和風シェイクスピーアWa-fu Shakespeare

What is “wa-fu”?“Wa-fu” （和風）

means “Japanese-style”

Wa-fu 和風 , Japanese style, is contrasted with yo-fu 　洋風 (western style)

In general, if you contrast “wa-fu” and “yo-fu”, you can notice a pattern.

Looking at some photos of the wa-fu food on the right and the yo-fu food on the left, we can notice that though both look delicious,

the Japanese ones (wa-fu) refer more clearly to nature through the way they look like they did when alive or growing.

Looking at clothes next, we notice that kimonos (wa-fu clothes) almost always have patterns from nature on them

Wa-fu dishes are the color of the sky, clouds, beach sand, rocks,

or a stormy ocean. Nature prevails.

Let’s even take a look at a wa-fu toilet. It resembles a hole in the ground and wastes from the body are evacuated more completely and more easily---more naturally-- than from a western-style toilet.

So, too, a wa-fu house and room. Traditionally, a Japanese house is very simple and natural. Wood beams, rice

paper doors, rice straw mat (tatami) mat floors. Each part is simple to craft and can be replaced and composted easily:

no varnish, paint, nails. It follows a natural forest model.

Yes, there are even wa-fu socks and shoes!! Once again, we can notice the natural elements: the geta shoes look like a piece of natural wood. The socks

reveal toes. The effect is natural.

EVEN an interpretation ofSHAKESPEARE

can be

WA FU

和風

Back in the late 1500s, the news that the earth was circling the sun----and powered by the sun---was little understood.

One man, Giordano Bruno, came up with a thermodynamic heliocentric model in the 1580s.

• He based his ideas on Copernicus’ earlier model.

• But Bruno added the sun’s heat and light as the factors that powered the earth.

What if Shakespeare had wanted to encode Bruno’s ideas—so radical in 1600-- about our sun and earth—nature—into his plays???

Yes!!!!! He did!! (“Juliet is the sun”)

• I actually have published many articles (only in Japan, naturally) on this idea.

• I’m getting thousands of views a year (thank you so much, everyone!!!) (These are from all over the world, though, not just Japan!)

• And I think such an interpretation would be a wa-fu interpretation of Shakespeare.

和風

• My interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays are based on nature and the sun, the earth, fossil fuels, human beings, and other natural elements…

• And, like wa-fu style, my interpretations are very simple.

Bruno & the dolphin…

• “Bruno’s symbol of philanthropy was the dolphin—that most gentle of creatures that swims through an ocean of infinitely changing waters, while constantly attempting to reach the light of a sky it can only occasionally glimpse”---Hilary Gatti, “A Tranquil Universal Philosophy” from Essays on Giordano Bruno, Princeton U. Press, 2011)

• Wa-fu design and aesthetic principles are constantly trying to make users aware of nature: sun, moon, rocks, leaves, trees, the ocean.

• It is a constant reminder that we live in nature, are surrounded by nature, belong to nature, are part of nature.

• Living harmoniously with nature can be seen as one aspect of Bruno’s concept of a “peaceful swim through the infinite ocean of universal being”.

• Wa-fu design enables users to spot, glimpse, or understand their place within the planet as a natural place.

• And probably Shakespeare had this goal in mind as well. Since fossil fuels are just temporary, but could last millennia……it’s really unknown how long they could go on for.

• But the sun will still keep shining, that’s for sure.

One of my favorite quotes!!

In Japan people have “an underlying sense of being creatures of nature rather than lords of it.”—http://onlyablockhead.typepad.com/blockhead/2015/06/the-pleasures-of-japan-2.html

日本、ありがとう！！• THANK YOU, JAPAN, for everything!!!!

• 心からありがとうございました！！