Spaces in Translation: Japanese Gardens and the West [Illustrated] 0812246748, 9780812246742

Table of contents :
Cover
Half title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1. From China to Japan: The History of Asian Spaces
Chapter 2. Discourses of Spaces
Chapter 3. Spreading the Japanese Garden Worldwide
Chapter 4. Between Essence and Invention
Chapter 5. Zen and the Art of Gardens
Chapter 6. Elements of the Japanese Garden
Chapter 7. Authoritarian Gardens
Chapter 8. Connecting Spaces, Disconnecting Spaces
Chapter 9. Postmodernizing Japanese Gardens
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Citation preview

Spaces in Translation

PENN STUDIES IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE John Dixon Hunt, Series Editor This series is dedicated to the study and promotion of a wide variety of approaches to landscape architecture, with special emphasis on connections between theory and practice. It includes monographs on key topics in history and theory, descriptions of projects by both established and rising designers, translations of major foreign-language texts, anthologies of theoretical and historical writings on classic issues, and critical writing by members of the profession of landscape architecture. The series was the recipient of the Award of Honor in Communications from the American Society of Landscape Architects, 2006.

Spaces in Translation Japanese Gardens and the West

CHRISTIAN TAGSOLD

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tagsold, Christian, author. Title: Spaces in translation : Japanese gardens and the West / Christian Tagsold. Other titles: Penn studies in landscape architecture. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Series: Penn studies in landscape architecture Identifiers: LCCN 2017005515 | ISBN 9780812246742 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Gardens, Japanese—Europe—History—20th century. | Gardens, Japanese—North America—History— 20th century. | Gardens, Japanese—Design—Philosophy. Classification: LCC SB458 .T33 2017 | DDC 712/.60952—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005515

Contents

Introduction Chapter 1. From China to Japan: The History of Asian Spaces Chapter 2. Discourses of Spaces Chapter 3. Spreading the Japanese Garden Worldwide Chapter 4. Between Essence and Invention Chapter 5. Zen and the Art of Gardens Chapter 6. Elements of the Japanese Garden Chapter 7. Authoritarian Gardens Chapter 8. Connecting Spaces, Disconnecting Spaces Chapter 9. Postmodernizing Japanese Gardens Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments

Introduction

Japanese gardens are a global phenomenon, and nearly every major city in the world has at least one. We find them in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, London, and Paris and also in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Singapore. It is certainly not surprising that there are many Japanese gardens in Tokyo, Osaka, and especially Kyoto, and many tourists travel to Japan to visit them. However, the abundance of Japanese gardens around the globe might seem puzzling at first glance. Why are Japanese gardens so popular? A search on the Internet produces among others the following interesting answer, on a website called “Meditations on the Japanese Garden”: “The Japanese garden finds its main roots in an aesthetic that gives the garden an intrinsic value of its own, as a means of representing the natural world in an idealized state for contemplation, as a way of expressing the relationship that humans have to the natural world and its elements. Perhaps what most fascinates the Western viewer when first seeing photos of Japanese gardens, is that they seem to be paintings, using natural materials in three dimensional space.”1 This explanation is backed up by popular as well as scholarly literature. However, this statement creates more questions than answers. Surely contemplation and meditation are popular in the West. But perhaps the fact that Japanese gardens look like paintings is so fascinating to people because everyone desires one of his or her own? And would this not be true for Chinese gardens as well? In fact, in the eighteenth century, Chinese gardens were also described as picturesque, conducive to contemplation, and close to nature, much closer, in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers, than gardens in the artificial French or Italian styles. Yet in spite of these similarities, Japanese gardens massively outnumber their Chinese counterparts outside their respective countries.2 No other Asian type of garden is as ubiquitous as the Japanese; in 2006 Kano Yoko counted 432 worldwide.3 Why then, and under what circumstances, have Japanese gardens become so widespread? This question focuses on the process of their global dispersion and its history. Differences are obvious when comparing even just a few of the gardens. While New York’s exemplar in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is more than a hundred years old, the Japanese garden in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was built three decades ago. Cologne, Germany, has two gardens to offer, one of which is about nine decades old while the other is some fifty years younger. Japanese gardens in the West have a history that stretches back about 150 years, and new ones are built each year. These are just some of the central questions about Japanese gardens worldwide that are hard to answer simply by pointing out the gardens’ intrinsic qualities; many others could be asked. There was and probably is still a certain mystification involved in achieving this special global status for Japanese gardens. Until the last three decades most scholarly accounts of Japanese gardens reinforced the mystic qualities ascribed to them. While the first accounts of Japanese gardens at the end of the nineteenth century often had a very analytic point of view, romantic visions were also prominent.4 In the following decades levelheaded accounts of the

gardens’ history and influence in the West were rare. Clay Lancaster’s publications were exceptions. Most of all, his book The Japanese Influence in America (1963) offered a serious explanation of Japanese gardens in the West as a success story.5 But even he lacked the theoretical tools for a more critical account. And in contrast to Lancaster, Western and Japanese authors alike more often than not offered interpretations resembling the earlier quote from the Internet. The popularity of this garden type was more mystifying than explainable. Only in the last years have garden designers like Wybe Kuitert or specialists of East Asian art like Kendall H. Brown started to demystify some aspects of Japanese gardens.6 At the same time in Japan, Inoue Shōichi and Yamada Shōji have deconstructed common cultural assumptions about Japanese gardens.7 One goal of this book is to follow in the footsteps of Brown and Kuitert on the one hand and Inoue and Yamada on the other and to ask more questions about the vogue for Japanese gardens in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The questions asked at the beginning of this introduction can serve as a guideline. However, they have to be radicalized. Yamada can offer a model. He started his analysis of one of the most famous Japanese gardens, the stone garden at the Ryōanji temple in Kyoto, with a simple question: Why do people think that it is beautiful?8 Behind this question was Yamada’s confession that he himself was not convinced of the stone garden’s beauty. My personal opinion on Japanese gardens is a little bit different, but my uneasiness is nevertheless quite similar. I do enjoy visiting Japanese gardens, be it in New York, my hometown of Düsseldorf, or Kyoto. In that respect working on this book has been a wonderful experience. My research has led me to visit many public parks and gardens and to look for their Asian-inspired additions. I tried to obtain archival material concerning the gardens I wanted to use as examples: I have always wanted to know how the gardens feel and work as representational spaces. This has meant visiting about ninety Japanese gardens in ten countries over the years. In addition I asked friends around the world to send me information on gardens in their cities and countries. Finally, I read many papers dealing with individual Japanese gardens, or Japanese gardens in certain regions or countries, which helped complete the picture.9 But the research has not only been about having fun and enjoying the gardens. I never accepted the commonplace and essentialist explanations for why people find them fascinating. Nor have I enjoyed how most of these gardens are presented to the public through informational boards and strict rules of use; it is as though the “admonishing fingers” of members of park commissions are trying to educate me, to remind me as a visitor all the time that these gardens are meant for meditation, that I am not free to enjoy them as I choose. Sometimes real-life guardians were in attendance and warned me not to step on pebbles or raise my voice beyond a whisper—and this happened more than once. Ascribing special qualities to Japanese gardens not only has theoretical consequences; these qualities are sometimes enforced literally. Interestingly enough, the only time that garden attendants not only allowed but even urged me to step on the green beyond the path was in a garden in Fukuoka, Japan. This practical mystification of Japanese gardens added to my questions about them. Japanese gardens are not only objects of discourse. They are also very concrete spatial ensembles.

