Yūgen – the Japanese aesthetics of half-light and mystery. About the hidden beauty that exists between vanishing and enduring, in art, literature, and everyday life.
2025/10/16

When something has already vanished, but has not yet ceased to exist. Yūgen – the Japanese Aesthetics of Suspension

Yūgen – the Japanese aesthetics of half-light and mystery. About the hidden beauty that exists between vanishing and enduring, in art, literature, and everyday life.

 

In Suspension

 

How can one describe yūgen in a way that another person truly understands it?
Perhaps it cannot be done. But one can show a picture: thick fog, so dense that almost nothing is visible, from which elongated, twisted, pale shapes timidly emerge — perhaps tree trunks. Nothing happens, and yet everything in this image trembles — as if existence itself hesitated between being and nonbeing. Yūgen cannot be captured in words, because it begins precisely where words give way to silence.


The kanji 幽玄 — the two characters that together form this concept — literally mean “secluded” (幽) and “deep, mysterious” (玄). Their components are mountains shrouded in mist and a thread dyed in darkness: an image of fading and deepening at the same time. It is the beauty of the half-light — one that does not blind but draws us inward, toward what is indistinct yet disturbingly real.

 

Yūgen is like the half-whisper of nature: the sound of a bell lingering in the air after it has been struck; the shadow of a bird disappearing into milky fog; the light of the moon seeping through shōji paper. To hear it, one must silence the chattering mind and allow things simply to be — mono o hanasu (物を放す), “to let things go.” It is not about meditation, but about presence without the attempt to understand. A walk at dawn, when mist still clings to the earth, becomes a practice of yūgen if we can look without trying to grasp meaning. The same applies to sound: when the echo of footsteps on a night street slowly fades away, what remains within us is not emptiness but a subtle tension, as if something important had just passed by — without touching us directly.

 

Even modern cities, despite their concrete and lights, can still whisper in this language. An old, crumbling kiosk wedged between skyscrapers, an alley that suddenly ends in a wall, a moon cutting through the glare of neon — all are micro-scenarios of yūgen. This experience is not an escape into melancholy, but a lesson in subtle alertness: a sensitivity to thresholds, transitions, and the breaths of the world. Yūgen — you can hardly see it, hardly hear it — and yet — can you feel it? It awakens those strange sensations… of what? Longing? Mystery? Depth? An awed wonder, admiration, fear?


Let us look today at one of the most important motifs of Japanese aesthetics — both in the modern and medieval sense. For yūgen has never left the Japanese way of seeing the world.

 

Yūgen – the Japanese aesthetics of half-light and mystery. About the hidden beauty that exists between vanishing and enduring, in art, literature, and everyday life.

 

(yū)

“secluded, dimmed, hidden”

 

The first of the two characters forming the concept of yūgen (幽玄) is 幽. It is quiet, shy, hidden in the shadows — and has carried such meanings for centuries. In classical calligraphy, it looks like mist suspended above mountains, and its composition indeed suggests that.

Graphically, the character 幽 is built from two repeating elements 幺 placed above 山. The lower sign, 山, means “mountain” — an ancient pictogram originally depicting three peaks of varying height. Above it appears 幺, a sign meaning “short thread,” “something small, thin, subtle.” When two such threads are placed above a mountain, a visual metaphor emerges: fog or shadows settling in mountain valleys, light turning into twilight, subtlety that muffles and softens the clarity of forms. What was once bright and solid as rock becomes enveloped in something soft and delicate.

 

Thus was born the meaning that, in languages connected to Chinese culture, has for centuries signified “secluded, remote, calm, dim, hidden, inaccessible.” 幽 is the opposite of brightness and expressiveness — it is a subdued yet deep world where every sound, every shadow, carries its own weight. Already in Chinese dictionaries from two thousand years ago, this character was associated with the ideas of depth and darkness, used to describe things “difficult to grasp,” “concealed from the eyes.” Hence also its later meaning “the otherworld” (幽冥) — the invisible realm where the boundaries between life and death are blurred.

 

In Japanese, 幽 (yū) has survived in many compounds that help us better understand its character. 幽霊 (yūrei) — ghost, spirit — literally means “hidden soul,” a being not fully present in the world of humans. 幽閉 (yūhei) means imprisonment, confinement — the physical seclusion of a person in a space cut off from light and sound. Meanwhile, the pair of terms 幽顕 (yū–ken), meaning “hidden and manifest,” has long been a central metaphor in Buddhist and Shintō conceptions of reality — that world and this world, the invisible and the visible, two sides of a single existence.

