In a country where the number 4 causes shivers and where the 9 evokes suffering, the 8 occupies a radically opposite place in the Japanese collective imagination. A number of abundance, prosperity, and expansion, it is one of the most sought-after and valued numbers in all of Japanese culture. But unlike other numerical superstitions that rely on simple homophony, the luck associated with 8 in Japan is the result of a remarkable convergence between linguistics, geometry, philosophy, and history. A number that is read, seen, and felt, and whose good fortune is expressed so coherently in so many different areas that it is difficult, even for the most rational of minds, not to find something truly exceptional about it. The...
For a Westerner, the question may seem paradoxical. White, the color of the bride, light, and purity in European tradition, would be the color of mourning in Japan? The reality is both more nuanced and more fascinating than this simple inversion. White in Japan is not merely the opposite of white in the West; it is a color of remarkable symbolic complexity, embodying simultaneously absolute purity, the sacred, death, renewal, and the beyond. Understanding why white is associated with mourning in Japan is to penetrate the heart of a philosophy of death and life that is radically different from what we know in the West, a philosophy where dying is not the end of a cycle but the passage to...
There are numbers laden with superstition in all cultures. In the West, the number 13 sends shivers down the spines of the most rational. In Japan, it is the number 4 that concentrates this collective anxiety, with remarkable intensity and cultural coherence. This seemingly innocuous number carries a considerable symbolic burden, summed up in a single word: shi. A syllable that, in the Japanese language, means both "four" and "death." This homophony is not a funny coincidence; it is the starting point of a deeply rooted belief in Japanese society, called tetraphobia, which still influences today the architecture, medicine, sports, real estate, and daily life of millions of people. How could a simple number acquire such symbolic power? And how...
Few are the colors that concentrate so many contradictory meanings within a single culture. In Japan, red is at once: it protects and it threatens, it celebrates and it mourns, it sanctifies and it transgresses. This ambivalence is not a contradiction; rather, it reflects a civilization that has managed to grasp the full complexity of a color and exploit every nuance with remarkable precision. From the vermilion of torii gates to kabuki masks, from wedding kimonos to alarm signals, the red of Japan tells a story spanning several millennia. A story where the same shade can signify life or death, luck or peril, depending on the context in which it appears. Red in Japanese culture: a millennia-old presence Japan's relationship...
In Japan, there are objects of deceptive simplicity. The tenugui is the perfect example. This rectangle of fine cotton, about thirty-five centimeters by ninety, without hem, without button, without any artifice, is one of the oldest and most versatile objects in all of Japanese culture. Towel, headband, wrapping, decoration, offering, fashion accessory, artistic support: the tenugui is all of this at once, and much more. Behind its apparent modesty lies a history of over a thousand years, a philosophy of use and beauty that says a lot about how the Japanese conceive the relationship between the useful and the aesthetic. The tenugui: a thousand years of history in a rectangle of fabric The first traces of the tenugui (手拭い) date...
