The grammar of space

What is the space of Japanese society ? This questioning brings together no less than 64 authors around an ambitious Vocabulary of Japanese spatiality. Architects, geographers, urban planners, anthropologists and specialists in Japanese language and civilization place the work in a resolutely transdisciplinary field of Japanese studies. Its co-directors are emblematic: Philippe Bonnin is an architect and anthropologist, Augustin Berque, who prefaces the work, is a geographer and philosopher.

How to grasp Japanese space culture ?

Targeting a wide audience, this work lays the foundations for a Japanese grammar of space, illuminating the meaning of multiple terms through the prism of their uses and origins, in the most illustrated way possible. It allows us to grasp the semantic richness of the Japanese written and oral language to shed light on the relationship to space of its speakers. Such an analysis of representations of space is without equivalent to date, with the exception of The Adventure of City Words (Topalov et. al. 2010), surveying the urban worlds of seven European languages ​​and Arabic.

The work is based on the double conviction that spatiality is “ a gateway to the intelligibility of our societies » (p. 25) and that it is consubstantial with the language used, especially in Japan. Making space a major dimension of societies, it thus participates in “ spatial turning point » identified since the end of the 1980s and which consists of favoring spatial entry to approach common objects in the social sciences from an interdisciplinary perspective.

The authors, however, are careful not to deliver a turnkey model of Japanese spatiality, placed in fact on the horizon of the approach. It is up to the reader to reconstruct the system of this spatiality from the 199 entries proposed. The bias of the work is to assume random and fragmentary navigation “ between islands of meaning, (which the reader) connects » (p. 36), mimicking the practice of “ Japanese reader (who) prefers that we suggest (…) from small elements skillfully described » (p. 34).

This bias is already a way of expressing Japanese spatiality. The authors’ objective is to show that Japanese spatial culture operates a constant articulation between the analytical and the poetic as well as between the rational and the sensitive. These elements, easily judged incompatible in the West, are woven together in the terms of Vocabulary. Concrete or conceptual, they range from the micro-spatial scale of potted plants, placed between the street and the home by its occupants (Hachiue), to the cosmological notion of Yama sato umiwhich combines inhabited space with the wild space of the sea and the mountains.

The authors draw on a wide range of scientific works, dictionaries and historical references from Japanese literature. Much attention is paid to materials, objects and the material culture they convey. These potted plants, for example, are seen as the expression of an urban culture of nature and a relationship between public and private spaces. The entirely ethnographic care in describing spatial forms and devices aims to express a spatial culture where we have “ entrusted thought to things » (p. 25). The iconography of the work serves the same purpose. It is present almost on every page, in the form of photographs, maps, plans, paintings, drawings or prints.

This interweaving of the rational and the sensitive is not thought of as exclusively Japanese: it sheds more light on the spatiality of societies. The authors draw lessons from the orientalist discourse deconstructed by Edward Saïd, of dual opposition between Western rationality and Eastern sensitivity, deeply ideological and arising from a relationship of domination of the Other and the Elsewhere. They also distance themselves from the inverted discourse of nippologies, flattering national sentiment by affirming the superiority of Japanese spirituality over Western modes of thought. To escape the trap of these ever-prevailing dichotomies, this Vocabulary is based on the participation of French researchers and, for a quarter of them, Japanese, sensitive in the joint writing of numerous articles.

A multifaceted contribution to contemporary debates on the space of societies

The features of Japanese spatiality identified largely fuel reflection on the space of societies. In this regard, let us discuss four guiding threads woven by the work. The most significant concerns living. It addresses the symbolic places of the Japanese territory, the constructions, the domestic spaces as well as their access thresholds. These thresholds are seen less as separators than as articulations. They reveal the social and cultural meaning of the passage between spaces, public and private, sacred and profane, or between landscapes, like the technique of Shakkei which blurs the boundary between the garden and its surrounding landscape.

This relational approach to space also echoes the original environmental thinking developed in the work, another guiding thread and a good introduction to the thought of Augustin Berque. Through the analysis of a society steeped in animism, an ontology of space based on the constitutive relationship of populations to their environment is highlighted. This consubstantial relationship of co-existence of humans and non-humans operates through concrete situations of constant entanglement of the natural and the cultural, of the subject and the object. We therefore understand that such spatiality, in the Fukushima era, questions Western representations of risk “ natural » or technological. It feeds more broadly into the debate in the social sciences on hybrid objects, with human and non-human components.