However, there was always more to researching Japanese gardens than simply finding out about a somehow exceptional phenomenon of spatial representation that engrained a notion of essentialism. If it was only about Japanese gardens, I would not have felt compelled to write a whole book. These gardens offered more angles for analysis. They fit very well with my interest about the theoretical problems of a cosmopolitan world and, in particular, my concern with the discursive formation of knowledge. These gardens posed problems for Western observers who lacked categories to describe them in the beginning, even as the Japanese minds behind them had difficulty understanding how they might fit into the discourse on nation and identity. Only gradually was a discursive framework established that put terms like “nature,” “spirituality,” or “serenity” into context, albeit within a colonial framework. Japan was never colonized, of course, but it fell into semidependence on the West during the mid-nineteenth century when Commodore Matthew Perry was sent from the United States to open up its ports for American whalers as well as for trade in general. Unequal treaties were forced upon Japan in the following years by Western powers before Japan itself turned into an imperialistic power. And it was in this later context that the first famous examples of the Japanese garden were presented at world’s fairs in the United States and Europe with the aim of convincing the Western public of Japanese equality. The gardens that represented Japan at world’s fairs and then increasingly in public gardens and on the private estates of the rich followed spatial patterns that imperialist ideologies had mostly dictated. Such patterns cannot be fully explained within the paradigms of the spatial turn, as outlined by Henri Lefebvre, Marc Augé, or Edward W. Soja.10 Where Lefebvre, Augé, and Soja focused on spaces in social interaction mostly within one culture, the Japanese gardens came into existence on the borderline between cultures. In framing the matter thus, I do not intend to essentialize “cultures” in any way; indeed, whenever I talk about “culture” or “cultures,” I have an uneasy feeling similar to what I have when visiting Japanese gardens in Europe or the Americas. On the one hand, these gardens constitute a space in themselves; on the other, the space is highly dynamic and interactive. Even if it is strongly confined by fences and shrubs, as most Japanese gardens in the West are, the space interacts with its foreign surroundings—if only by virtue of being so strongly confined and closed in. And it is this combination of separateness and interaction that gets to the heart of the notion of culture that I use in this book. Signifiers like “the West” or “Japan” are hard to avoid completely, and putting these words in quotes each time they appear would be more of a distraction than a helpful reminder. Even Stuart Hall felt obliged to excuse himself for a simplified understanding of “the West” in his introduction to the discursive formation of The West and the Rest.11 If it is necessary for Hall to mention this at the very moment he is unraveling the discourse, it becomes all too clear that it is difficult to avoid this problem of simplification. Clearly there is no fixed West, Japan, or China—the latter two replacing Hall’s “rest” in my case—in the sense that I use these words. Japan exists as a state, but “Japan” implies much more, as expressed among other things by Japanese gardens. I can only beg the reader to keep in mind that these signifiers denote dynamic entities, as will become evident, I hope, as the book proceeds. Japanese gardens in the West are translational spaces. They spark negotiations over what is West and what is East, and they help to constitute these categories. As such they are “third spaces,”

lively places distinct from established areas, as described by Homi Bhabha, Lefebvre, and Soja. New forms of creativity emerge in third spaces, and Bhabha, Lefebvre, and Soja see their respective third spaces as liberating. In contrast I have a much bleaker vision to offer. Power and power relations crisscross the space of Japanese gardens. There is no liberation. Instead the gardens are yet another dispositif in the Foucauldian sense. The third space is devoid of hope. While my chief aim is to clarify theoretical problems of space and translation by using Japanese gardens as an example, I first establish the historical background of the gardens themselves. Roughly half of the time spent researching this book was passed in numerous gardens, where I endeavored to analyze spatial patterns and types of use, and where I also spoke with the guardians and officials connected to the gardens. The other half of my time was spent in archives. Methodologically, the resulting book is a hybrid, situated somewhere between the work of an ethnographer and that of a historian. Analysis of historical material goes hand-in-hand with data gathered on the spot through participant observation and interviews. As my history of Japanese gardens in the West in the first chapters is meant to lead to the theoretical questions I want to pose, it may be that my approach is somewhat frustrating to (garden) historians. I introduce each chapter with a stroll through a garden. This adds some concrete examples to the analysis of the text and helps to remind us that gardens only exist in toto and in many historical layers. Unless just built yesterday, all gardens are palimpsests.12 Paths through them are changed or repaved. Informational boards offer new interpretations every decade. And my garden walks not only add to each chapter in which they appear, but also connect topics throughout the whole book. Chapter 1 deals with Chinese rather than Japanese gardens in the West. As noted, before Japanese gardens aroused European interest, Chinese-style gardens were in fashion, and my first chapter deals with this eighteenth-century Enlightenment phenomenon. There are only a few direct linkages between the vogue of Chinese gardens and their Japanese counterparts of a hundred years later. Nevertheless interesting parallels exist, especially in the notion of a special Asian relation to nature. In addition, the assumption that religious motives underlay the gardens is common to both types. The discursive analysis of Japanese gardens starting in the late nineteenth century drew from these dispositifs of knowledge. I treat these discourses in Chapter 2. The formation of a canonical body of knowledge about Japanese gardens paralleled their actual arrival in the West in the last three decades of the nineteenth century when, within the context of the imperialist world order, Western authors living in Japan began to write books about Japanese gardens. These introductions were essential for Westerners to appreciate Japanese gardens. Chapter 2 introduces these main early publications and also discusses the rules of knowledge formation that guided their discourse. The distinction between discourse and practice is somewhat artificial, as both together form the body of knowledge on Japanese gardens; books and gardens, textual treatment, and design composed what was to be known. Nevertheless, for analytical reasons it makes sense to first treat both realms separately, and it is in Chapter 3 that I turn to the actual arrival of Japanese gardens in the West. World’s fairs in Europe and North America first made Japanese gardens popular. Museums and garden fairs helped spread that popularity further. The rich of the Gilded Age in

the United States and their counterparts in Europe liked what they saw and started to commission their own Japanese gardens. The first real Japanese gardens do not quite fit into our contemporary understanding of the category and differed to a large degree from what is seen today as an authentic version. Spectators lacked knowledge about how to look at these spaces and enjoy what they saw. Within two decades and through discourses and practical experience, however, a canonical body of knowledge had formed. This first vogue of Japanese gardens in the West ebbed in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, money for new gardens was scarce. In addition, Japan’s aggressive imperialistic policies in the East increasingly repelled the rich in the United States and England—those who had been most active promoting Japanese gardens. After dealing with Chinese predecessors, discourses, and practice in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, Chapter 4 takes a detour into the theoretical implications of Japanese gardens in the West—and in Japan. I argue that older frameworks for analyzing these gardens and their path to the West, such as cultural essentialism or constructivism, can be valid, but that the case is much more complicated. By offering a semiotic analysis based on the notion of translation, I hope to provide a much more accurate theoretical framework that goes beyond the mere example of gardens and is valid much more generally for the globalization of cultural artifacts. The theoretical background will be of use when we move back into history. After World War II, Zen Buddhism began to dominate the interpretations of Japanese gardens (a mode of analysis based on discourses that had already started emerging in the 1930s). A new, second vogue of Japanese gardens in the West started to form. Soon Japanese gardens were once again ubiquitous. This second vogue, still closely connected to Zen Buddhism, has lasted up to the present and offers a clear case of cultural translations and re-translations. In Chapter 5, it serves as a test of the theoretical assumptions put forth in the preceding chapter. From a more discursive exploration I move back to practical matters in the next two chapters. In Chapter 6 I describe what gardens must contain in order to be considered Japanese. There are certain elements that are essential—in more than one sense of the word. How these elements are arranged spatially is the core of Chapter 7. Japanese gardens are often presented to visitors as “Other” spaces; authoritarian rules and limitations of space underline this. These spatial analyses lead to the question addressed in Chapter 8 of how Japanese gardens can be seen as spaces in between the East and West. Concepts of translation are but one way to express this. Taking up translation as a metaphor also stresses the deep entanglement of global modernity. Ideas as well as objects travel around the world. But Japanese gardens are no longer mere gardens. In the last two decades they have left the boundaries of space and have infiltrated other areas. I will scrutinize these postmodern versions in Chapter 9 and provide an outlook on how Japanese gardens have finally left their boundaries and confinements behind.

