We’ve only been in Japan for four days and the country has already influenced me profoundly.
The Japanese familiarity with visual techniques (particularly via the historic use of brushes rather than pens) has made them particularly sensitive to aesthetics. Certainly, the textures, shapes and sheer symmetry of the cultural design ethic has delighted my mind's eye.
My father is an architect and I always remember him noting that great design favoured exclusion over inclusion. Having recently immersed myself in the national obsession with form and function, I now believe that he was secretly Japanese!
The Japanese have coined the term ‘muda’ for ‘waste’. Such is that pathological focus on ‘muda’ that many corporates such as Toyota and Sony, for example, have legions of workers solely responsible for its removal.
Photographers should heed this note. Whilst I’ve always had many ‘muda’ principles in mind (i.e. the removal of all non-coherent detail, singular focus etc), it has taken a trip to this design-obsessed nation to clearly resolve them in my mind.
There is a story that one day an observer asked Michelangelo how he went about carving his famous David statue. The artist replied that he acquired a large piece of marble and removed everything that was not David.
I believe that Michelangelo was also Japanese...
