Japan
Accompanying my older nephew on his first overseas holiday, we arrived in Tōkyō a few short months after the Tōhoku earthquake and its devastating aftermath. I was no stranger to overseas travel but this was the first time I’d set foot in Japan. According to Australian media, the country was recoiling from multiple shocks: the quake; tsunami; nuclear disaster; an exodus of expats; a severe decline in the number of tourists and travellers; and widespread electricity rationing. If these weren’t enough, the country had experienced over a decade of economic malaise. My expectations were understandably low.
What I immediately found, however, was a hospitality second to none in a city brimming with human activity. To my eyes, it was as if nothing of the disaster that struck so close to Tōkyō as to shake its skyscrapers, had happened. The city is the world’s most populous — so large that it isn’t considered a metropolis, but a megalopolis. Despite its size and busyness, there’s a calmness to the way people carry themselves throughout their daily comings and goings — except, that is, during rush-hour on its vast, labyrinthine, and mostly underground rail network. This takes the edge off what might otherwise be described as a frenetic (and possibly overwhelming) pace of life. Among its thirty-eight million or so people, there seems to be a genuine and broadly observed consideration and respect for others, even complete strangers.
At one point during our first day, while travelling through Tōkyō’s underground, two young Harajuku-girls giggling coquettishly and dressed in their cartoonish cosplay outfits, stepped into our carriage at one stop and stood next to a woman who was perhaps my age, sitting with perfect poise and an air of dignity and grace about her. Elegantly dressed in a plain but nonetheless chic dark teal-grey kimono, complete with geta and tabi footwear, her jet-black hair was held aloft in a perfectly neat roll with what looked all the world like a pair of chopsticks. That visual contrast (I could’ve used ‘juxtaposition’ here, but it’s a word I tire of easily), was the first among many in a country where the present and futuristic sit sometimes jarringly, and at other times comfortably alongside tradition and history.
If his experience of Japan left any lasting impression on my nephew, I’m none the wiser. But to cast my first time there as inspiring would be an understatement. Over the next five years I returned three times to experience all four seasons on all four main islands, and a few lesser but no less beautiful islands. It sounds like I’m reading from Lonely Planet’s guide to Japan, but it’s nonetheless true to say that with so much to see and experience across its long and climatically variable archipelago, one can be forgiven for never wanting to cover the same ground twice. Indeed, whenever I’ve journeyed there I’ve made a point of spending time somewhere new to me — someplace less travelled than major cities. Having said that, there is one place almost every traveller to Japan visits, and which I always return to. Kyōto.
Apart from anything and almost everything there, I never tire of the city’s gardens — both historic and contemporary. The most popular are located in the grounds of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, of which the city is home to two thousand or so. I’ve no first-hand experience of residential Japanese gardens other than those I’ve glimpsed from public vantage points — something I plan to rectify in any future visit.
The two private non-residential gardens I recall having the pleasure of experiencing include the æsthetically austere tsuboniwa (courtyard garden) designed by Kajikawa Yoshitomo and Akenuki Atsushi, set inside the top floor of the Kahitsukan Kyōto Museum of Contemporary Art. It dates from 1981. I was at the museum during a very quiet period with few other visitors, and could sit undisturbed with — but not within — the garden for the better part of half an hour; something of a luxury. The other garden — also a tsuboniwa — is set immediately adjacent to a ground-floor room at the Hiiragiya Ryokan. It would be no stretch of one’s imagination to say that the garden is an integral part of the room rather than seperate to it, since a wall of old cedar-framed glass-panelled doors can be slid back to reveal its horticultural glory completely unmediated by the slightly warped glass, which is charming in its own rustic way. The inn dates from 1818, and the room was favoured by Japan’s Nobel laureate for literature, Yasunari Kawabata. I’d like to think it was also the room where David Hockney produced one of his more intimate Polaroid collages, Gregory watching the snowfall, Kyōto, but am happy to remain none the wiser.
Of the many temple and shrine gardens I’ve had the great privilege to visit, the gardens of Tōfuku-ji, Ryōan-ji, Saihō-ji, and Sanzen-in have left lasting impressions. There’s a Japanese word which describes the pursuit of viewing autumn leaves which can loosely be translated to ‘red maple leaf hunting’, and the Tōfuku-ji temple complex is one such momijigari hot-spot. In particular, the large copse of Japanese maples (Acer palmatum) that swamps the temple’s Tsūten-kyō cedar bridge is a sight to behold at the height of its autumnal splendour, especially if one can avoid the worst of the crowds. Arriving first-thing in the morning is advised. For me, though, it’s Mirei Shigemori’s gardens that make any visit there all the more worthwhile.
