Western Perspective and Japanese Poetry ...

I am reading a classic middlebrow (I have aspirations!) work (A History of Knowledge, by Charles Van Doren) when I came across an assertion by the author that Western (Florentine) Art, which invented linear perspective around Renaissance times, was unique: perspective was not in the art of other cultures.  Exactly who invented it is little unclear, and even the Greeks and Romans had used some forms of it, but Masaccio's Holy Trinity is generally thought to be one of the first artworks of Renaissance times using perspective:

Curious, I used Google to check Mr. Van Doren's statement, which appears to be more or less true, however, Japan had forms of perspective which weren't linear, but attuned to particular cultural and geographic sensibilities.  In this article, the author, Ken-ichi Sasaki, writes knowledgeably about all these forms, and point out that Japanese visual art is inseparable from Japanese poetry, and the landscapes are very different from Western landscapes:

 We find several ... examples of such a scenery structure in waka by Eifuku-mon’in and some other poets.
The striking characteristic of this scenery consists in the fact that there are only close and distant ranges with the middle one lacking.  In the following piece, mist fills the middle range but that is, so to say, empty. 

Ochi-kochi-no yama-ha sakura-no hana-zakari(Mountains here and there are full of cherry blossoms,)
nobe-ha kasumi-ni uguisu-no koe(in the field are mist and the song of the bush warbler.)

I recognize here a pictorial expression dear to Japanese paintings.  Let me quote from the Tale of Genji, a novel dating from the very beginning of the eleventh century.  Suffering an illness, Genji, the hero of the novel, visited a sage in the northern hills of the capital district.  After giving him medicine and curing him, the sage advised  Genji not to worry too much.  Then Genji climbed the hill behind the temple and looked off toward the city.  The forest had receded into a spring haze.  “Like a painting,” he said.  “People who live in such a place can hardly have anything to worry about.”  “Oh, the ‘keshiki’ around here is not profound enough,” said one of his men.  “The mountains and seas in the far province should help you gain real progress in your painting”…