The sensibility saturates Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century Tale of Genji, the world's first novel, where aware is cried at the beauty and sorrow of passing things. In the 1760s, the kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga made mono no aware the novel's central theme and the heart of Japanese literature: the capacity to be moved by things, perceiving the emotion of things, everything seen and heard and touched settling in the heart and being tasted. Aware originally meant the involuntary sigh itself, ah, before it meant pathos.
The culture operationalized it: hanami parties sit under blossoms precisely because they fall, and the forecast maps the sakura front like weather. Impermanence is not endured but scheduled, catered, and photographed. Norinaga's project was partly polemical, carving a native Japanese sensibility free of Chinese moral reading: Genji's lovers are not lessons; they are weather. Feeling the passing is the morality.
The claim: mono no aware is loss-aversion alchemy, by pre-feeling the ending at the moment of beauty, the culture converts shock into seasoning, and the blossom that cannot surprise you cannot devastate you. Verdict: plausible and the practice supports it, but the reading has a cost: pre-grieved joy is discounted joy. The tradition's own defense is Norinaga's: the sigh is not preparation for loss. It is proof you were actually there.
Why does the awareness of loss feel like the loss is the point?