Chapter 1

From China to Japan The History of Asian Spaces

Garden Stroll I: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew Our first garden stroll takes us through the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. The gardens have many attractions, but the most eye-catching is the Pagoda located at the south end of the park, which stands ten stories (fifty meters) high. The layout of the gardens encourages visitors entering through one of the main gates to walk on the grass, taking in the Pagoda Vista, the name of the path leading up to the structure. The view of the Pagoda is very impressive when approached in this way. However, upon closer inspection, the building itself does not look as Chinese as it does from afar. Its octagonal layout and the overhanging roofs of each story certainly have a chinois flavor, but the plain brick walls and red window frames look rather English. That is a bit unsettling, as is the noise. The Pagoda is situated below one of the main approach paths for aircraft using Heathrow Airport, and planes pass overhead every two minutes, disturbing the peaceful atmosphere. Indeed, the Pagoda is one of the West London landmarks visible from these aircrafts. When the Pagoda was finished in 1762, the land was not yet designated a royal botanic garden. It belonged to Augusta, the widowed Princess of Wales, who had appointed the architect Sir William Chambers to extend the garden of her late husband, Frederick, Prince of Wales. Chambers had been to China and was therefore well suited to bring to Kew the chinois flavor so in vogue during the eighteenth century. Before his death, Frederick had commissioned a House of Confucius in 1749, which Chambers may also have planned. Under Augusta’s patronage, a Chinese pavilion and the Pagoda were erected as well.1 Chambers planned a total of twenty-three buildings for Kew, among them a Moorish alhambra and a Turkish mosque to flank the Pagoda. The Pagoda itself was then much more colorful than it is today, with roofs made of tiles that were varnished green and white, gaudy banisters, and eighty dragons on the roof corners. In line with the fashion of the times, the garden thus offered visitors various curious experiences. Today the House of Confucius, the alhambra, and the mosque are all gone, as are the dragons of the Pagoda. Instead a Japanese garden is situated near the Pagoda. It is not fenced off as are many Japanese gardens in the West; benches, plants, and pebbles clearly demarcate how visitors should move within the space. Small signs are present, asking visitors not to step on the pebbles. The Chokushi-Mon (Gateway of the Imperial Messenger), built for the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, now occupies a space on a slight slope in the middle of the landscape. It was given to the Royal Botanic Gardens after the exhibition and was left to deteriorate until it was restored as a centerpiece of the

new Japanese Landscape.2 Through the proximity of the Pagoda, the gateway, and the Japanese Landscape, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew vividly links the various vogues of Asian gardens in the West (see Figure 1). If the Pagoda is the archetypical building of the Chinese vogue of the eighteenth century and its architect, William Chambers, a popular but also controversial designer of the era, the Gateway of the Imperial Messenger is one of the finest examples of Japanese architecture at fairs in the Age of Imperialism. Today gardens like the Japanese Landscape can be found all over the world, with the more recent examples proof of the long-lasting popularity of Japanese gardens.

THIS FIRST STROLL through a garden has taken us into a chinois setting that demonstrates that Japanese gardens were not the first Asian-style gardens to be regarded highly in the West. During the eighteenth century, long before the first Japanese gardens were built in Europe and North America, chinois architecture, Chinese-style garden layouts, and the Pagoda of Kew were in vogue. Just as Japanese gardens would be popular in the context of Japonism roughly a hundred years later, these buildings and gardens were part of a fashion for all things Chinese. Most significant of all Chinese imports was porcelain, the white gold that astonished Western nobility until Europeans found out how to produce it themselves. Besides porcelain, Chineseinspired interior decorative schemes and ornamental art were popular. But the Chinese fashion had a philosophical side as well; some of the best minds of the century, like Voltaire, felt a certain affinity for Chinese thought.3

Figure 1. In the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, the Japanese Landscape (1996; in the middle) and the Gateway of the Imperial Messenger (1910; to the left) in front of William Kent’s Pagoda (1762; to the right) visually connect three vogues of Asian gardens and buildings in Europe. Photograph by the author.

This Chinese vogue was a consequence of expanded trade relations in the eighteenth century, but of course actual gardens were not direct imports; only the idea of the Chinese garden was taken up and given concrete form. The richest and most powerful rulers in Europe adorned their vast parks with Chinese-style gardens and chinois edifices, but lesser sovereigns, too, wanted to keep up with fashion, even when it was beyond their means. These gardens reached remote places and were soon ubiquitous in Europe. The “Chinese” effect of these gardens was often limited to chinois buildings with an exotic touch such as pagodas, bridges, or teahouses. The design and initially the plants of the gardens rarely had any prominent “Chinese” qualities to offer, though the importation of plants did become more significant later on. However, some of the garden designers emulated Chinese-garden design in the overall layout of their plans and thus achieved a more profound Chinese effect than those who just added chinois buildings to a picturesque garden. The difference between a Chinese effect through chinois buildings on the one hand and the same effect achieved through deeply embedded planning decisions certainly matters for contemporary connoisseurs of garden design as well as for present-day garden historians. Yet contemporary unknowing visitors probably did not see much difference between the two ways of bringing China into European gardens. For them, both turned Western garden scenes into a more or less perfect Chinese scene.

China went out of fashion at the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, some of the basic features of Western interpretations of Chinese-style gardens experienced a rebirth in the nineteenth century in Japonism. Some Western architects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries even deliberately established a relationship between the first Asian fashion and the new one. In Brussels the architect Alexandre Marcel used chinoiserie motifs in a Chinese pavilion that stands near the Japanese tower at Laeken, which were both built beginning in 1901.4 In truth, some of the recurring motifs that have been ascribed to Japanese gardens in the second Asian vogue have their origins much earlier and point to China instead. This enables useful comparisons between Chinese gardens of the eighteenth century and Japanese gardens of the nineteenth century.

Nature First and foremost there is a striking similarity in the use of the word “nature,” the employment of which as a descriptor of Chinese design reached its peak with the Jesuit Jean-Denis Attiret in the middle of the eighteenth century. The Jesuit mission to China had been set up in the sixteenth century, and because they had accommodated Chinese ways, the order had gained access to the inner imperial circles of Beijing to a degree no other Europeans had managed. Accommodation required a certain respect for local customs in order to strengthen mutual confidence, which would in turn ease the process of winning converts to Christianity; for example, Jesuits wore the clothing of the Chinese Confucian scholars even as they tried to convince the imperial bureaucracy of the merits of Christianity.5 Their methods were criticized severely by orders that were less willing to compromise, but accommodation afforded the Jesuits unique insights into Chinese culture. In a sense, the Jesuits were early ethnographers using participant observation and, by the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, had built up a quasi-monopoly on interpreting China to the West. In this setting, Attiret became the court painter for the emperor when he arrived in Beijing. He and other Jesuits regularly sent letters full of information back to Europe, which sometimes were published and circulated as authoritative sources on China by intellectuals. One such letter was written by Attiret in 1743 after he had been in China for a decade. Attiret reported his visit to the imperial gardens of Yuanming Yuan, the Old Summer Palace, which had deeply impressed him. Others, including some non-Jesuits, had also written about Chinese gardens before Attiret.6 Sir William Temple’s essay “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus,” written in 1685 and published in 1692, was the first European writing to discuss the merits of Chinese gardens in depth. The essay described them as irregular and informal, unlike European gardens.7 Chinesegarden enthusiasts like Anthony Ashley Cooper (third Earl of Shaftsbury), Joseph Addison, and the poet Alexander Pope had also stressed this point early in the eighteenth century.8 But unlike these others, Attiret could offer a firsthand account; his letter was based on his visit to such a garden and not mere hearsay.9 The letter was translated into English a few years later and became even more widely read in Europe. “They go from one of the Valleys to another, not by formal strait Walks, as in Europe; but by various Turnings and Windings, adorn’d on the Sides

