Sensing Impermanence: Multisensory Authenticity, Aesthetics, and Material Decay in Japanese Intangible Heritage

Abstract

This paper examines how Japanese heritage conservation articulates authenticity through a multisensory understanding of impermanence. Rather than privileging visual fixity and material stability, many Japanese practices value the performative life of materials, their capacity to weather, patinate, and transform across seasonal cycles. Drawing on aesthetic philosophy, heritage theory, and the concept of impermanence (mujō), the paper reframes authenticity as an emergent quality constituted through atmosphere, embodied perception, and the ongoing life of things. I introduce multisensory authenticity to name how authenticity comes into being through embodied perception, atmospheric attunement, and material transformation across time. In this view, authenticity does not inhere in static fabric or visual integrity, but unfolds through sensory engagement with the changing life of things. Focusing on intangible heritage settings shaped by seasonal attunement, everyday care, and environmental rhythms, the discussion explores how authenticity is enacted through sensory experience and material change. Weathering, decay, and atmospheric variation are approached not as threats to heritage value, but as co-creative forces that participate in the making of meaning. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this approach for global heritage debates. By attending to atmosphere, sensory experience, and environmental co-agency, it suggests a broadened understanding of authenticity, one that accommodates material temporality and process without displacing established conservation frameworks. Recognising the animated, time-bound life of things opens a more expansive conversation about how intangible heritage might encompass the lived and changing conditions through which places are continually experienced and renewed.