The mutations affecting Japanese spatiality are at the heart of a third questioning. It allows us to grasp the violence of the processes of industrialization, urbanization and the diffusion of liberal capitalism in Japan. It also addresses forms of resistance and conflict, alternative practices and more participatory urban planning (Machizukuri) which assert themselves by reaction. Japanese society more broadly acts as a laboratory for understanding the mutability of our relationships with space. This illustrates the famous Buddhist and aesthetic notion of impermanence (Mujo), expressing the inevitable evanescence of things, the fragility of the world and the importance of the ephemeral. This is also shown by the unprecedented aging of the Japanese population, fueling a process of urban shrinkage (Shukushō) which goes against all dominant development models, based on indefinite growth.

The work finally sheds light on the structuring role of the mobile and the fluid, thereby nourishing the reflection opened by the mobility studiesan interdisciplinary field of study which has gradually emerged since the 2000s. The capacity of stations to crystallize the urbanity of the Japanese megalopolis, to organize its lively neighborhoods with a strong urban atmosphere around the passage (Sakariba) is emblematic of this. In another register, the analysis of paintings and prints also highlights the aesthetic attachment to the mobility of the gaze, to the construction of a “ exploded perspective » (p. 125) made of multiple vanishing points. It is part of a broader refusal of the fixed illusion of an overlooking, absolute and objective point of view in the experience of a place, thus joining the work carried out in the field of mobilities, which underlines the extent to which it is made of variable and moving interactions.

An approach to spatialities in all their heterogeneity ?

This work will be very useful to those interested in Japan and in the spatiality of societies, because it allows them to question their own reading keys. The connection between rationality and sensitivity proves to be most convincing when reading the entries, even if a minority of them do not address it.

The limits of the demonstration relate more to the conception of spatiality adopted by the authors. It has the great advantage of taking its verbal dimension seriously but the disadvantage of limiting the investigation of its sensitive dimension in its various registers. Images, for example, are rarely analyzed or even mentioned in the text, limiting their argumentative scope. Practices in particular are little analyzed, to the point that in 90 % of cases, no individual appears in the color photographs. However, existing conceptualizations of spatiality attach great importance to the practices of actors (Soja 1996, Lussault 2003). We regret their weak integration all the more as they have a major role in articulating rationality and sensitivity, which would support the main idea of ​​the work.

This Vocabulary would also benefit from diversifying its corpus of representations. Very linked to scholarly culture (prints or great literary texts), it takes very little interest in popular culture and very widely distributed cultural products: are films, mangas or pop music less relevant for capturing the space of Japanese company ? The risk is to favor the point of view of the dominant actors most endowed with cultural capital.

If the authors insist on the situated character of Japanese spatiality, the work does not always escape the trap of the essentialization of culture as well as a holistic approach to Japanese society. For example, he mentions “ the unique relationship that a culture maintains with space, the way in which it uses it, how it arranges it, how it makes each person express (…) the essential choices that are theirs » (p. 24).

The work shows very well what Japanese spatiality owes to Chinese, Indian or Western societies, through multiple borrowings, reinterpreted in a Japanese context. However, these circulations are seen in one direction. In return, Japanese spatiality remains confined to the archipelago while various works suggest, on the contrary, its vehicular character. The study of the living of Japanese migrants in Paris (Dubucs 2009) highlights, for example, the capacity of these actors to deploy a Japanese spatiality in Paris, from the Opera district to their own domestic spaces, and even, for some between them, to modify various traits through the evolution of their social networks, causing tangible forms of hybridization on the scale of individual spatialities.

Added to the culturalist risk is that of not fully restoring the diversity of forms of experience of Japanese spatiality. Better integrating the spatialities of women, outcasts, Korean or South American migrants, mixed race people, the disabled or nuclear gypsies, for example, would help avoid making major sections of Japanese society invisible. The challenge is not to neglect what all spatiality owes to the social relationships of class, gender, age, generation or breed in the sense of the critical race theorytherefore to give full meaning to the idea that spatiality is always the expression of a situated point of view. This Vocabulary is nonetheless a major and fascinating contribution to the understanding of societies through their words and their spaces.