A beautiful excerpt from Spengler's "Cherry blossoms, the beautiful and the good"

"It is a common observation that a sense of the natural, or the spontaneous, uniquely characterizes Japanese art: the unpredictable patterns of ash glaze in ceramics, the freedom of calligraphy, the impressionistic representation in painting, the allusiveness of poetry. Nature is cruel as well as generous, but always beautiful, and this balance and tension pervades the Japanese esthetics that Professor Fujiwara associates with samurai ethics. If nature is as cruel as it is spontaneous, then men also may be spontaneously cruel.

The comparison may seem peculiar, but the Japanese in a way resemble the Jews in their passion to bring something of the eternal into every detail of everyday life. As Franz Rosenzweig put it, the myriad laws regulating Jewish prayer, diet, marital relations, and so forth all stem from a single motive, to import eternity into daily life. As Fujiwara avers, that is what the Japanese do by making every aspect of life into a work of art. But the contrast is as sharp as the parallel. Jewish food generally is unappetizing as well as visually unappealing, as opposed to Japan's magnificent national cuisine; Jewish manners are brusque, while Japan has made an art form of courtesy; and no aspect of Jewish religious life is concerned with visual beauty in any way at all. "

Asia Times
Spengler