Stone based building

Philosophy behind design

Hybrid Japanese

Japan, which had been isolated until about 150 years ago, was "open" and the Japanese government told the public to abandon traditional Japanese culture and to incorporate western style living.

It has been importing the industrial revolution, living such as baking bread, eating Western food, wearing Western clothes, killing a traditional skilled carpenter, and even banning traditional rural festivals.

It was also to learn 'Science' established by dividing human and nature without Christianity.

Science was unlikely to occur in Japanese who had never been separated from nature.

And Japan as a defeated country in the Second World War, decided to throw away traditional Japanese things himself.

In the postwar Japan, the culture of the United States, which can be said to be a sharp point of the Western civilized countries, and individualism has been imported.

The Japanese became a hybrid of Oriental and Western in this way.
The Japanese is like a graft planted with Western on the rootstock of Japanese mind.

Now Japanese people gather information of "nearby" on the Internet like other "developed countries" people, measure people with annual income, live in a house made of materials mass produced at the factory, dress and frozen food.

Instead, we almost lost the rich nature and the societies without disparity, the most sophisticated traditional things that certainly existed 150 years ago. In addition we are almost losing even our mind.

The rootstock itself is about to decay.

And in the past decade ‘Neo - Liberalism’ has emerged as well as the United States, the country's GDP has increased, the annual income per capita has decreased, the gap between rich and poor has expanded. (Twenty years ago, Japan was the country with the least disparity in the world, but now it has become a disparate big country like the United States)

Citizens are losing "individuals" in front of their overwhelming power due to the right-handedness of developed countries, the magnificent multinational corporations and the spread of globalism, but that is the same in Japan.

The Western society that vocalously shouts 'love' only seems to have come to be the society with the least love. Is such a society sustainable?

People succumb to that system by giving up to fear without following the hearts of myself if we have a mighty system / power / organization.

Are we really hoping to continue living like this way?
Is not it obvious that we will just become "rootless rice"?

What we have to deal with is not to return to tradition nor to be buried in the West.

As for the architecture, Japanese should reevaluate the traditional construction method that has been ignoring for 150 years and we'd better to integrate into what is appropriate for a new era?

If we do not lose the consciousness that our Japanese people had in the past, we may be able to disseminate the answers to become a truly sustainable society to the world.

'Rokumeikan-period'
The latter half of the Meiji era where senior officials of the Japanese government and aristocrats, Westerners' diplomatic corps organized banquets and balls around the Rokumeikan and trying to spread Europeanism

A masterpiece that summarizes Japanese through the eyes of foreigners who visited Japan during the Edo-Meiji era.

'Bonodori’
'Bon-odori/Dancing festival' is a long long traditional festival which has been danced for ancestors who’s been said to come back to ‘this world’ in the day 'Obon'.

Battle ship 'Yamato' and 'Zero' fighter
Japanese have passed the West in technology development by the time the World War II began (= decades after Japan's "opening the country").

'Gojyunoto / the five-storied tower' and 'Tokyo Sky tree’
'Gojyunoto' is a Japanese designed the five-storied tower which has been built more than 1200 years ago.It'a quite different design from that of Chinese one.

The Tokyo Sky Tree boasts the world's highest height of 643 m as a self-contained radio tower, but the design in the world's largest earthquake area was adopted the same "core-column damping structure" as the five-storied tower.

Shigezo Sustainable Designs　Murou Nara Japan　mail