with little Pavilions and charming Grottos,” he wrote.10 Attiret’s interpretation of Chinese-garden art and his understanding of nature blended well with a general development in English-garden design in the eighteenth century. Baroque gardeners loved symmetries and straight lines. English gardens introduced winding paths instead. The feet could not follow the eye any more in such parks, and Attiret had pointed out that the same principle ruled in China. In 1774, the French Duke d’Harcourt summarized the various garden cultures, declaring that while the French used geometrical planning, the English simply planted their houses in a meadow and the Chinese built horrific waterfalls in front of their windows: “voilà trois genres d’abus.”11 For Attiret, “nature” was the element missing in the garden designs he had left behind in Europe. Attiret frequently used the words “rustic,” “nature,” and “natural” to describe his impressions. But nature was not, in his eyes, completely opposed to art. The appeal to nature did not mean gardeners had to retreat and let nature do the work on her own. Real artists of gardening knew how to copy nature: “The Sides of the Canals, or lesser Streams, are not faced, (as they are with us,) with smooth Stone, and in a strait Line; but look rude and rustic, with different Pieces of Rock, some of which jut out, and others recede inwards; and are placed with so much Art, that you would take it to be the Work of Nature.”12 For Attiret, a “Chinese garden is a site where an excess of artificiality is used to create an illusion of nature.”13 Nevertheless, this implies that nature can be art and vice versa and that an artistic garden is one that copies nature meticulously. The conquest of Europe by Chinese-style gardens and chinois buildings in gardens emanated outward from England. This garden style was called “anglo-chinois” on the Continent. However, many gardens added a Chinese touch mainly through chinois buildings and not by including Attiret’s interpretation of nature as a conceptual base for their layout. William Chambers was the most popular Western architect to apply ideas from the Far East and add a chinois touch to gardens. He had been to China (although John Dixon Hunt has downgraded the fame derived from his travels as an “exaggerated claim to firsthand knowledge of China”),14 and his writings, with their examples of Chinese design, were used all over Europe as guidelines for attaining Chinese flair. They helped popularize chinois architecture in gardens in France, where the Trianon de Porcelaine had already been built in 1671. In Prussia, King Friedrich II’s Sanssouci, with both a Dragon House and a Chinese House, was influenced by Chambers’s sketches, while in Russia Catherine the Great’s Tsarskoe Selo featured a Chinese village of ten buildings.15 Even in remote places, gardens garnished with chinois edifices were built with Chambers’s writings at hand.16 Chinois edifices and garden structures such as bridges betrayed a certain Chinese influence, but their impact remained superficial. Whether Chinese gardens made a much deeper impression on English-garden architecture and thereby on the way in which continental gardens took up the anglo-chinois vogue is much more difficult to answer. Looking to Attiret and other informants on Asia, Irmtraud Schaarschmidt-Richter and others have argued that Chinese and even Japanese gardens were the main inspirations for the concept of the English garden in the eighteenth century.17 However, Schaarschmidt-Richter’s arguments are not convincing. Hunt has demonstrated that the idea of nature in English gardens was already being implemented when Chinese thought started becoming fashionable in England.18

Philosophy and Religion Another influence for Chinese-style gardens and chinois buildings in gardens in the eighteenth century was religion, though the connection between the two is not as obvious as that between gardens and nature. Houses, ruins, and other architectural features brought Greco-Roman religion, the Christian Middle Ages, and Chinese Confucianism into the gardens of the eighteenth century. The term “religion” needs some clarification within the context of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Leading intellectuals within Enlightenment circles tried to establish a new approach to religion. Voltaire, Denis Diderot, and their followers in France and Christian Wolff in Prussia used the image of China to support their ideas about a reasonable religion based on the natural capacities of mankind. Their main opponent in France was Catholicism. Voltaire, who—like most of his intellectual contemporaries—had received his higher education at a Jesuit school, used Jesuit reports from China to fight the Catholic Church. The most important symbol of the reasonable religion of the Chinese was Confucius— or, at least, so Voltaire had decided. In contrast Taoism and especially Buddhism were shunned by Voltaire and the others, not least because the Jesuits had drawn a very unfavorable picture of those two creeds.19 Chinois edifices in gardens all over Europe reflected in particular the Jesuits’ descriptions and the use Voltaire made of them. Confucius played a central role as grand sage of the East. The House of Confucius, built by Frederick, Prince of Wales, in Kew in 1749, was an expression of the Englishman’s enlightened attitude.20 The sage also features prominently in Potsdam’s Sanssouci, where his appearance could be linked to the self-representation of Friedrich II as an enlightened ruler. The erection of the Chinese House in Sanssouci was fostered not by mere curiosity on the part of the king but, as Gerd-Helge Vogel has argued, by a real intention to come to terms with Chinese philosophy (see Figure 2).21 There are numerous examples of such uses of Confucian allusions in garden architecture of the time. The fascination with Chinese religion and philosophy, expressed through garden edifices, resembles the later curiosity for Japanese gardens, which was often closely related to Buddhism. But there is an important difference in the appreciations of Chinese and Japanese religions through garden architecture. In the Chinese case, religion and nature connect very well through the notion of a natural religion, which allowed European intellectuals of the time to criticize as unnatural the rituals enforced by the Catholic Church. Chinese gardens reflect the harmonious connection between (man’s) nature and beliefs. The Catholic creeds are presented as irrational and unnatural while Confucius is the hero of rationalism and tolerance—Diderot’s Encyclopédie played on this in numerous entries, such as that on homophagy. In the naïve view of the Enlightenment, the rationalism of logic could be subsumed under the notion of nature. A certain mysticism that in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries formed an important part of the enjoyment of Oriental gardens was mostly absent from chinois concepts.

Figure 2. The Chinese House at Sanssouci in Potsdam is decorated with golden figures of Chinese court life. A mandarin figure sits on top of the roof. Photograph by the author.

Spatial Representation How did the gardens present China spatially? The gardens worked as a pleasant spatial translation of knowledge. It was no coincidence that during the last years of the ancien régime in France, a member of the committee for equipping the Louvre was also in charge of designing gardens for the king;22 museums and gardens were twins in the Age of Enlightenment. Those who could afford it would build gardens full of symbols and historical allusions; their entourages would stroll the grounds pleasantly recapitulating what they already knew and gaining new impressions. Gardens had fairylike qualities but at the same time taught visitors about the world. Science, pleasure, and art were not yet formally separated in these circles. A study of Louis Le Rouge, a famous engraver who introduced anglo-chinois gardens to France through his works, indicates how such a garden would ideally have presented history and foreign countries (see Figure 3). The plan dates from 1784 and was engraved for the garden designer Francesco Bettini but never actually built.

Figure 3. Le Rouge’s engraving shows an ideal eighteenth-century garden that encompasses the world in miniature. No. 18 denotes the chinois garden, and No. 19, the Isle of Japan, both to be found in the upper middle portion of the layout. Image courtesy of John Dixon Hunt.

In Le Rouge’s design, the driveway to the palace is flanked by symmetrical garden layouts. On the left-hand side an orangery and greenhouses can be found, while on the other side a court for jeu de paume (an old form of tennis) and a theater invite the inhabitants of the palace. The actual park behind the palace has a world of its own to offer. A lake with a ship crossing it and rustic garden scenery can be found in the lower part of the engraving. Farthest away from the palace are vineyards and a Dutch garden with canals that enclose the park. In the upper part of the engraving, an exotic realm is attached to the rear face of the orangery. A triangular Chinese garden leads to the Temple of the Moon. Chinois buildings form a Chinese court next to a pagoda. The English garden can be found beyond the Chinese one, while a desert garden fills the spaces before the enclosures on the right-hand side. An Elysian field guards the top of the Chinese garden. In addition to the numerous picturesque temples, statues, and graves, Le Rouge’s garden plan offers the whole world in miniature. With one step, visitors could wander from an English garden to China, featuring an “Isle de Japon,” or to the desert, had the garden ever been realized. The Chinese garden derives its effects from the curved roofs of the palace, the pagoda itself, and the picturesque bridges crossing the lake. Even though certain stereotypes are portrayed in the design, China occupies a place within this garden no worse and no better than that occupied by other nations. And finally there is an explanation of Chinese

customs regarding gardens engraved on the right-hand side of Le Rouge’s plan. Curiosity paired with pleasure, not scientific interest or evolutionist thinking, seems to have been the driving force behind the spatial arrangements. But knowledge is part of the pleasure, and here the start of the movement to order knowledge spatially according to the system introduced by the famous Encyclopédie of Diderot and his colleagues can be sensed. The ordering of different national, historical, and mythical elements is not yet in itself logical but comparisons become possible while wandering through the garden.23 In the eighteenth century, the quality of a garden was measured in the number of different sceneries offered, and a plan such as Le Rouge’s had prepared many different views; the visual element was more important than in earlier times.24 Le Rouge published his engravings as cahiers starting in the 1770s. These cahiers helped to promulgate this style in Europe and, with Chambers’s pattern books, to spread the idea of Chinese-style gardens. However, the overall impression of Chinese-style gardens in Le Rouge’s cahiers was not especially homogeneous.25

