When I first arrived in Japan, I had unspoken curiosity about the country. It was a curiosity that I had built on images, fragments, books, and bits and pieces of architecture I only saw through screens. It was an abstract appreciation for a place that seemed to hold paradoxes in balance. Precision and imperfection, silence and density, memory and future, all at the same time.  ​

 

Tokyo seemed like a system that had already transformed chaos into order, even the crowds had rhythm, trains arrived and departed on schedule, and the streets were clean in a way that didn't seem forced. I recall thinking that back home, order is almost imposed on you, but in Japan, it seemed like something agreed upon.

 

Walking through the city of Hiroshima on my first night there, the Optical Glass House by Hiroshi Nakamura suddenly appeared before me. It stood there silently, as if it wanted to dissolve into its own reflection. I stopped without meaning to, as I looked at it. It wasn't trying to dominate the street, it wasn't trying to attract attention, it was just there, breathing as one with light and water. That moment fundamentally changed the way I understood architecture.

 

Until then, I had been trained formally and informally to think of buildings as statements. Objects of identity, even in my own design work, I was often searching for clarity through form, for meaning through strong visual presence.

 

Standing in front of that house, I began to understand something different: architecture can also be defined by absence. It can involve restraint. It can be a way of letting the world continue uninterrupted.

 

​Hiroshima would change almost everything in how I saw and understood pain and the past. Yes, I had read about the destruction before, but in Hiroshima, the past is not just a chapter in a book, it is part of the city’s present. I was surprised to see not only the memory of loss, but also the choice to move forward without turning that memory into a spectacle.

 

There is a discipline in how Japan carries its history. It does not exaggerate it, nor does it erase it. I was challenged by my own perspective, coming from Kosovo, where history is often still raw, spoken through urgency, sometimes through pain that has not yet found architectural form.

 

I started to question myself and my decisions: what does it mean to design in a place where history is still emotionally active? And what can be learned from a place where history has been absorbed into daily life without losing its weight? Japan didn’t give me clear answers, but it changed how I think.

 

Japan made me reflect not only on architecture but also on the ethics of memory itself. The country does not simply preserve the traces of war and destruction. There, pain is neither hidden nor constantly expressed. Hiroshima does not force emotion through monumental gestures or loud or overwhelming symbolism. I slowly began to think about “framing pain” from an interior and spatial perspective. 

 

In many conflict-affected areas, including Kosovo, memory is often expressed through direct symbolism because wounds are still fresh, which makes it understandable to do so. But pain can be held quietly, without losing depth. The Hiroshima Memorial is emotionally devastating, but it does not exaggerate tragedy; there, carefully, emotions are spatially controlled. Light is soft, movement in circulation is intentional, and materiality is restrained. Silence becomes part of the exhibition's design itself, and the visitors are not overwhelmed, but are slowly confronted with human reality.

 

That approach carries an important lesson, space can create empathy without dramatizing the suffering. Design and architecture shape not only how people live, but also how people feel. And perhaps this is what Kosovo can learn most from Japan, that maybe spaces connected to memory do not always need to explain themselves loudly in order to be powerful. Sometimes a preserved wall carries more emotional weight than a reconstructed monument. Sometimes emptiness speaks more honestly.

 

Hiroshima is not frozen in 1945. Just like our cities, it continues to evolve, to live, and to grow. The city carries its scars, but without allowing them to define its entire identity. For Kosovo, this raises an important question: should and can architecture and interior spaces acknowledge collective pain without permanently locking society into it? And the answer is yes, not in forgetting, but in integration. By bringing memory into everyday life instead of hiding it in monuments. By knowing that material, light, proportion, and silence, we can tell history as strongly as symbols and narratives. Japan taught me that architecture may not heal trauma directly, but for sure, it influences how trauma is carried collectively across time and generations.

 

And perhaps architecture becomes its most meaningful when it does not try to overpower history or remembrance, but instead learns to carry them with dignity. Because the way a society designs its spaces reveals how one chooses to remember, to heal, and to move forward. Architecture cannot undo the past or erase the collective pain, but it can shape whether we leave to the future generations to inherit only trauma or also the possibility of coexistence with, and later heal from it.