建築語彙のなかの「シブイ」とその国際化過程

抄録

 Japanese professionals tend to harbor ambiguous feelings toward the overseas usage of the term Shibui in architecture, since despite being colloquially uttered in their language, they themselves have rarely used it as an actual architectural term. This divide in understanding seems to be a serious one, suggesting a potential miscommunication throughout the global sphere of architectural discussion. Based on materials mainly written in Japanese, English, and German since the 1920’s, this paper investigates the global reality of intercultural exchanges about this term, and how Japanese architects largely chose to sidestep them.

 The propagation of the notion of Shibui started within the Anglosphere around the late 1920’s. It was introduced as something untranslatable, but which represented the ultimate aesthetics of the Japanese, tending towards that which is simple, austere but meaningful. In the mid-thirties, a group of mainly foreign American readers got a hold of such influential works as Soetsu Yanagi’s The Folk-Craft of Japan and Harada’s The Lesson of Japanese Architecture. Non-Japanese-readers gradually came to know the word through these publications as well as daily conversations with speakers of the language. The German architect Bruno Taut [1880-1938] was one of those who experienced these circumstances while staying in Japan from 1933-36, and interpreted the ideal beauty of Japanese architecture as Shibui, or the “unobtrusive, quiet and harsh.”

 Besides Japan and the U.S., the German sphere in Europe was potentially another center for the production of knowledge about Shibui and Japanese architecture. While there was no German introduction of the word during the twenties, they had nourished their interest in the intrinsic modernity of Japanese traditional wooden construction as early as immediately after the end of WWI. A number of influencers would soon emigrate to the U.S., where Japanese promotion of Shibui to the American public was at the forefront, and the aesthetic of Shibui was in the process of making itself known to a German-reading public. Walter Gropius [1883-1969], for example, started to combine his idea of a “Japanese” modular, flexible, and nature-loving architecture with the word Shibui.

 In this early stage of outbound knowledge production, Japanese architects were pretty much uncommitted to it, as the word was too colloquial to be aesthetically defined in their own language, and they did not share the goal of propagating Japanese aesthetics, for which Shibui had become a buzzword.

 In the postwar craze of all things Japanese, the word gradually got popular among the Pacific-American public from the early fifties, before being further popularized by Elizabeth Gordon’s special issues in 1960 for “Discover Shibui” in the influential American magazine House Beautiful. However, due to her notoriously offensive attitude toward contemporary efforts in architecture, this prompted a string of critical backlashes. Japanese architectural historian Yuichiro Kojiro [1922-2000] spoke in The Japan Architect against Gordon’s “oh-so-wonderful romanticism,” and his criticisms would attract overseas followers like Bruno Zevi [1918-2000] in Italy.

 Thus was formed a global space of dispute over the modernity (and anti-modernity) of the naturalized and de-nationalized Shibui. In fact, most Japan architects did not have the means to know about this external phenomenon, and those who did had no avid motivation to join, since its contents kept changing and diversifying according to each player’s ambitions and local contexts, making the whole scene appear as a quite chaotic one to their eyes.