Finding spaciousness in Japan
In Japan, there’s a beautiful concept called yutori, which roughly translates to “spaciousness” or “living with spaciousness”. I learned of yutori when I arrived in Kyoto, the first stop on my three-week Japan adventure. I fell in love with the concept immediately, yet it left me puzzled. How could Japanese people feel spaciousness when they have a population of 126.8 million people? Australia, in comparison, has a population of 24.6 million people — 100 million less people than Japan on a landmass that is 20 times the size.
Despite the odds seemingly being stacked against them, Japanese people live with yutori and I wanted to find out how. I wanted to see where they found spaciousness among all the noise and people. So, I spoke my very broken Japanese to the locals. In Japan, they explain yutori as arriving somewhere early, so that you have time to look around. They say that yutori is the feeling you get after reading a poem that leaves you sitting in the spaciousness of its words. Yutori can also be felt when you’re hiking in the mountains, completely absorbed by the beauty surrounding you.
As I travelled through Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo, I decided to seek out those places that left me with a feeling of yutori. As I was about to find out, though, yutori wasn’t just found in physical places; it was also a state of mind.
Cultural Kyoto
A wooden hand-built boat pulls up next to the jetty my fiancé and I