 

The character 幽 (yū) thus carries within it a powerful tension between being and fading. It is not absolute darkness but rather a twilight where form still exists yet no longer fully reveals itself. One might say that 幽 (yū) symbolizes the mode of things that do not radiate light directly but act through attenuation, through withdrawal. Within this “softening of intensity” lies a profound Japanese intuition of beauty: that which is quiet and subtle is often more present than that which is loud and distinct.

 

In this sense, 幽 (yū) is not simply “dark” — it is soft, diffused, breathing. In ink painting, in haiku poetry, in nō theatre, it is precisely this kind of shadow, this semi-visible realm, that forms the emotional core of beauty. It is the space in which the imagination of the viewer or reader becomes a co-creator. 幽 (yū) says: do not show everything — let meaning flicker in the half-light. (More about the meaning of shadow in Japanese culture here: "In Praise of Shadows" by Tanizaki – Let Us Touch the Japanese Beauty of Twilight, So Different from the Western Aesthetic of Light).

 

This character has also long been associated with spirituality and meditation. In Chinese Buddhism, the term 幽寂 (in Japanese reading: yūjaku) meant “silent contemplation” — a state in which the mind detaches from external noise and sinks into itself. This experience of inner stillness and subtle awareness was one of the roots of the aesthetic that the Japanese would later call yūgen.

 

If we look at 幽 (yū) as a symbolic ideogram, we can discern three levels of meaning:

  -  Physical – mist, shadow, silence, a hidden place in the mountains, a valley, a sound from an indeterminate distance.

  -  Psychological – a feeling of inner focus, melancholy, contemplation; a state of the soul “in twilight,” far from clamor.

  -  Metaphysical – the space between life and death, presence and absence; the world of spirits, but also the world of poetry and dream.

 

In all of this, 幽 (yū) remains a liminal sign — belonging fully neither to light nor to darkness. In its structure is contained the principle of “fading through existence”: the two threads above the mountain are a metaphor for things that slowly disperse into space — like smoke, like an echo, like a memory.

 

Yūgen – the Japanese aesthetics of half-light and mystery. About the hidden beauty that exists between vanishing and enduring, in art, literature, and everyday life.

(gen)

“dark, deep, mysterious”

 

The second character in the concept yūgen (幽玄) is 玄 (gen), one of the oldest and most philosophically charged ideograms in the entire Sino-Japanese cultural sphere. In classical calligraphy, it appears simple.

 

Graphically, 玄 (gen) is composed of two elements: at the top, 亠 (a cover, lid, or element symbolizing “something above” or “something enclosing”), and beneath it 幺 (a thread, something thin and delicate). In ancient Chinese etymological commentaries, this structure was explained as “a thread hidden beneath a cover” or “the process of dyeing a thread a dark color.” In old weaving workshops, silk thread was repeatedly immersed in dye until it acquired a deep, almost black shade — and this phenomenon, the fading of light into the depth of color, became for the ancient Chinese a metaphor for mystery, profundity, and ineffable meaning.

 

For this reason, in classical dictionaries such as the Shuowen Jiezi (2nd century CE), 玄 (gen) was defined as “a dark color, the deepest shade of black” — a hue in which all boundaries disappear. It is “blackness” that is no longer a color, but a bottomless space. Over time, the meaning of the character expanded to encompass spiritual and metaphysical phenomena: “that which is mysterious, difficult to grasp, as deep as the night sky.”

 

It is worth noting that in ancient China, the color black (玄色) did not carry negative connotations as it often does in Europe. On the contrary — it was considered the primordial color, associated with beginnings and potential. In Taoist cosmology, it signified the original chaos (hundun, 混沌), “the darkness before the light,” from which everything is born. Not coincidentally, one of the ancient names for Heaven was 玄天, “Dark Heaven,” and the divine guardian of the north and winter was 玄武, “the Black Warrior.”

 

In philosophical literature, especially in Taoist texts, 玄 (gen) took on a metaphysical dimension. In the Dao De Jing, Laozi writes:

 

「玄之又玄,衆妙之門。」

“Darkness beyond darkness — the gateway to all mysteries.”

