The Japan Garden: 2. Qualities

Site

Perhaps unfairly, the most important thing to do when creating a Japanese garden is to choose its location carefully and with regard to the vegetation and topography already there, the possibilities for the creation of mountains and ponds, and for the opportunity to borrow scenery from outside the site. Many Japanese gardens are designed to generate the impression of walking along a mountain path and, if the land is unfortunately flat, ponds will have to be dug and the excavated earth used to make hills. So, on the one hand we have exquisite contrivance to make a garden appear as Nature yet, on the other, there are Zen monasteries where they have no need for a garden because they are sited in mountains and Nature is the garden. As it happened, there was no choice as Site C5 was allocated for The Japan Ishinomaki Garden and there was no choice but to work with it. The design problem then, was to contrive a Japanese garden as a walk along mountain paths when the mountains are already there. The art is in the contrivance but also in creating the impression of the absence of contrivance. It’s about believing the garden is Nature as it should be. Tough gig.

Buildings

Whatever buildings there are in the garden, they must be seen to be an extension of the garden and vice-versa. The two must be part of a single composition. The tea house (below) from the previous post is a good example. It’s not an extension of a landform. It doesn’t look like it’s growing out of the ground. It’s what you expect to see in this position. If it weren’t there you’d feel something needed to be at the end of this path. Another way of creating a unity is to frame views from certain positions in a room, or from certain locations. It’s very compositional but in seemingly natural way. Again, in a Japanese garden, the appearance of naturalness is the result of exquisite contrivance.

Enclosure

One difference between Nature and gardens is that a garden provides a sense of enclosure, of being sheltered from the world outside. This feeling can be created by changing the topography or the planting of a boundary of trees giving way to lower shrubs and, in turn, groundcover. This sense of enclosure is what makes Japanese gardens so relaxing. There’s no long perspectives.

Enclosure is not unique to Japan. Many cultures have walled gardens. Chinese gardens use the same principle. This garden and pagoda at Xingshengjiao Temple isn’t large and is bounded on three sides by roads but, once inside, you forget about the world outside. Note the cedars in the distance (on the “shoulders” of the site) emphasizing the verticality of the pagoda? This is an example of building and landscape being parts of the same composition.

Shakkei

Shakkei is borrowed scenery. The principle originated in China and refers to background scenery being appropriated into the composition of a garden. This is an opportunity presented by Site C5 as there’s much background scenery to borrow on three of its four sides. Part of this scenery will be the pagoda that is currently being constructed 75 meters behind the site in line with its eastern boundary. The garden at The Adachi Museum of Art (below) is a good example of the principle of shakkei being applied.

There’s a foreground, a middle distance and a far distance but it’s all the one composition and it’s beautiful. The far distance is especially important since it makes the enclosed world of the garden feel like an extension of the larger world. Or perhaps the intention is to make the larger world appear as an extension of the garden. Both work. Shakkei doesn’t always have to be as grand it is here. The Rikigien Garden below has a middle-distance patch of dark foliage separating the foreground garden from the far-distance borrowed scenery. 

Shukkei

Shukkei is compressed scenery forming an idealized version of Nature in which rocks can represent mountains and ponds can represent seas. False perspectives can be created by placing large rocks (or shrubs the same shape) in the foreground and smaller ones to the rear. These are technique for representing a world in miniature and its purpose is none other than to make a perfect world. The referencing of existing gardens and landscapes is a feature of Japanese garden design although, to a 21st century person, it sometimes seems like a combination of homage and at other times as different interpretations of standard themes. The garden at Suizen-ji Temple (水前寺) has a miniature Mount Fuji (富士山). The kare sansui garden at the Gyokudo Art Museum（玉堂美術館）is a representation of the Tamagawa River flowing just outside.

There there is also a long Japanese tradition of referencing celebrated Chinese landscape features and Chinese garden features. These representations are necessarily miniature and known as（縮景, compressed scenery）and their purpose is none other than to create an ideal world in miniature. The representations can be realistic, impressionistic or symbolic. There are numerous examples of gardens with representations of some aspect of Hangzhou’s West Lake. The Dragon Gate Waterfall (龍門瀑) at Tenryūji Temple in Western Kyoto depicts the Yellow River Gorge at Long Men (龙门) in China and the waterfall in the garden at the temple of the Golden Pavilion (金閣寺) has a waterfall representing that, that represents the Chinese legend of a carp succeeding in climbing the waterfall to become a dragon. This beautiful and inspirational legend has meaning for people striving to reach some higher plane of existence. Or pass exams.

In short, the history of Japanese gardens is intimately and intricately connected with the landscapes of China. Even the kare sansui rock gardens that Westerners associate with Zen Buddhism and think of as essentially Japanese, are derived from 5th century attempts to recreate Chinese ink landscape paintings as gardens. 

Sabi

The fifth and last major principle of a Japanese garden is sabi (然び). It can be thought of as an appreciation of the beauty of time and history. A garden such as the Japan Ishinomaki Garden created in eight months is unlikely to have this quality but retaining existing trees will provide it to some degree. Allowing some newly-revealed but ancient rock faces to show will bring additional sabi and, somewhat counterintuitively, reshaping or relocating existing trees to borrow and frame the forest scenery of Mt. Shanmenshan (仙门山) will also. 

Wabi

The garden and teahouse in the first image of this post were created in the grounds of the private residence of Prince Asaka one hundred years ago. It has the five important qualities of a Japanese garden and is like palace gardens and temple gardens in that it fits many people’s image of a Japanese garden. One concept that always mentioned in connection sabi is wabi and this can be understood to be the presence of simplicity, humility or understatement. This teahouse for a prince is neither ostentatious nor larger than it needs to be. Wabi and the admiration of simplicity is the result of 16^th century tea-master Sen-no Rikyū codifying and simplifying the rules for the tea ceremony, its objects and the rooms for performing it. He was saying less-is-more in the 16th century.

He invented the colour Rikyu Grey (also known as Rikyu Nezumi, Rikyu Rat, RGB112,124,116). It’s grey with a hint of green. It’s said to be using colour to express the absence of colour. It’s a popular color in Japan. In response to a person at some meeting asking “can’t you add something to do with tea ceremony?,” the lower part of the concrete walls on the lower level will be this color.

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Revisited this week:

• Aesthetic Efficiency
• The Antikythera Mechanism
• The Construction of Gothic Cathedrals