It happens to almost every designer at some point, the quiet fascination with Japan. What begins as an admiration for minimalism and restraint becomes a deeper descent into concepts like 侘寂 (wabi-sabi) and 物の哀れ (mono no aware). You start to see beauty not as the pursuit of perfection, but as the acknowledgment of decay: the space between emergence and disappearance. In Japan’s visual culture, absence is as expressive as form, and that sensibility begins to infiltrate the way we build: empty states, whitespace, fading transitions, interfaces that breathe just enough to feel alive before vanishing.

The web itself is the purest expression of this impermanence. Sites erode. Frameworks die. Code breaks with time. Nothing we design here truly lasts—and yet, that fragility is what gives it meaning. Each iteration, each release, is a momentary bloom: digital sakura, fragile in its perfection, destined to fall. The Ephemeral Web is a garden we keep tending, knowing it will always wither. And maybe that’s the point—to design as a form of letting go, to create knowing that even data can ache with 物の哀れ.