 

This sentence became the key to later interpretations of the character. 玄 (gen) ceased to mean merely a color — it became a symbol of infinite depth, of the mystery of existence, of that which lies beyond the reach of reason. From this understanding arose the later tradition of xuanxue (玄学), “the learning of the mysterious” — a current of Chinese philosophy during the Wei–Jin period (3rd–4th centuries CE) that sought to unite Taoist metaphysics with elements of Confucianism and Buddhism.

 

In Japanese, 玄 (gen) retained all these meanings, though its tone softened and became more aesthetic. The character appears in words related to color and depth:

 

  -  玄人 (kurouto) – “master, professional,” literally “a person of depth,” someone who reaches beyond the surface.

  -  玄関 (genkan) – “entrance,” literally “mysterious gate” — the threshold between the outer world and the interior of the home, the passage from the profane to the intimate.

  -  玄米 (genmai) – “unpolished rice,” that is, rice which has retained its original, natural depth.

 

Each of these words carries an echo of the old meaning: 玄 (gen) refers to that which is deeper, unrefined, more genuine. In the spiritual realm, it has always been associated with mystery, profundity, and the impossibility of complete understanding. In Japanese Zen Buddhism, 玄 was used in reference to meditative experiences in which the mind transcends the dualism of thought and thing.

 

An intriguing detail is that 玄 also became, in classical usage, the opposite of 白 (“white, bright, evident”). The pair 玄–白 thus mirrors the polarity of “hidden–manifest,” “deep–superficial,” “mysterious–obvious.” In this sense, 玄 does not signify mere darkness but rather a depth that conceals meaning in order to protect it from shallowness.

 

In Japanese culture, especially in waka poetry and nō poetics, this character acquired exceptional importance. It came to signify a state of “subtle stirring,” something that transcends emotion but has not yet become idea. Zeami Motokiyo, the founder of nō theatre, wrote that “that which is most beautiful is like a shadow that does not vanish even after nightfall” — and it is precisely this shadow that represents gen: a bottomless depth in which form ceases to be form, and sound ceases to be sound. (More on nō theatre and its ambiguity here: Chimerical Masks of Noh Theatre – A Form Truer than Content).

 

Yūgen – the Japanese aesthetics of half-light and mystery. About the hidden beauty that exists between vanishing and enduring, in art, literature, and everyday life.

 

幽玄

(yūgen)

What does it“say”?

 

When we combine these two characters — 幽 (yū: hidden, subdued) and 玄 (gen: deep, mysterious) — we obtain a construction of astonishing semantic harmony. Though the two originate from entirely different images, together they form a remarkably precise expression of a distinctly Japanese aesthetic experience.

 

幽玄 (yūgen) thus means “hidden depth,” “darkness full of meaning,” a world existing on the threshold of perception — neither fully visible nor fully invisible. It is not night, but twilight; not silence, but echo; not full presence, but a subtle intimation. In this combination lies the principle that became the heart of Japanese aesthetics: beauty arises where things are not explicit, but implied.

 

Linguistically speaking, the character 幽 leads us into a state of sensory attenuation — it quiets the senses, slows movement, diffuses light. Then 玄 deepens this experience, guiding it inward — not into darkness, but into incomprehensibility. It is a two-phase motion: dimming — immersion. First something withdraws; then it opens a space where depth can exist.

 

In Japanese artistic practice, this combination became almost a model of perception: to see indirectly, to hear what is silent, to understand through what is left unsaid. Yūgen does not refer to some other, mysterious reality — on the contrary, it refines the very reality before our eyes, an attentive gaze that does not stop at the surface.

 

Just as 幽 teaches us to quiet the world in order to hear something, 玄 shows that what is truly essential always lies beneath the layer of appearances. Together, they form a linguistic metaphor of perception — the art of seeing through a veil.

 

This is precisely why yūgen cannot be translated with a single word. It contains within itself both silence and depth; dimness and awe; melancholy and understanding. It is not an intellectual category but a way of being in a world of half-tones, where nothing is obvious and everything — potentially infinite.

 

Yūgen – the Japanese aesthetics of half-light and mystery. About the hidden beauty that exists between vanishing and enduring, in art, literature, and everyday life.

 

How to understand yūgen today?

 

A contemporary understanding of yūgen requires us to reject the fog of words that, for decades, has encrusted the term like decorative smoke in catalogues about “Zen design” and “mystical minimalism.” Yet yūgen has nothing to do with New Age mood or inspired abstraction. It is not mysticism, but a concrete aesthetic experience that can be lived in everyday life — in the moment when something slips out of sight and yet leaves an echo within us.

