The Japanese concept of wabi-sabi is difficult, or impossible if you ask some Japanese people, to precisely define. But I have Google and all the false confidence of a mediocre, middle-aged, Western white man, so here we go.
Loosely, it’s an aesthetic that values imperfection and transience. Andrew Juniper, a furniture maker and author of the book Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence, says “it’s an aesthetic that finds beauty in things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete”.
Tanehisa Otabe, professor at Tokyo University’s Institute of Aesthetics, told the BBC in 2020 that “wabi-sabi leaves something unfinished or incomplete for the play of imagination”.
It is, then, one of a number of Japanese idioms that references an appreciation for or wistfulness towards impermanence. Not dissimilarly, the concept of mono no aware translates to “the pathos of things” or “a sensitivity to ephemera”.
This brings me to the current and soon to be not-current Nissan GT-R, the R35 generation, which is about to end a fairly astonishing 18-year production run. That’s a timeline which is anything but fleeting by automotive standards: cherry blossom, blooming and dying quickly, it is not.
But in its more recent years, there can only have been an awareness of the R35’s mortality. At the start of its life, we called it “the world’s cleverest car” and Japanese engineers told us it was comparable to a craftsperson-made Swiss watch.
But as time has gone on and its annual model-year revisions have slowed, its once-spectacular power outputs have been dwarfed and its Nürburgring lap times eclipsed.
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