日本庭園の世界 — 池泉・枯山水・露地の様式

A Japanese garden is an art form designed to condense the scenery of nature into a small space and to let viewers savor the changing of the four seasons. Unlike geometric Western gardens, it is asymmetric, makes heavy use of curves, and represents elements of nature — mountains, rivers, the sea — in a symbolic way. There are three principal styles.

The chisen-kaiyū style is built around a central pond, with paths inviting visitors to stroll its perimeter and enjoy the shifting scenery. During the Edo period, feudal lords across the country competed to build them, laying out artificial hills, bridges, and teahouses across vast grounds so that a different vista would appear with every step.

Karesansui — the dry landscape garden — is an extremely abstract style that depicts mountain and water scenery using nothing but white sand and stones, with no actual water at all. Ripples drawn into the sand with a broom symbolize the sea or the flow of a river, and carefully placed stones represent mountains or islands. The form developed at Zen temples in the Muromachi period as an object for zazen meditation.

The most famous karesansui of all is surely the garden of the abbot's quarters at Ryōan-ji in Kyoto. Fifteen stones are arranged in five groups within a rectangle of white sand, but from any vantage point one stone is always hidden behind the others — only fourteen can ever be seen at once. Also in Kyoto, Daitoku-ji is known as a Zen temple complex possessing many celebrated dry landscape gardens.

The roji is a garden created as a passageway leading to a tea room, and is also called a chatei (tea garden). Said to have been systematized by Sen no Rikyū, it is laid out with stepping stones, a stone water basin (tsukubai), a stone lantern, and a waiting bench. By walking through the roji, guests detach their hearts from the secular world and, after purifying their hands and mouth at the tsukubai, enter the tea room — completing a single ritual flow.

Shakkei is the technique of incorporating mountains or forests outside the garden into its composition as if they were part of it. By visually erasing the garden's boundary, it creates a landscape that feels far grander than the actual grounds. The most famous example is Entsū-ji in Kyoto, which borrows Mount Hiei: the ridgeline of the mountain rising beyond a grove of cedars makes for a breathtaking composition.

The greatest charm of a Japanese garden is that the same place wears a completely different face each season. In spring, cherry petals form a "blossom raft" on the surface of the pond; in early summer, fresh green and rabbit-ear iris glow side by side; in autumn, fiery red leaves dye the garden; and in winter, a blanket of snow turns the scene into the silent world of an ink painting. The yukitsuri ("snow ropes") at Kenroku-en are especially famous as a winter sight.

Beyond the three great gardens, the next must-visits are the imperial villas of Kyoto: Katsura Rikyū and Shugakuin Rikyū. Katsura, built in the early Edo period, is considered the supreme masterpiece of the chisen-kaiyū style, and became known worldwide after the German architect Bruno Taut praised it as "beautiful enough to make you weep." Visits require advance application to the Imperial Household Agency.

Ritsurin Park in Takamatsu on Shikoku is another leading daimyō garden, with a vast landscape unfolding against the borrowed scenery of Mount Shiun. It holds the top three-star rating in the Michelin Green Guide.

A Japanese garden is not something merely to be looked at — it is a space for walking, for sitting, for feeling the seasons, and at times for setting one's heart in order. The three styles — pond, dry landscape, and tea garden — each embody a different aesthetic and a different spiritual world. Next time you visit Japan, do spend some time at one of these celebrated gardens and savor the sensibility our ancestors poured into the borrowed scenery.