TOKYO -- Nostalgia, you could say, is a current that hums under the static of modern society. But what does it mean to feel nostalgia in Japan, which has a heightened reverence for the traditional (and even the arcane)?
For many Western cultures nostalgia equates with a sense of melancholy and loss, an unequitable yearning. Nostalgia in Japan, on the other hand, seems to evoke a pleasant fondness and gratitude for the past. The fact that it cannot be reexperienced lends a special poignancy to it that is a blend of wistfulness and longing, a sensation deriving from a very Japanese aesthetic that sees beauty in evanescence and impermanence.
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