 

Most simply, one could say that yūgen is a quality of experience in which the boundary of the visible or audible reveals more precisely because it shows less. It is a state of feeling and knowing at the very threshold of vanishing — when something is only just receding, dissolving, paling. A momentary twilight of the world in which contours do not disappear entirely, but blur, making room for something deeper. When the light fades, the imagination burns brighter.

 

In this sense, yūgen differs from other famous Japanese categories of beauty. Mono no aware is above all a tenderness before transience — a soft, melancholic touch of awareness that every thing lasts only a moment. Wabi-sabi, by contrast, rests on austere simplicity and noble patina — it teaches acceptance of imperfection, the charm of age and asymmetry. Yūgen goes deeper. It does not speak of time, but of distance; not of simplicity, but of inaccessibility. It is a beauty hidden in half-light, where something does not fully reveal itself — like an echo that still resounds after the sound has ceased, or like a shadow in a garden at late dusk, in which we are unsure whether something is truly there, or whether it only seems so.

 

This inaccessibility is not a lack, but a form of presence. That which hides gains depth. That which is not said remains with us longer, because we must complete it ourselves. That is precisely why yūgen does not tolerate an excess of detail. In Japanese aesthetics it was understood long ago that too precise an explanation kills meaning — not because it robs it of mystery, but because it robs us of the space for co-participation. In the experience of yūgen, what matters is precisely that gap between the image and its understanding, between the sound and its echo.

 

In the language of art, yūgen manifests wherever form is not complete: in images that halt halfway between light and shadow; in music that leaves silence behind like a scent in the air; in a poem that suggests but does not speak outright. It is a world of half-tones in which things lose contour in order to gain meaning. The point is not to hide the truth, but to allow it to ripen within the recipient.

 

In our civilization we demand sharpness and immediate meaning; yūgen works the other way around. It teaches patient seeing — not through the prism of what is seen, but of what is still concealed. It teaches that full understanding does not arrive when we have all the data, but when we can remain in a state of suspension, with an open mind and a calm heart.

Therefore, today yūgen should not be understood as an exotic secret of Japan, but as a universal practice of attention. It is a way of looking at the world in which the most happens not at the center, but at the periphery of perception. A single moment of dusk, the scent of damp air, the sound of a distant train is enough — and suddenly an ordinary instant opens into infinity.

 

In that brief flash of understanding, before it goes out, the entire meaning of yūgen is contained: something vanishes, but in that vanishing, depth is revealed.

 

Yūgen – the Japanese aesthetics of half-light and mystery. About the hidden beauty that exists between vanishing and enduring, in art, literature, and everyday life.

 

Yūgen in practice — selected Japanese works

 

 

羽衣 and 敦盛

“Hagoromo” and “Atsumori”

  -  Zeami Motokiyo (c. 1400–1420, nō theatre)

 

In “Hagoromo,” a fisherman finds on the shore the feathered robe of a celestial dancer; he will return it if she dances — and the entire drama unfolds in the pause between the recovery of the robe and the dance. The tennin mask, with its unchanging face, does not “express” emotion; it suspends it, so every small gesture of the fan and movement of the sleeve works like a half-voice: signalling, not stating. The hayashi ensemble (the nōkan flute and the ōtsuzumi and kotsuzumi drums) accentuates the breath of emptiness — the beats divide space rather than fill it, so the viewer begins to “hear” what lies between the sounds.

 

The climactic scene of the dance in the shadow of pines is a model realization of the principle jo–ha–kyū: a slow introduction, a gentle opening, a sudden extinguishing after which the echo of movement remains. It is here that the old metaphor “drifting clouds / swirling snow” takes effect: the soft, suspended phrases of the chant are like clouds moving across the sky, and the dancer’s small, quick steps are like swirling snow that veils the meaning in order to make it perceptible.

 

In “Atsumori,” the spirit of a young warrior returns to meet the monk who killed him — and again the mask and the half-profile of the body create distance: forgiveness is not acted, it appears in the gap between word and silence. The musical refrain about Atsumori’s flute acts like a spectral object: we do not hear it directly, but we feel its reverberation, which binds memory, sorrow, and solace. In Zeami, yūgen appears exactly where the drama takes a step back, and what remains is gesture, shadow, and aftersound.

