You could spend your entire life in modern Japan without ever hearing the term wabi, though no overview of Japanese history or art is complete without it. It's a beautiful word, hard to define like most beautiful words. Poverty is the heart of it, which sounds dispiriting, but there's the Zen phrase "To fill a monk's tattered robe with a cool refreshing breeze," quoted by Zen master Daisetz T. Suzuki (1870-1966) as an invitation to see poverty through Zen eyes.
"A life of wabi," he says, affords "an inexpressible quiet joy deeply hidden beneath sheer poverty."
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, many of whose political goals spring from a professed love of Japanese tradition, has little to say about this particular one. It's hard to blame him.
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