture can hardly be defined without understanding its natural context. 

However, the last observation revealing a more confrontational relation with nature shows, in my opinion, a drastic change in the built form and the culture it reflects. According to the architect Toyo Ito, this form brought by Western culture has strayed away from Japanese roots and the understanding of nature and humans as inseparable. In the wake of the 2011 tsunami, the reconsideration of 20th-century architecture led to a renewed interest in the oneness with nature as a guiding principle for a new architecture. Somewhat paradoxically in the face of a terrible natural catastrophe, Ito went on to call for a renewed practice of building with nature. 

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