Kuma’s particular version of this search seems to have preceded that of most of his international peers, and unlike them he seems to have found a solution. This is partly because of the early collapse of the Japanese economy — the trauma of the 1990 bubble bursting was harsher for the country than even the effects of the 2008 worldwide crash. No longer would it be assumed, as was common in the 1980s, that Japan would become the world’s biggest economy. Indeed, the country has never truly recovered — not financially, and, just as significantly, not psychically as well — and the need to find an architecture appropriate to a sobered world of vastly diminished expectations, one aware of the costs of imposing endless development and construction on an unresilient planet, became more urgent here than it did elsewhere — at least, it certainly did for Kuma.

It is nonetheless hard to keep in mind Kuma’s self-addressed injunction to “erase” architecture when viewing his Wooden Bridge Museum, his most recently completed work in Yusuhara. Technically a functional design to integrate Kuma’s earlier hotel with a local bathhouse, the resulting structure is much greater than its ostensibly simple purpose. The gallery rises up several stories and is supported by a single strong central pillar. But most of the gallery’s weight is cantilevered off the hillside thanks to another traditional Japanese beam technique, in which small cross sections of modern laminated veneer lumber are stacked one on top of another, at perpendicular angles, creating a luminous, exhilarating sense of infinity. The effect is less of a craft being renewed than an abstract monument to that craft, and to an architect, too. Despite Kuma’s professed desire to distance himself from his forebears, it clearly resembles Arata Isozaki’s famous but unrealized “Clusters in the Air” (1960-62), a plan for housing projects in Tokyo, in which a single pillar supports capsule-like apartments, piled one above the other, like Kuma’s beams. Kuma’s rejoinder might be that his own plan represents the local traditions and materials of the surrounding region, rather than a fanciful object alien to the landscape. But the unmistakable reference suggests that Kuma has never quite abandoned his old combativeness.

The use of wood to achieve hallucinatory effects continued into Kuma’s projects outside Yusuhara. His unearthly Bato Hiroshige Museum of Art (2000) in Nakagawa-machi, a semirural town about a three-hour train ride north from Tokyo, employs the thin louvers and pitched roofs he later used in Portland. To enter the museum, you walk through an enormous open entrance: In a characteristic Kuma gesture, a strong, unbroken line connects the city and the lush hillside against which the museum backs up, perforating the museum, making it permeable. Then you turn right alongside a glass wall shimmering with thin wood slats, reflecting the line of bamboo on your left, turn right again into a foyer and then right a third time into the museum itself. The effect of the disorientation is unnerving, dissolving the boundary between surface and depth. Elsewhere in the museum, the louver patterns are reflected directly onto the glass, like a bar code. The superimposition of multiple materials complements the ukiyo-e woodblock prints of Hiroshige displayed inside, with their layers of ink printing, each not quite obscuring the one beneath. Unlike his peers, he told me, “I don’t want to establish a style.” But as with Kuma’s other fights within and against the profession, this one has produced unexpected results: There is no question that a Kengo Kuma building, however much it is designed to disappear, is recognizable from a mile away. In the walls of his Stone Museum, here and there, Kuma has cut out sections of the ashino stone wall and infilled it with translucent marble. The cold light filters through and turns the wall into something that resembles an old IBM punch card.

“Architecture should go back to fabrication, to using real materials, to using the hand,” he told me. “Before industrialization, most of the world had that system.” As with many of Kuma’s programmatic statements, this is a principle or self-description designed to be betrayed. Though fond of traditional materials, he is not a fetishist, and seems just as interested in using computational design to create new effects. Later, he took me to the materials room of his lab at Tokyo University, where his students were using computers to come up with new uses for strange materials. All around me were truly bizarre, organic, basketlike shapes. Kuma fingered a loose, perforated canopy strung up by one of his students and discussed it briefly with him. It turned out to be made of coir, the threadlike skin of aging coconut husks. Was this a traditional building material, I asked him? “No!” he laughed. “Absolutely not. No one has ever used it.” But, after all, he seemed to be saying, “why not?”