dens,Shinto shrines, and Buddhist temples, as well as the latest shopping centers, sportsfacilities, residential complexes, office towers, department stores, and high-tech structuresare some excellent examples of Japanese Architecture (hkuhist2.hku.hk).Japan is described as a country of wood, and the reverence of natural materials. The depths of the love and admiration that the Japanese people have for wood are famous, which is similar to the Greek love of pristine marble and its smooth surfaces. This can beseen in an old Japanese expression "plants and trees all have something to say", Japanesebelieve that trees have a soul and say they can sense spirits, or "kami", within them. It istrees that form the core which nurtures the sensibilities about nature held by the Japanesepeople. It is thus natural for architecture in Japan to be based on wood. Many structuresare made of wood, ranging from shrines and temples to palaces and homes, and in doingso grand structures have been created (Stokstad). Castles and palaces dating from the end of the 16th century, including OdaNobunaga's Azuchi Castle and Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Osaka Castle and Jurakudai Palace,are tall castle towers that rise into the sky at the center of groups of magnificent buildingsexecuted in the Shoin style, decorated with carvings and wall paintings done on goldbackgrounds. In some of these castles, tea rooms with plain thatched roofs were favored,with the rooms made as small as could be built. These two elements of magnificence andplainness jointly formed the tastefulness of the Momoyama period (1568-1600).However, these two factors by no means contradict one another: the basicprinciples are the same, and in a sense what developed was a double-layered structurewhere the inside and outside were one and the same (www.greatbuildings.com).Similar to the Greeks, the Japanese artisans stressed the importance of bothfunctionality and beauty in there designs for buildings. Each...