 

 

 

松林図屏風

(Shōrin-zu byōbu)

“Folding Screens of Pine Forest”

  -  Hasegawa Tōhaku (c. 1595)

 

Two six-paneled screens, ink on paper, monumental pines emerging from mist — and an expanse of “unpainted” space. The lack of background is not emptiness: it is the matter of the invisible, which allows the trees to appear like a memory rather than a thing.

 

The contour of needles and bark is deliberately “broken” in places, and the ink washes are thinned; the eye cannot “catch” on detail, so it completes the whole from the memory of walks and scents. Tōhaku paints mist not with the brush, but with the refusal to paint: he spares his strokes so that the paper becomes air. Depth arises not from linear perspective but from a gradation of presence — first almost nothing, then half-shadow, finally a trunk that once again fades. The screens also “play” with the gaps between panels; this rhythm of slits compels us to read the whole like music, with bars of silence. This is yūgen in its purest form.

 

 

 

雪景山水図

(Sekkei sansui-zu)

“Winter Landscape”

 - Sesshū Tōyō (c. 1470–1480)

 

Here the cold is not a theme — it is a technique. A rock stretched diagonally across the composition cuts the frame like a gust of north wind; the brushstrokes are rough, “dry,” and the ink blurs build hie (冷え) — a chill of distance and solitude that is almost physically palpable.

 

The snow has not been painted; it is the unpainted areas of paper that ache with whiteness. Tiny human signs — a path, a small bridge, a hut — are barely suggested and therefore more truthful; they endure like footprints in a drift, before the next gust covers them.

 

Sesshū switches modes fluently: from the sudden, coarse lines of the rock to the nebulous interpenetration of planes — the eye cannot be sure whether it is looking at mist or at a “fault” of the brush, and in this uncertainty a depth opens. It is a landscape that recedes as we look at it: the more attentively we follow a patch of ink, the more clearly we feel the chill of the space beyond the picture. Yūgen reveals itself as a designed distance: the landscape refuses us entry so that we might long for it more intensely.

 

 

 

枯朶に
烏のとまりけり
秋の暮

(Kare eda ni / karasu no tomarikeri / aki no kure)

 

“On a withered branch
a crow has perched —
autumn dusk.”

– Matsuo Bashō (c. 1680)

 

In three images (branch, crow, time of day) there is not a single adjective; all the “emotion” is carried by the scenery of vanishing light. The crow does not symbolize — it anchors the frame; “dusk” does what it always does: blurs contours, evokes the memory of endings. The poem ends in silence, which everyone hears differently — a “semantic gap” through which we read the poem, and the poem reads us.

 

 

 

 

東京物語

(Tōkyō Monogatari)

– Ozu Yasujirō (1953)

 

In Ozu, yūgen takes the form of cinematic thresholds. Half-closed shōji doors, corridors leading nowhere, flat shots from tatami height — all these hold us just before the event. The most important gestures (farewells, deaths, separations) often occur offscreen; in their place we see a kettle on the stove, an empty corridor, clouds above smokestacks — the so-called “pillow shots,” which calm the rhythm and create time for meaning to emerge.

 

Transitions between interior and street are the modern equivalent of the genkan: physical sites of transformation, where the “hidden” becomes perceptible before it becomes visible. Sound in Ozu — a too-loud tram, the city’s breath — fills the pauses in dialogue, as if speaking for the characters what they cannot say. The camera does not seek climax; meaning is born in the fading — after the entrance, after the glance, after the door closes. It is cinema in which empty space is an equal actor — and it is precisely in that emptiness that yūgen resides.

 

Yūgen – the Japanese aesthetics of half-light and mystery. About the hidden beauty that exists between vanishing and enduring, in art, literature, and everyday life.

 

Workshop: How to “hear” yūgen

 

To truly experience yūgen, one must learn to attune the senses to what does not speak directly. Japanese aesthetics have for centuries cultivated sensitivity to moments of transition — those brief instants when form still exists, but has already begun to dissolve. Yūgen most often reveals itself exactly there, where something ends but does not completely vanish: in twilight, in the silence after a sound, in movement that is already slowing, in a shadow that still trembles on the wall. Dusk, fog, the fading echo of footsteps, the sound of a train in the distance — these phenomena form the natural laboratory of yūgen. Their common quality is instability: the boundary between visible and invisible, audible and inaudible, present and disappearing.