The End of the Chinese Fashion in European Gardens Even if China survived as an attraction in places such as Parc Monceau in Paris, chinoiserie went out of fashion at the end of the eighteenth century. The French Revolution has often been cited as one reason for this, because it stripped the nobility of the wealth needed to buy porcelain and furniture and to build gardens. But others argue that China had lost its novelty and was gradually replaced by India as the harbor of European hopes and dreams. Voltaire, for example, had switched his enthusiasm to India in the 1760s without altering the messages he connected with this Eastern country.26 The romantic movement in the complicated patchwork of sovereignties that later became Germany used India to settle its differences with the philosophy of the Enlightenment.27 This affected the notion that China had some special inclination for nature. For example, the German romantic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel praised the Indian language but placed Chinese on the lowest rank of languages because it was atomistic and had to artificially rebuild phrases that flowed organically in Indian.28 It was therefore not simply a matter of Orientalism that led to a new, much more negative judgment of Chinese love for nature, as Craig Clunas has suggested.29 China had been the favorite of the Enlightenment, an inspiration to French thinkers; as such, German romantic thinkers had to criticize it for strategic reasons. China in general became seen as an unnatural culture, a judgment that persisted for a long time and was reinforced repeatedly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But if China had gone out of fashion with the clientele that had commissioned gardens and with the intellectuals who had replaced China with India, anglo-chinois gardens were newly enjoyed by others. The idea of gardens for the public had increasingly gained popularity in eighteenthcentury Europe.30 Now after the French Revolution the anglo-chinois gardens became open to the public by nationalizing the aristocratic property, even though some gardens decayed due to lack of money for maintenance. Generally common people became more and more acquainted with China through various

types of gardens since the end of the eighteenth century. Public gardens, such as the Englische Garten in Munich, were laid out. It featured the Chinese Tower (resembling a pagoda) and a Chinese-style restaurant. Pleasure gardens, such as Cremorne Gardens in Chelsea, England, sometimes had Chinese pagodas or other buildings on display.31 In North America, Chinese garments were made in gardens throughout the nineteenth century. Peter Browne, an attorney, built a Chinese pagoda, pavilion, and garden at Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, in 1827–28.32 Two pagodas served as observation platforms for Niagara Falls. The first was built on the American side in 1845 and the second on the Canadian side in 1847.33 And in 1879 a threestory pagoda was erected on a hill in the center of the new Schlitz Park in Milwaukee, a huge and very popular pleasure ground.34 China also survived in Western gardens through plans resembling those of Le Rouge, for example, in the sketchbook of Gabriel Thouin published in 1828.35 But the general vogue in which Chinese-style gardens were embedded had passed. Though the public gardens and pleasure grounds for the masses were precursors of the world’s fairs that took off in the second half of the nineteenth century, they lacked some knowledge-ordering qualities that would be developed later. China was exotic and helped to attract visitors, which was important because some of the gardens aimed to earn money. At least in this regard they resembled the later world’s fairs.

China and Japan: Modernity and Gardens Chinese gardens prestructured a field that Japanese gardens would start to occupy. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, Western garden enthusiasts, Orientalists, and the general public visiting such gardens started to view Chinese gardens as unnatural. The most important symbol of this was the Chinese dwarf tree, which at the end of the century was likened to the custom of foot binding.36 Chinese gardens were deemed not only unnatural but also monstrous distortions of nature, implemented by a sick culture. The Orientalist discourse on China reflected the general problems of the empire facing Western colonial expansion. The more the Western powers encroached upon China, the more its culture was criticized.37 Chinese plants now had to be saved from the unnatural Chinese treatment of them, a responsibility taken up by plant hunters such as the English botanist Reginald Farrer.38 In the nineteenth century, Western comparisons of China and Japan often meant praise for the latter at the cost of the former. While China was condemned as being conservative and stuck in the past, Japan was frequently lauded as being progressive.39 In terms of Chinese and Japanese gardens, Clunas argues that the Exposition Universelle de 1878 in Paris encouraged such comparisons. World’s fairs in general helped present and reinforce comparisons of the two cultures, and Japan fared much better on these occasions, as will be shown later.40 But the change in Western views on Chinese gardens was not due to aesthetic reasons or the qualities inherent in Chinese- and Japanese-garden concepts. While Chinese dwarf trees were rejected, Japanese ones became valued collectors’ objects. The chabo-hibas, as the Japanese dwarf

trees were called, seemed to have lost popularity in Japan, but, around 1900, many specimens were sold at Western auctions.41 However, the example of the bonsai also reveals that this shift in interest in Asian gardens and horticulture from China to Japan was not as straightforward as Clunas suggests. Up to the turn of the nineteenth century, Japanese bonsai were frequently criticized by travelers to Japan and garden enthusiasts in the West in a fashion similar to the criticism aimed at their Chinese equivalents.42 In 1876, the Orientalist William Elliot Griffis wrote about the bonsai he saw at a temple at the Asakusa district in Tokyo: “Dwarfing, unnatural local enlargement, variegation of leaf and petal, the encouragement of freaks of nature by careful artificial selection—these are the specialities of the natives of Nippon.”43 Only by the 1890s had the Japanese bonsai become a much-desired item in the West.44 Japanese gardens also had drawn some criticism comparable to that of their Chinese counterparts in the early stages, though they were generally applauded; by the 1890s they were clearly championed for their natural and aesthetic qualities, as Chapter 2 will show. The differences between Western responses to Chinese and Japanese gardens allow one to scrutinize the motives for introducing Oriental gardens to the West. One reason Japanese gardens were often favored over Chinese gardens beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century might be that the Japanese government actively promoted them. China’s gardens had entered Europe not because the Chinese had wanted to introduce them but because some Europeans—including the Jesuits—had been attracted by Chinese gardens and at the same time had an interest in advertising positive aspects of China. In the case of Japanese gardens, experts from the West were also crucial in bringing the notion of these spatial arrangements to Europe, though they were not the sole interpreters of them. The Japanese government used Japanese gardens for its own purposes. It was able to do so because Japan had escaped colonization by Western powers and by the turn of the twentieth century had itself joined the ranks of imperialist powers. Meanwhile, China had sunk into semicolonial dependency and its gardens went out of fashion. Only in recent decades have Chinese gardens begun to regain their former popularity. The first Chinese gardens in the United States were constructed in the 1980s.45 Chinese diaspora groups played an important role in building such gardens initially, but in recent years the Chinese government has also begun to promote Chinese gardens as actively in the West as the Japanese government had been doing for their gardens for more than 150 years.

