Parting Thoughts

I’ve had a month now to process my time in Japan, and honestly, I've only just begun. There are so many things I saw that utterly baffled and humbled me, but if I could boil it all down to one realization, it would be the primary position that Japanese culture gives to beauty.

Let me explain.

We saw and enjoyed many national gardens while we were there. They were gorgeous, and I could have spent hours exploring them. But they were not surprising to me; I expected them (I'd seen the Instagram photos, after all!). What actually astounded me can be aptly illustrated by a scene on the edge of the town of Kutchan, on the northern island of Hokkaido.

Kutchan is a fairly nondescript town, except for the gorgeous volcano in its backyard—Mount Yotei, a striking Fuji lookalike. While this area bustles during the winter ski season, we visited in the early summer, so there were very few tourists around. One afternoon, Joy and I rented e-bikes and spent the day riding the quiet roads winding across the volcanic plain.

As we rode back toward town late in the afternoon, we stopped outside one of the very first houses we encountered. The house itself was nothing to note, but the garden... the garden was absolutely exquisite. It wasn't large, but every single inch of it was lovingly tended. Flowers, sculpted trees, mossy rocks—it was unbelievably beautiful.

And here is what hit me: I was in a quiet town, on an out-of-the-way little street, standing in front of an ordinary house with a miniature garden that felt like a microcosm of Eden itself. As an American, the question that kept running through my mind was why? I mean, it's one thing to have a garden, but this? What I saw went far beyond "over the top." Why bother? Who was ever going to see this? It wasn’t as if this garden sat outside a landmark home on the main street next to the "Welcome to Kutchan" sign.

So, why do it? Why go to all the trouble? Why spend hours pulling individual dead leaves off of trees as they begin to fade? I literally saw people on ladders, gently removing dead pine needles and shaping branches with tiny scissors. The attention to detail and the deliberate cultivation of beauty was at a level I have truly never seen before.

Why? Because beauty is treasured simply because it is beautiful. It’s circular reasoning, but it works.

This realization hit me hard, and it directly affects my view of who I am and what matters most. Every time we look at the chaos in the world around us and call beauty into existence—even in the smallest, quietest of ways—we are doing truly holy work.  Whether what we create is noticed by thousands or by no one at all, it matters. It matters because we made it, and it matters because beauty is beautiful. It is a lesson I’m carrying back to my own creative practice: to clear away the noise, focus on the details, and simply build something beautiful for its own sake.

A quiet green space, 

Tended for no eyes but God’s, 

Beauty is enough.