The Japan Garden: 1. Intro.

In October last year the department of architecture at my university was asked to provide proposals for pavilions and gardens to represent various countries at next year’s Wenzhou International Horticultural Exposition to be held in Wenzhou between April and July next year. The exposition will have general facilities, as well as gardens and pavilions representing 11 cities in China, another 11 representing cities in Zhejiang, and a further eleven gardens and pavilions in the International Gardens section. The reason many of my posts this year have had something to do with Japan is because I was entrusted with the designing those for Japan and Wenzhou’s Japan sister city of Ishinomaki. The Japan Ishinomaki Garden is one of the international gardens. On the left below is the expo masterplan. The site for The Japan Ishinomaki Garden faces the waterway to the south of the number 18 in the middle of the mountain in the middle of the image on the left.

On the left below is an image of the site taken around February this year and, because the site is fan-shaped, the more recent image on the right shows pretty much all of the site, the rear boundary of which stops a few meters before the road at the rear. (This road is currently covered in green mesh to limit airborne dust.) I’ll talk more about the site and its limitations and opportunities in what will probably be the third post in this series.

In this first post I want to talk about what is expected of a Japanese garden for an expo in China. There were four levels of approvals required. The first was by the Expo committee, then there was the level of the City, followed by approvals by the Provincial government and finally, the National. A design suggestion I made at one of the early expo committee meetings was for a Japanese garden in the style of Isamu Noguchi but this was thought to be “insufficiently Japanese”. I can understand that. Expectations management was called for because the image most people – and not just Chinese people – have of a Japanese garden is of a picturesque garden and pond associated with a palace such as Katsura Detached Palace or a contemplative kare sansui (dry) garden of rock, raked gravel and possibly some moss, and which are usually associated with a temple – the one at Ryoanji Temple being the most widely known.

There are many fine modern Japanese gardens and this one (on the left) designed by Tokyo firm Landscape Plus for the Muni Kyoto hotel can be thought of as a wet version of a dry rock garden where, as ever, the rock on the “shores” represents the rock that represents islands symbolic of the unchanging and eternal framework of the universe and the horizontal rock and the water running over it represents the raked gravel that represents the sea that symbolizes the transience of the phenomenal world. This logic of symbolism is reason why this garden is still recognizable as a Japanese garden, particularly to Japanese people. The garden on the right is a Japanese garden in Hangzhou, China. Again, it’s unmistakably Japanese probably due to the absence of colour in this photograph, but I expect that’s a Japanese maple tree in the bottom right corner. There’s more photographs here.

Nevertheless, the comment about a Noguchi garden seeming “insufficiently Japanese” showed that the design of the garden and pavilion needed to be recognizably Japanese to Chinese people yet at the same time not be seen as pastiche by Japanese people. Even if it were possible within the time and budget constraints to bring Japanese gardeners, plants, rocks and soil to China to create a truly authentic Japanese garden (or one as authentic as could be given the six-month construction period), it’s unlikely it would be perceived in the same way as Japanese people perceived a garden at a 15th century temple or palace garden for these are the result of exquisite contrivance at the design stage and ceaseless and labour-intensive maintenance ever since. In the case of temple gardens, re-forming symbolic mountains made of sand, raking gravel or sweeping paths every morning is a form of meditation while, at a palace, maintaining the shape of a black pine tree by thinning its needles by hand is a similar act of devotion and equally difficult to make happen outside a palace or temple grounds within Japan, let alone in some other country.

Another consideration was the symbolic role of the garden. Because Wenzhou and the Japanese city of Ishinomaki are sister cities, The Japan Ishinomaki Garden therefore represents a city as well as a country and symbolizes ties between them. The Japan Ishinomaki Garden needs to be more than a Japanese cultural artefact transplanted to another country in the manner usually described by the term “mutual cultural exchange”. Ideally, the garden should be capable of bringing people together by being experienced in the same way by Chinese people and by Japanese people. Rather than highlighting and exhibiting the differences in the garden and architectural cultures of China and Japan, the Japan Ishinomaki Garden should aspire to providing an experience and enjoyment that crosses borders. 

Enjoying the changes in a garden though the seasons is a pleasure in many countries but, over many centuries, China and Japan have developed it into an aesthetic expressed in gardens as well as in paintings and in poetry. What’s especially relevant is that viewing a garden or strolling in one and enjoying the changing seasons is an egalitarian pleasure available to everybody. Perhaps even more importantly, they are also sensory pleasures that don’t require knowledge or theory to appreciate. They are as accessible to children as they are to adults. With long-term maintenance at the back of my mind, I thought the garden to needed to be more like a park with paths allowing people to appreciate various scenes across the sloping site. My first idea was therefore to have different parts of the site densely planted with seasonal trees such as cherry blossoms for Spring, bamboo for Summer, maple trees for Autumn and gingko trees for Winter in the expectation that this might encourage visitors to return at least twice per year. 

Although I didn’t know it at the time, this idea inadvertently echoed that of a garden described in The Tale of Genji, written in the early 11th century and said to be the first novel in the world.

“the garden at Rokujō Palace was divided into four quarters, one for each season following Chinese principles of geomancy. Thus a cool natural spring, appreciated most on a hot sumer day, was included I the summer quarter located to the south. Thickly planted pines, beautiful after newly fallen snowm were planted in the winter quarter located to the north. The spring quarter was located in the east and the autumn quarter in the west”.  

My proposal had the same clockwise progression of seasons but my south was for winter when I thought the sun’s warmth would be most appreciated and the cooling shade on the north side was for summer. The cherry blossom trees aren’t on the east slope to represent the beginning of a new seasonal cycle but on the west slope where they’ll look better in the morning sun rather than the evening shadow of the mountain behind. Similarly, the maple trees are on the east slope to receive the evening sun rather than the shadow of the slope on the east. It was a simple and easily understood idea that took the project forward, even if many details and some of the basics were still unresolved. It was now the middle of March, about thirteen months before the expo is due to open.

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