Chapter 2

Discourses of Spaces

Garden Stroll II: Clingendael At the center of the Clingendael estate in The Hague lies a beautiful Japanese garden (see Figure 4). Although the estate’s vast park is open to the public throughout the year, the Japanese garden opens its gates for just six weeks from April to June. The city of The Hague decided to preserve the garden, one of the oldest in Europe, by excluding the public most of the year. The moss that covers much of the ground and adorns the lanterns, in particular, benefits from the lack of foot traffic. A large informational board resembling those found at Japanese shrines greets the visitor at the entrance gate and outlines several rules: for example, children are not to enter the garden unaccompanied by adults, and joggers are not permitted entry at all. In fact the garden has two entrance gates: a modern exterior gate in the Japanese style and an old interior gate original to the garden. A small wooden hut resembling a Japanese police station guards the second, interior gate (see Figure 5). Staff monitor the garden to ensure that it is kept safe. When entering through the first gate, visitors can take an informational leaflet that relates the history of the garden. Baroness Marguerite Mary van Brienen, the owner of Clingendael in the first decades of the twentieth century, is credited with having created her own interpretation of a Japanese garden. After returning from her travels to Japan in 1911, she decided to plan the garden, which stretches behind the second gate. Her interpretation is very romantic and has strong Buddhist overtones. One strolls by a water basin and a statue of Buddha placed under a small roof. There is also a jizō, a Buddhist statue revering a bodhisattva; jizō are often found on roadsides in Japan because the deity protects travelers. After passing a pond containing an island and a red drum bridge, visitors come upon a thatched pavilion. Because the garden is open for such a limited time, the atmosphere is somehow special. Visitors seem to be even more mindful of their steps. Anxious not to destroy the moss, they stroll along broad paths that lead around the pond to the pavilion. Only rarely is the garden open beyond the six-week period, however. In 2008 the Japanese Embassy and the Netherlands Ikebana Society worked together to organize an ikebana show at Clingendael’s Japanese garden, which was open for an additional two days in October for the occasion. But special events rarely occur. The garden was placed on the list of national historic monuments of the Netherlands in 2001, emphasizing once more its cultural importance but also secluding it even more from the public.

Figure 4. View over the Japanese garden of Clingendael from near the old entrance gate. The teahouse in the background is the focus of the garden. An old lantern on the left can be seen behind a bush. The moss covering the stones is typical for Clingendael. Photograph by the author.

The actual history of Clingendael’s Japanese garden is a bit more complex than the version provided by the informational board. Wybe Kuitert, one of the most esteemed experts on Japanese gardens in the West, has dug deeper.1 Baroness van Brienen had strong connections to England; Kuitert writes that she spoke better English than Dutch.2 Among her friends were the Du Cane sisters: Florence, a writer of garden books, and Ella, who painted watercolors of landscapes that served as illustrations for these books. Together they had published The Flowers and Gardens of Japan in 1908, which was relatively popular at the time. The Du Cane sisters admit in the book’s foreword that they had read Josiah Conder’s book Landscape Gardening in Japan thoroughly.3 Indeed, when they provide details about stones in Japanese gardens they use Conder’s taxonomy, and in some places they cite him extensively.

Figure 5. A guard house overlooks the new entrance to Clingendael’s Japanese garden as well as a fortified fence that partly conceals the small house in this picture. Photograph by the author.

Kuitert claims that the Du Canes’ book strongly influenced the layout of Clingendael’s Japanese garden, but this is debatable.4 Though the garden was built in 1915, four years after the baroness had traveled to Japan, she probably needed more suggestions for a concrete layout. The plans were not made by the baroness herself but most likely by Theodoor Johan Dinn. Dinn was a gardener who had worked in England before being employed by the baroness. Kuitert concludes mainly from an article that Dinn wrote in 1928 that he was actually the architect of the Japanese garden in Clingendael.5 The history of the garden after the baroness died in 1939 to the present state of its most diligent preservation was not smooth. When the city took over the estate after the last relatives of the baroness had left it in 1968, the Japanese garden was “modernized” using rather cheap material. In the decades following World War II, connecting Japanese gardens to Zen was quite common, and at Clingendael more stones were added to give the garden a touch of Zen, while flowers were removed to eliminate the atmosphere of japonaiserie the place had acquired.6 Only in the last few years has the value of the garden as a place reminiscent of the Japanese vogue of the early twentieth century been once again realized and its worth rediscovered.

WHEN JAPANESE GARDENS started to arrive in the West, they were almost immediately reviewed in newspapers and books that introduced the underlying principles of Japanese gardening. This was important because many in the West had no idea what the gardens’ meanings were and how they could be interpreted and understood. Within the context of world’s fairs—where Japanese gardens were first experienced by a broader public—they inspired interest but also bemusement. Texts helped spread information and thereby advice on how to best appreciate the gardens. The first books to treat Japanese gardens intensively were published in the West a decade after the first gardens had been built there. But the influence of these books cannot be underestimated. Both they and their reviews in newspapers were instrumental in spreading knowledge. The corpus of material is surprisingly extensive, and cross-references between the texts are numerous. A few books form the core, however, and were the most important for informing the public about Japanese gardens, and hence they also form the heart of my analysis.

Introducing the Japanese Garden The Tokugawa family shogunate had ruled Japan from 1600 to 1868 and had tried to tightly control contact with foreign countries. The Dutch were the only Westerners allowed to trade with Japan until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the United States forced Japan to open its ports and enter into treaties that gave the advantage in trade to America. The other Western powers quickly concluded similar treaties with Japan, and shogunate power began to crumble as a result of its inability to drive out Western forces. In 1868, in the so-called Meiji Restoration, the shogun had to step down and return the worldly power to the Japanese emperor, the tennō, who had resided in Kyoto without much influence. The new government, feeling a strong need to adapt to Western standards, to bring Western knowledge to Japan, and to catch up with the West, called foreign advisors into the country; the Meiji government hoped not only to avoid further imperialist infringements but also to shed the unfavorable conditions of the first “unequal treaties.”7 Americans and Europeans worked as technical advisors in newly set-up factories or as professors in new institutions such as the Tokyo Imperial University. It was in this context, some two decades after the Meiji Restoration, that two important books on Japanese gardens were published: Edward Morse’s Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings in 1885 and Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan in 1893. Conder and Morse had worked as foreign advisors in Japan and thus had the opportunity to become well acquainted with Japanese gardens. In addition, a very influential article on Japanese gardens was published in 1892 by Lafcadio Hearn, a journalist who had moved to Japan in 1890 on his own account and lived there until he died in 1904.8 These three texts constituted the first widely read accounts of Japanese gardens. Additional texts added to the body of knowledge but were not nearly as important as the works of Morse, Conder, and Hearn.9 Only after World War II did these three works gradually fall out of fashion when more modern accounts replaced them. But even today Morse’s, Conder’s, and Hearn’s works remain in print and all three are

quoted from time to time.10 To be sure, there had been prior information on Japanese gardens available in the West. Details about Japanese gardens had been disseminated in Europe by Jesuit missionaries as early as the sixteenth century,11 and additional information was gathered by famous early researchers of Japan, many of whom had come to Japan with the Dutch to the trade outpost in Nagasaki. For example, Philipp Franz von Siebold served as a resident physician for the Dutch from 1823 to 1830 but was also broadly interested in Japanese living conditions, fauna, and flora. Joining the Dutch honorary visits to the shogun, von Siebold had the chance to travel and explore the country. In his writings on Japan from 1832 he remarked, for example, that the Japanese tried to integrate the gardens for their houses with the surrounding landscape.12 But the modern discourse mostly ignored these sources and started to form its own body of knowledge from the 1860s onward. Newspaper articles addressed the new phenomenon of Japanese gardens soon after the Meiji Restoration and became more detailed once the first gardens had been on display at world’s fairs. The official reports of the Japanese government accompanying their displays included some information on the history of gardening in Japan as well. A German foreign advisor, Gottfried Wagener, had also written about Japanese gardens in the 1870s,13 but his text was intended to offer expertise to the Japanese on what kinds of displays would draw the most interest at world’s fairs. Morse, Conder, and Hearn had different backgrounds and careers. All three belonged to a small community of Western expatriates in Japan in the decades before the turn of the century. Morse, born in New England, went to Japan in 1877 to research coastal brachiopods. He was offered a position at Tokyo Imperial University as a professor of zoology. Sensing that old Japan was vanishing because of rapid modernization, Morse decided to record what was about to be lost.14 He started to write anthropological books on Japan. His theory that the early Japanese were cannibalistic stirred heavy discussions,15 while his book on Japanese houses was less controversial but also found a wide readership. It contained about thirty pages on gardens and was full of praise for them. Much more than in other parts of his book, Morse sought a cultural explanation for the specific phenomenon of the Japanese garden. He had concluded that the Japanese built light, wooden houses because they were poor and because this type of housing was best suited for the climate and could withstand frequent earthquakes.16 However, the Japanese “love of flowers,” which Morse called a “national trade,” explained their much more extravagant gardens.17 Morse used plates from a source on gardens written during the Edo era to illustrate his ideas. Morse’s book was a success. But because his main focus was not gardens but houses and their surroundings, it influenced the Western discourse on Japanese gardens only temporarily. Conder followed in Morse’s footsteps in some respects. Conder was an English architect who had been asked by the Japanese government to teach architecture at Tokyo Imperial University in 1877. After 1888 he set up his own private architecture firm and remained in Japan for the rest of his life. He is most famous for transforming Tokyo’s urban outlook. The Tokyo Imperial Museum is considered his most outstanding achievement.18 Conder also trained many Japanese architects who helped bring Western architecture to the center of Tokyo and other parts of Japan.

