The movement was very successful, peaking when its members received praise for the Takara Cotillion Beautillion at the Osaka World Expo 1970.

Although he had practiced the concept of sustainable and eco-minded architecture for four decades, Kisho Kurokawa became more adamant about environmental protection in his latter years.

Kurokawa was a stakeholder and founding Chair of the Executive Advisory Board of the Anaheim, California-based university since 1998 and his wife Ayako Wakao-Kurokawa serves as Honorary Chairman of the institute.

[citation needed] His architecture focused on keeping traditional Japanese concepts invisible, especially materiality, impermanence, receptivity and detail.

Kurokawa noted that Japan's cities, primarily built from wood and natural materials, were more susceptible to destruction by fire.

On the same note, historically speaking, Japan's cities have almost yearly been hit with natural disasters such as earthquakes, typhoons, floods and volcanic eruptions.

This continuous destruction of buildings and cities has given the Japanese population, in Kurokawa's words, “an uncertainty about existence, a lack of faith in the visible, a suspicion of the eternal.” In addition, the four seasons are very clearly marked in Japan, and the changes through the year are dramatic.

The traditional tea room was intentionally built of only natural materials such as earth and sand, paper, the stems and leaves of plants, and small trees.

Kurokawa's designs often highlighted the natural properties of materials, a characteristic observed in his treatment of iron, aluminum, and concrete.

Kurokawa opened structures and made no attempt to hide the connective elements, believing that beauty was inherent in each of the individual parts.

For more than a thousand years, the Japanese had an awareness of neighboring China and Korea and, in the modern age, Portugal, Great Britain and America, to name a few.

The only way for a small country like Japan to avoid being attacked by these empires was to make continuous attempts to absorb foreign cultures for study and, while establishing friendly relations with the larger nations, preserve its own identity.

Then at one point in the 1960s, Kurokawa and a small group of architects began a new wave of contemporary Japanese architecture, believing that previous solutions and imitations were not satisfactory for the new era: life was not present in Modernism.

Kurokawa explained that the attention paid to detail in Japanese work derived essentially from the typical attempt to express individuality and expertise.

This sharp jump from producing goods by craftsmen to industrially realized production was so rapid that the deep-rooted tradition of fine craftsmanship as a statement of the creator did not disappear.

As a result, the Japanese maker continues to be instilled with a fastidious preoccupation for fine details, which can be seen in contemporary architecture, art and industry.

In 1958, Kisho Kurokawa predicted a “Transition from the Age of the Machine to the Age of Life,” and has continually utilized such key words of life principles as metabolism (metabolize and recycle), ecology, sustainability, symbiosis, intermediate areas (ambiguity) and Hanasuki (Splendor of Wabi) in order to call for new styles to be implemented by society.