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Isozaki Arata, long a major international architect, has written usefully on a variety of architectural topics. This book is a translation of a collection of essays written largely in the 1980s and 1990s (most originally intended for American publication) and published in 2003 in Japan as Kenchiku ni okeru "Nihonteki na mono "--a reference to a 1934 article with the same title by the architect Horiguchi Sutemi. Isozaki here considers buildings not just as objects but as what he calls "events" and "textual spaces"--their historical contexts and what has been written about them (p. viii). Similarly, he treats Japan-ness, Nihonteki na mono , not just as a collection of certain physical or aesthetic qualities but as a problematic that appears during times of strong outside pressure and social turmoil, followed by the assimilation of foreign influence of wayô-ka , "cultural Japanization" (p. 168), which brings social stability. This pattern has been repeated many times--a "mechanism of cultural production" that is "destined to become cliché or eventual kitsch" (p. 305).
One well-known example is the nineteenth-century Western taste for Japanese objects of daily life. In response, following this "Western-style 'Japanese taste,'" Japan produced connoisseurs who found qualities of Japan-ness in such items, which have now become art (p. 4). Architecture as profession and concept was likewise introduced to Japan in the nineteenth century, and as Japanese became trained architects and architectural historians, they came to see past Japanese building as architecture. Architectural interest in the qualities of Japan-ness,...