Conder’s book on Japanese gardens is generally not seen as his most important achievement. Nevertheless, it was an indispensable source for the study of the subject in the West for a long time. The book was based on “The Art of Landscape Gardening in Japan,” an article he had written in 1886 for the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, a year after Morse published his book.19 It also followed a well-received book Conder published on ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement.20 Conder elaborated and refined the ideas of the article in his book. Conder also relied heavily on historical treatises on gardens from the Edo period. He drew heavily on some of the sources that Morse had used, including the Tsukiyama teizōden, a work that had appeared in 1735 in three volumes, and the Tsukiyama teizōden kōhen, the supplemental volume to the 1735 edition, which was compiled by Akisato Ritō in 1828. For interpreting the supplemental volume, Conder relied on Honda Kinkichirō’s book on gardening, Zukai teizōhō, published in 1890.21 Honda had redrawn many of the plates from the Tsukiyama teizōden kōhen for his publication.22 Not only did Conder adapt these illustrations from it23 but he seems to have been generally inspired by his contact with Honda (a story that will unfold more fully in the next chapter). Conder’s book consisted of three parts. In the first he retold the history of Japanese gardens; the second part, the bulk of the book, described all the elements that formed them; in the third part, Conder gave some examples of Japanese-garden designs based on the Tsukiyama teizōden and its supplement. The history was concise and set up a principal binary between the West and Japan. Conder expected Western readers to find Japanese gardens grotesque, but he defended the Japanese: “Though the people of this country, both high and low, are unrivaled in their genuine love of nature, their manner of observation and enjoyment is one peculiar to themselves. It is a taste educated through the medium of their traditional customs, arts and cults.”24 Conder also pointed out that Japanese gardens owed much to their Chinese counterparts but had developed their own independent style. These two observations were rather common at the time and mirrored Japanese self-assessment as given in reports from world’s fairs.25 However, the second and third parts of the book changed the notion of Japanese gardens, both theoretically and practically. By describing in detail the elements of a Japanese garden, such as stones, lanterns, pagodas, enclosures, and bridges, Conder helped make the gardens fully intelligible for Westerners. The elements were organized in a Linnean way: Conder grouped elements into orders, which were further divided into families, genera, and species. This is most obvious in Conder’s discussion of trees. He contrasted Japanese classification with the correct biological one: “The numerous fanciful names given by the gardeners of the country to different varieties of certain genera have in many cases not yet received exact botanical classification; and though the vernacular terms alone can convey little or no meaning to the uninitiated, to omit all mention of them would be misleading and fail to give a correct idea of their rich diversity.”26 Conder classified not only plants but also all of the elements of Japanese gardens. Morse had also grouped elements, but Conder went much further. His taxonomic analysis of the Japanese garden was elaborate. The order of lanterns, for example, was divided into two

families (see Figure 6).27 The first of these families was again subdivided into two genera with about twenty species; the second family consisted of five species. The order of stones consisted of a total of eighty species grouped in various genera and families.28 All of these species of stones were briefly described individually. Conder even found about twenty species of garden ponds.29 He had already categorized the elements of Japanese gardens in his 1886 article, where, for example, he described all the stones over nine pages.30 However, the grouping was not yet as refined as it would be seven years later. In the third part of the book, the elements of Japanese gardens that had been atomized by the analysis of the second part were once again contextualized. Using numerous plates, Conder explained how the separate components made up harmonious gardens. He remained faithful to the Linnean approach used throughout the book and introduced his readers to a classification not just of garden elements but of Japanese gardens themselves. Conder distinguished mainly between four types: hill gardens (tsukiyama-niwa), flat gardens (hira-niwa), tea gardens (chaniwa), and passage gardens (roji-niwa).31 Gardens that did not fit into one of those categories were treated as “fancy-gardens.”32 Once again Honda was the main inspiration. Honda had set up this scheme of classification in his book in 1890 though he only wrote chapters about the hill, flat, and tea gardens and included information about passage gardens within the tea gardens chapter. Honda himself relied on classifications that had been set up during the Edo period. For example, the Tsukiyama teizōden kōhen had used this scheme.33 However, it was Conder who popularized this scheme in the West.34 A “hill garden,” often also described as a “hill and pond garden,” was commonly used afterward to classify Japanese gardens and is still in use though some terms have been changed by other schemes that will be introduced later. Overall Conder’s book very much resembles a treatise of taxonomic biology, which likely helped make it so popular. The book assembled what was to be known about Japanese gardens in a way easily comprehended by Western readers of the second half of the nineteenth century. Michel Foucault has pointed out how the basic idea of Linnaeus’s taxonomy had reoriented canons of knowledge in the West.35 Presenting Japanese gardens in this taxonomic way helped connect this knowledge to the wisdom of biology.

Figure 6. A plate from Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan shows his classificatory approach. The garden lanterns and their Japanese names are further discussed and classified in his text. Josiah Conder, Landscape Gardening in Japan (Tokyo: Hakubunsha, 1893).

Lafcadio Hearn’s article on Japanese gardens was the antithesis to Conder’s taxonomy.36 In many respects, Hearn was a romantic when it came to Japan. He married a Japanese woman and worked as a teacher in the province. In his article he described the garden in his backyard and formulated more general notions about Japanese gardens. Hearn had worked as a journalist before going to Japan and had published widely read novels. It was therefore not surprising that his text on Japanese gardens fell more into the category of a brilliant essay, not a scientific treatise. Instead of enumerating all the elements of a Japanese garden, Hearn tried to grasp its essence and to convey it in his text. In doing so, Hearn exoticized the Japanese garden and insisted that foreigners would not be able to understand it easily, if at all. An example of this is his comment on stones and their placement in Japanese gardens: Another fact of prime importance to remember is that, in order to comprehend the beauty of a Japanese garden, it is necessary to understand—or at least to learn to understand—the beauty of stones. Not of stones quarried by the hand of man, but of stones shaped by nature only. Until you can feel, and keenly feel, that stones have character, that stones have tones

and values, the whole artistic meaning of a Japanese garden cannot be revealed to you. In the foreigner, however aesthetic he may be, this feeling needs to be cultivated by study. It is inborn in the Japanese; the soul of the race comprehends Nature infinitely better than we do, at least in her visible forms.37 This tendency to mystify Japan runs through the whole essay and in fact through most of Hearn’s writings on Japan. True, Hearn also provides some historical facts, but mostly he muses about the garden in his backyard, the birds singing there, and various other marvels of Japanese nature. For Hearn, this scenery epitomized the values of traditional Japanese culture, a culture that was endangered by rapid modernization. With every new factory built and every new railway line opened, he believed, Japan came closer to losing its soul to the cold rationality of the modern Western world. On this point Hearn basically agreed with Morse, who had started his writings on the culture of Japan with a similar agenda. Hearn observed the whole process of Japan’s move from the periphery and hence could estimate how long it would take to transform the province after the model of its centers such as Tokyo and Osaka. That “old Japan” was on the verge of disappearing was an attitude shared by many Westerners upon encountering the land in the late nineteenth century. Morse, Conder, and Hearn together defined the basic patterns of how to interpret and understand Japanese gardens in this period. If the rationalistic, taxonomic approach of Morse and even more Conder made Japanese gardens fully intelligible for foreigners, they stood in stark contrast to the romantic Hearn, whose view did not allow foreigners to pride themselves so easily as true connoisseurs.

