The highlight of Nijo-jo Castle is perhaps not the famous Ninomaru-goten Palace, a national treasure, but it is hidden in the stone walls of the Honmaru-goten Palace.

I recently had the opportunity to visit the castle for the first time in a while and was struck by its stone walls. How extraordinary it is to witness all the rocks shaped almost uniformly and aligned perfectly. Rocks, by nature, are found in fields and mountains and have irregular, organic shapes. They should not bear resemblance to “standardized components.” Looking at the castle’s rocks—neatly chiseled into almost identical shapes and assembled into walls with flat and smooth surfaces—I couldn’t help but think that these stone walls epitomized the Tokugawa shogunate’s stance during the early Edo period, which valued social order and “hammered down the nails that stuck out” (a Japanese proverb meaning “disapproving anyone/anything outstanding”).

Standing in stark contrast to the Nijo-jo Castle stone walls are the stone walls built by Anoshu, a group of stonemasons from Sakamoto, the temple town of Enryakuji. The masons’ specialty was to stack up the rocks without concealing their characteristics, bringing together the seemingly unorganized pieces into a unified whole. “Listen to the stones and put them where they want to go” is a saying passed down among the masons. By honoring the unique shapes and sizes of the rocks and carefully balancing them, they distributed external forces throughout the wall, resulting in a structure of remarkable strength.

If you ever have a chance to visit the remaining stone walls by Anoshu in Sakamoto, I highly recommend appreciating them not just from the front but also from the sides. When you stand before them, the first thing you would notice is the three-dimensionality of the wall surface. This effect is created by the joints, which recede along the contours of the rocks, accentuating the volume of each stone. Allowing the stone’s volume to be expressed means the individual characteristics of the stones are respected. Let us now shift our focus from stone walls to wooden architecture, with an emphasis on the relationships between components.

Old Japanese architecture is dominated by “army-like wooden architecture,” which resembles a plastic model composed of small, interlocking parts. In army-like wooden architecture, wooden components are made uniformly, like standardized machine parts, stripped of individuality and treated like soldiers—pawns—marching in perfect order. The orderly march of wooden parts seems, to me, to possess the elegance of a highly organized army.

While this army-like wooden architecture predominates the country’s traditional architecture, there exist a few exceptions that could be described as “associational wooden architecture.” “Association,” in this context, is akin to a band in music. Just as a great band performance allows the band members to illuminate each other’s distinct musical qualities, the associational wooden architecture allows individual components to stand out, asserting their sculptural presence. Such architecture possesses a quality of wood joinery, which embraces the characteristics of each component and composes the pieces in a non-hierarchical manner into an inevitable form. This aspect parallels how wooden parts—each as an individual being—collaborate horizontally to create architecture. In terms of associational wooden architecture, only a handful of examples come to my mind. I will introduce those valuable buildings in the following sections.

The first example is the Murouji Temple, which encompasses both army-like wooden architecture and associational wooden architecture within its precinct. Murouji, located in Uda, Nara Prefecture, is a Buddhist temple built between the early Heian and late Kamakura periods and is known for the photographs by a prominent Showa-era photographer, Ken Domon. The temple’s five-storied pagoda is an example of the army-like wooden architecture. Its small-sized, homogeneous components are constantly and systematically repeated and marched. While this produces a delicate and graceful appearance, it also results in a latent beauty reminiscent of mass games in an authoritarian state, which is created by reducing the components into anonymous “pawns.”

On the other hand, the Kondo Hall in the precinct of the same temple is one of the rare examples of associational wooden architecture. In this structure, each component—from columns and crosspieces to rafters and columns under the external corridor—accentuates its presence as an individual element while being assembled into a unified architecture. What is noteworthy is the architecture’s rough, uneven surfaces produced by the distinct volumes of different components with striking, “protruding nail”-like depth.

Another example of architecture with associational wooden architecture characteristics is the Gangoji Temple’s Gokuraku-bo Zen Room, developed in the early Kamakura period. Particularly striking are the sculptural columns soaring inside the Main Hall, as if they were the wooden variants of the stone columns in Greek temples.

The third example of associational wooden architecture is the Ise Shrine. When viewed from a distance, the architecture appears to follow a primitive, post-and-beam structure. When observed up close, however, each wooden component seems to have a pliable volume and press into each other like clay. The components—some round, some thick, and some wide—are in shapes that would normally be considered unfit to use. However, by intentionally leaving gaps between them or shifting their positions, their sensuous aura is brought out, resulting in a wooden framework that appears voluminous and sharp at the same time. Just as with the rocks, allowing the wood’s volume to be expressed means the individual characteristics of the wooden components are respected.

I recently acquired a copy of Architecture Is Not a Soldier, an early work by architectural historian Hiroyuki Suzuki, who passed away in 2014, at a used bookstore. Suzuki states that modern architecture is a means to organizationally and systematically create architecture and that this method parallels the workings of a modern army, which functions with machine-like precision to achieve a victory mechanically. In a modern army, a commander is nothing but a post, and all soldiers are considered interchangeable components. Buildings are constructed through abstracted methods and resemble easily replaceable components, anonymous pawns, like soldiers in a modern army. As a result, when older buildings become functionally defective, they are swiftly erased from the city and automatically replaced by new structures, just as an army replenishes a troop with new soldiers in place of their fallen predecessors.

However, like a human being, all buildings inherently possess their own qualities and are by no means colorless or anonymous. According to Suzuki, recognizing the fundamental characteristics of each existing building in a city and appreciating and utilizing them allows us to create a sympathetic living environment. This approach—one that begins by honoring tangible entities—bears a resemblance to how Anoshu assembles rocks and stones in different sizes and shapes to build a stone wall.

If “architecture is not a soldier,” then each component constituting architecture should not be a soldier, either. Various elements that make up buildings are not colorless or anonymous; they exist with their own shapes, weights, and traits. In associational wooden architecture, the components—each as an individual being—embrace each other’s characteristics in a non-hierarchical manner to create architecture.

Architecture can be a microcosm of the world. I cannot help but believe that associational wooden architecture is where we will discover the ideal state of a “free and equal” world, hidden in an unexpected form.