 

For the Japanese, it is precisely these “thresholds of perception” (閾 shikii) that constitute the space of deepest beauty. That which disappears opens something greater than the phenomenon itself — it leaves an echo that matures in the mind. The viewer no longer possesses the object, but the experience. Zeami wrote that yūgen is born in the moment when the actor finishes a gesture, and the spectator completes its meaning in silence. The same happens in nature: when the sound of a cricket comes to an end, and the silence that follows becomes fuller than the sound itself.

 

How to train such perception? Not through effort, but through the relinquishment of control over experience. The Japanese saying mono o hanasu (物を放す) — “to let things go” — is key here. A walk among trees at dawn, when light is just beginning to pierce the mist, becomes a practice of yūgen if we can look without the urge to “understand.” It is enough to pause and let the image arrange itself in our eyes. The same can be done with listening: the bell from a distant temple, whose echo gradually disperses until it vanishes into the air — this is the moment when yūgen becomes an experience.

 

In the city, too, one can hear its echo. The shadow of a door left slightly ajar, an old torii gate wedged between modern buildings (or perhaps a monument, a small shrine, a remnant of a former structure), an alley ending abruptly at a wall — these are modern equivalents of the landscapes in old ink scrolls. The moon filtering between street neon lights, clouds above a subway station, the solitary sound of a bicycle passing at night over wet cobblestones — all these are micro-scenarios of yūgen.

 

It is not about seeking a mood. It is about the moment when the talkative mind falls silent, ceases to interpret, and simply listens through the senses. It is in these moments — on thresholds, in transitions, between sound and silence — that yūgen can truly be “heard.”

 

Yūgen – the Japanese aesthetics of half-light and mystery. About the hidden beauty that exists between vanishing and enduring, in art, literature, and everyday life.

 

Contemporary relevance

 

Although yūgen was born in early medieval Japan, its spirit did not fade with the era of aristocrats or samurai. On the contrary — it has deeply permeated modern forms of expression, in which “less” can still open into “more.” In Japanese design and architecture, yūgen still breathes in the translucency of shōji paper, in the soft gradations of light passing through milky glass, in the rhythm of shadowed corridors and intervals (ma), which give interiors their pulse (see the article on tokonoma: Close the World Behind the Door. Tokonoma – The Japanese Art of Emptiness in Your Home). Architects such as Tadao Andō have interpreted this principle in their own way — concrete, light, and silence, from which they shape space, act as contemporary incarnations of yūgen: the simplest things become profound when they allow emptiness to radiate (on his works in Naoshima: Art Island Naoshima – A Lesson in Transforming an Unremarkable Industrial Village into a World-Class Phenomenon).

 

In photography and music, yūgen manifests in what remains after the sound has faded. Photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto build their images at the edge of visibility — blurred horizons, light disappearing into the silver mist of the sea, a fragment of time stretched into infinite silence. In music, meanwhile, yūgen becomes the “sound of vanishing”: the final tone of koto or shakuhachi lingering for a moment in the air after the fingers have gone still. It is not the sound itself, but the echo that remains in the mind and carries deeper beauty — precisely what Zeami wrote of: that which is hidden speaks more fully than that which is clear.

 

There is also a practical dimension. Yūgen can today be understood as a pedagogy of sensitivity — the art of teaching seeing and listening through “leaving margins.” In a world flooded with excess images, information, and noise, Japanese tradition reminds us that value lies not only in what is shown, but also in what remains unsaid. To leave in a work or a conversation a shadow, a pause, a void — is to invite the viewer or listener to co-create, to complete the meaning independently.

 

This, then, is the modern meaning of yūgen: not nostalgia for an old beauty, but a method of being in the world. It is the ability to pause at the threshold, to see depth in what is subtle, unspoken, fleeting. Yūgen requires neither temple nor nō stage — only half-light, an echo of a step, the movement of a curtain. In that lightness, in that quiet trembling of things, Japan still speaks with its oldest, gentlest voice.

 

Yūgen – the Japanese aesthetics of half-light and mystery. About the hidden beauty that exists between vanishing and enduring, in art, literature, and everyday life.

 

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Butō – A Japanese Art Born in the Ashes of Hiroshima

 

A Dictionary of Delights – 15 Japanese Words for Fleeting Moments Worth Remembering

 

Fūryū. Listening to How the World Blows.

 

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 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

 

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未開    ソビエライ

 

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

 

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.- Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

Zdjęcie Mike Soray (aka Michał Sobieraj)

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