Using only materials available on site, he created a number of gardens , the pièce de résistance of which, in my opinion, is the tessellated moss garden — described no less as a “work of genius” by English gardener, Montague ‘Monty’ Don — closely followed by the nearby chequerboard straight-edged and low-cut clipped blocks of azalea, both of which look as contemporary as can be. These were, however, completed more than eighty years ago along with his other work which includes a dry garden, or karesansui. Shigemori questioned traditional garden design, and in doing so, the gardens he created appear quite unlike their predecessors but nonetheless retain an unmistakable ‘Japanese-ness’ about them. With an eye toward modernism, his work demonstrated a capacity for rule-breaking, and tradition to be reinterpreted.
As impressive as Shigemori’s karesansui are — he created several over his illustrious career as a garden designer and maker — surely the epitome of that garden style is located at Ryōan-ji, the Rinzai Zen Buddhist temple across town from Tōfuku-ji in the city’s north west. Its flat expanse of white gravel — about half the size of an Olympic swimming pool — is carefully raked daily to invoke the appearance of rippling water or ocean waves in the miniature, or something else entirely. How it might — and is supposed to — be interpreted is anyone’s guess, and limited only by one’s imagination.
Here, fifteen rocks are firmly fixed in the ground, appearing in two groups of two; two groups of three, and; one group of five. All are said to be able to only be seen as a single group from directly above. That is to say, from any grounded human vantage point, a maximum of fourteen rocks can be seen at any one instance. There is always one ‘missing’ rock, out of view, though depending on one’s literal point of view, it isn’t always the same rock. The garden’s only plant to speak of is moss, which clings in small colonies on and about the rocks. The ostensibly immutable karesansui garden that makes Ryōan-ji so famous has, in fact, undergone significant change — though, as far as I can determine, not in living memory (having suffered from numerous historical wars, Kyōto was spared complete destruction during World War II).
Ryōan-ji’s temple and some of its gardens are thought to have first been established in the eleventh century, but its earliest written records date from around 1680 and note only nine rocks embedded there. Ninety-nine years later, the temple was razed to the ground. Later, the karesansui was reconstructed by Akisato Rito atop the temple’s ashes with the fifteen now-venerated rocks that have presumably remained in situ ever since, waiting for something, anything, to happen. Of course so much happens; shadows shift, rain teams, the sun bakes, snow falls, the moon beams, there are innumerable earth tremors, leaves fall (and are dutifully removed), clouds dull the light, and perhaps a bird occasionally lands on a rock and discretely deposits a small volume of uric acid. And thousands of people come and go; processing through almost every day. It’s we humans who fool ourselves into thinking that the scene remains static. By the way, the earliest known picture of the fifteen rocks was included in Celebrated Gardens and Sights of Kyoto, authored by Akisato, who also, incidentally, authored the earliest known technical book on the subject of origami.
There once, I noticed an ornamental cherry in the adjacent garden behind the long and tall mud-and-oil wall, with some of its branches reaching in toward the back of the karesansui. In Yasujirō Ozu’s 1947 film — a black and white melodrama — Late Spring, there’s no evidence of the tree in the multiple scenes where Professors Somiya (played by Ozu stalwart, Chishū Ryū), and Onodera (Masao Mishima), visit the temple and discuss the forthcoming wedding of Somiya’s daughter, Noriko (played perfectly by the director’s muse, the late Setsuko Hara). The only other difference I can make out is that the mud-and-oil wall to the rear of the garden was then protected by glazed ceramic tiles. These have since been replaced by cedar-bark shingles, and look all the more smart, if not authentic, for it. Regarding the cherry, its visual intrusion of seasonal autumn leaves, delicate green spring leaf buds, darker green summer leaves, and barren winter branches — whether intended or incidental — serve as a poetic counterpoint to the seemingly unvarying rock garden. It’s a pitch-perfect contradistinction.
