Landscaping, color, and mood in Japanese culture of the Muromachi period

Abstract

In the convulsive Muromachi period, a double phenomenon of permanence and change occurs in the culture of Japan. The ancestral cult of nature, the search for beauty and harmony, is superimposed on austerity, simplicity and awareness of the impermanence of things that results in a dark state of mind, a renunciation of color and a "separation" or refuge in the arts as "paths of peace" (painting, architecture, gardening, tea ceremony, crafts, Nō theater, poetry), in the face of a society in permanent conflict, obtaining, in apparent contradiction, an enormous development, however parallel to the "arts of war" (iaidō, kyudō, kendō...); both paths that, surprisingly, the latter converted into paths of peace, subsist and are practiced today, thus demonstrating universal values.