If there’s a vegetal analogue to Ryōan-ji’s karesansui, it must be the moss garden, or kokeniwa, at another Rinzai Zen Buddhist temple, Saihō-ji. Here, a sea of moss carpets the main garden, punctuated occasionally by tree trunks and stumps, a few shrubs, and rocks that surround a central pond. Other than the path, there’s no other bare ground worth mentioning. The garden’s overall naturalistic appearance contrasts strikingly with Ryōan-ji’s unambiguous abstraction. The moss garden is, nonetheless, far from untouched by human hands. As with almost all Japanese gardens, Saihō-ji’s is tended to with a meticulousness that borders on what might easily appear to a western eye as obsession. Fallen leaves, pine needles, and weeds are constantly removed to ensure the moss looks its immaculate and uniform best. It seems like a lot of unnecessary work for a garden, but such places in Japan are not simply gardens — they are considered works of art deserving of perfect presentation. Besides, the moss for which the garden is best known would quickly succumb if it weren’t for its constant tending.
Because entry to Saihō-ji is conditional upon applying no fewer than three months in advance of a proposed visit, and — upon entry — participating in a short exercise of copying sutras written in kanji using traditional ink and brush, the temple is rarely frequented by westerners who might otherwise consider the entry requirements onerous, if not also — though somewhat unfairly — tedious. I would recommend to any would-be visitor who harbours second-thoughts, that the cost of entry is certainly worthwhile. Having said that, I’ve only visited once, but what I saw was indeed memorable. What has stayed with me most about the garden when I visited in late autumn (as the leaves at the very top of the maples had begun yellowing), was its almost total commitment to the verdant. I imagine it would appear starkly different once the maple leaves had turned red, or later still, covered beneath a blanket of soft winter snow without a leaf in sight. For those who cannot arrange to visit Saihō-ji, other moss gardens worth viewing include those at Gio-ji, Enko-ji, Jojakko-ji, Okachi-sanso, Hakuryu-en, and Sanzen-in. Of these, I’d recommend the last.
Sanzen-in is a Buddhist temple which traditionally housed priests of imperial and aristocratic lineage. I’d like to think it still does, but that is the hopeless romantic in me. The temple is located in the highland town of Ōhara, about thirty minutes north of downtown Kyōto. It gardens are set in a clearing at the edge of a forest, and for someone who was once determined to create a garden surrounding a cabin in the middle of a towering forest on the lower slopes of a mountain, there’s an obvious personal attraction. Japan has a very long history of creating ornamental gardens. The world’s oldest known garden-making book — the Sakuteiki — was written in eleventh century Japan. Well before then, the likely prototypes for Japanese gardens were forest clearings — sacred spaces into which kami (spirits) were invited. There was a time, not so long ago, when I imagined a string of meaningful coincidences — a Jungian synchronicity, if you will — between the origins and development of Japanese gardens, and the garden I wanted to make encircled by forest on the outskirts of Hobart-town. But there’s nothing remotely romantic as synchronicity involved — just a weaving of happenstance and ideas with some confirmation bias: piecing together detail to create a narrative. But a lovely narrative, nonetheless.
Suburban Townsville is quite different from the topographies and climates that inspired me to want to create a garden in Tasmania that was intended as a faint echo of some of the traditional Japanese gardens I’m familiar with. As mentioned earlier, I have no intention of creating anything resembling a traditional Japanese garden. Even if I wanted to, I don’t possess the requisite knowledge, skills, experience, nor confidence needed to create anything other than a crude, if not vulgar facsimile. A number of Japanese garden design conventions and gardening techniques can, however, be employed to create something ‘other’. What a Japanese-ish garden might look like is only limited by a garden-maker’s knowledge and imagination. But there is a risk that the result might appear too familiar — too familiar to ‘work’, that is.
To my eyes, the Cowra Japanese and Adelaide Himeji gardens — though designed by Japanese garden makers, Ken Nakajima (Cowra), and Yoshitaka Kumada — not only appear, but feel out-of-place. And strictly speaking they are, despite any associations those locations have with Japan. Others, no doubt, view these gardens in a more flattering light, and that is entirely fine. In the private realm, away from these gardens visited by the public, should someone want their suburban garden unambiguously designed in the style of ‘traditional Japanese’, complete with toro (stone lantern); tsukubai (stone wash basin); uneven stone paths; precisely raked gravel; sori-bashi (arched bridge); or any other typical feature, who am I to judge? It bares repeating that what matters most about one’s garden is the way it makes one feel.
To be continued…