Putting Discourses into Practice While the texts of Morse, Conder, and Hearn were all influential, it was Conder’s work above all that was used as a manual for building Japanese gardens in the West. Clingendael is an example of his influence, but there are many more gardens in Europe and North America that can be traced to him. Tachibana Setsu and colleagues have found evidence of Conder’s influence in twelve gardens in England alone between 1900 and 1936.38 Fukuhara Masao has discovered this is the case for Tatton Park, an estate with a garden near Manchester.39 Their conclusions suggest that some estate owners simply loaned their copies of Conder to Japanese gardeners, who designed gardens with the book as a guide.40 A very impressive example for Conder’s far-reaching influence is the Japanese garden at Düsseldorf’s Internationale Kunst- und Große Gartenbau-Ausstellung (International Art and Great Garden Fair) of 1904. The fair in fact featured two Japanese gardens: one was painted on a canvas and part of a panorama that showed the progress of garden history in the world; the other garden had been planned by a German landscape architect and was modeled after a photograph in Conder’s book of Fukiage Garden in Tokyo (see Figure 7).41 These gardens perhaps attracted special attention because the Russo-Japanese War had only recently begun. The guidebook for the fair commented: “Who would not be interested in this part of the fair

since the country of the Mikado is the focus of global interest right at the moment?”42 Conder impressed not just English estate owners and German landscape architects: even a Japanese professor used Conder’s book to create a garden.43 Between 1908 and 1925 Suzuki Jijō, a professor of design in Nagoya, was employed to improve the Japanese garden of Cowden Castle in central Scotland. He made ample use of Conder’s comments on bridges. Conder himself had been contacted by the castle’s owner, Isabella Christie, before Suzuki was hired and left his imprint on the garden’s design. Florence Du Cane and her sister, who had contributed to the layout of Clingendael, were close friends of Christie and also helped her to plan the garden at Cowden Castle.44 But Conder’s influence waned in the 1930s for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Japanese gardens began to lose their popularity.45 In the second vogue of Japanese gardens in the West after World War II, Conder’s book would no longer play the role it had before, because a type of garden that he had treated only superficially would became fashionable.

Figure 7. Two Japanese women stand in front of the teahouse in the Japanese garden of the Internationale Kunst- und Große Garten-Ausstellung in Düsseldorf (1904). The garden on the right-hand side was built after a photograph in Conder’s book.

Gardens, Nature, and the Japanese Because many of the authors writing about Japanese gardens contributed to the discourse on Japan more generally, knowledge of Japanese gardens was by no means isolated but well

integrated into a broader stream of knowledge formation on Japan. This is especially true for Morse and Hearn, who were prominent specialists on Japan in many respects. Morse regularly lectured throughout New England on Japanese topics.46 As a journalist, Hearn was also seen as one of the leading experts on Japan. Books like Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan or Kokoro secured his fame in this respect.47 Of course, as a famous architect Conder was also well known, but he did not publish as extensively on different subjects as did Hearn and Morse. Nevertheless, articles by Conder did appear, for example, in the (London) Times and helped form a picture of Japan.48 The Western discourse on Japan intensified in the last decades of the nineteenth century and established a range of facts about the country as common knowledge. While many texts dealt with Japan, a few key works stood out and acted as the main referents for most other texts. These key works were written not by Western authors only; the Japanese also added to the canon of knowledge. Many of the key topics of this discourse on Japan were further elaborated up to the 1930s, and nature was one of them. The special relation of the Japanese to nature was described, commented on, analyzed, and accepted in countless texts in the West from shortly after the Meiji Restoration onward. For example, on June 8, 1874, the following appeared in the New York Times under the headline “Japanese Love of Nature”: “A correspondent of the Cleveland Herald, in a letter from Yeddo, Japan, says: ‘The Japanese are innately a beauty-loving people. You may not think it, certainly you will not think it, if you have confined your attention to the study of their strivings after high art as set forth on their teatables, &c. But they do love the beautiful in nature, at least.’ ” Popular books on Japan took up this point and used it to set up a binary between the West and Japan. A prolific travel writer, Clive Holland, wrote in his Old and New Japan, “The spirit of the Japanese race permits them to comprehend Nature infinitely more subtly than do most Europeans.”49 The impact of this argument only deepened when the Japanese used it themselves. For example, an official Japanese guide to the country’s display at the world’s fair in Paris in 1878 had claimed that “the Japanese seem to have an innate taste” for the beauties of nature.50 Underlying the idea of a special relationship between the Japanese and nature was the notion that the West did not possess anything similar or had lost it at some point. The special understanding of nature that had been attributed to the Chinese in the eighteenth century was now transferred to Japan as Conder, Hearn, and the Du Canes took up the general point and applied it to the garden.51 This dichotomy between East and West put the Japanese in a very favorable light. They were described as being beyond the modern schism between man and nature that had riddled the West at least since the time Descartes had meditated in front of his chimney and split the human into body and mind. But the binary was also very risky for Japan’s image. Although many in the West lamented the alienation of man and nature, it was usually primitive people who were thought of as having a special relationship to nature in the social Darwinist discourses of the times. Naturvolk, the German word for “primitive people,” illustrates this point very well. Julia A. Thomas argues that political rhetoric in the Meiji era around 1890 stopped referring to nature as a justification to combat just this sort of negative thinking about the

Japanese.52 The Meiji government and thus regional governments also tried to impose various rules banning nudity and interaction between men and women in public, which were considered “primitive” behavior.53 Instead they preferred imposing more “civilized” and Victorian forms of relations between the sexes and public comportment. Thus public baths were separated by gender, and workers who had normally worn only loincloths were forced to cover up.54 Nevertheless, the ascription of a special relation between Japanese and nature lived on outside the arena of official Meiji politics. Writers in the West took up the idea of this special relation. An article published in the Boston Globe on March 25, 1909, links Japanese nature and art in a typical manner: “The wonderful combination of nature and art is so realistic that one could easily imagine himself in the Mikado’s land.” The Japanese “innate taste” was a sensitive sensorium for the subtleties of nature Westerners were not able to understand. This sense was extended to art in general. Basil Hall Chamberlain, a foreign advisor and professor at Tokyo Imperial University, was one of the leading propagators of knowledge on Japan through his dictionary titled Things Japanese. He enumerated three positive traits of the Japanese as described in typical accounts by Westerners who had lived for some time in Japan: “cleanliness, kindliness, and a refined artistic taste.”55 Of course there were voices of dissent. Chamberlain himself often presented a contrasting view of what constituted Japan. Not all writers agreed that the Japanese had “refined artistic taste” expressed through a special appreciation of nature. Japanese gardens were also seen as a fad or even as fake. In an article published on November 14, 1920, in the Boston Globe, a Boston couple who had visited Japan proclaimed on their return that “the impression that Japan is a perpetual flower garden of cherry blossoms and iris was an idea created by the artistry and propaganda of the clever little yellow men.” Nevertheless, the assumption of a special Japanese taste especially for nature was dominant in the first half of the twentieth century. The discourse on Japan was linked to the Western view of the East in general and in a wider sense to Western views on non-Westerners, be they Japanese, Chinese, Thai, or Africans. Basic patterns of knowledge production were equivalent, even as concrete ascriptions differed. What was conceded to the Japanese was not necessarily deemed true for Africans. Quite to the contrary, the social Darwinist rationale underlying many of the judgments ranked the Japanese as more “advanced” than those in most non-Western countries. But this in no way granted them equal status with the West. Countries were measured against the West using the criteria of modernization and development. At one end of the scale stood the primitive people, such as the Aborigines of Australia or the Ainu of Japan, who were deemed to live like the Europeans had done during the Stone Age. Temporal distance could be translated into spatial distance.56 More peripheral regions were also less developed, such as the Balkans, which was often seen as Europe’s Orient.57 Japan fared relatively well compared to other Asian countries. Its attempts to modernize were generally viewed positively by the West. The country’s reputation improved after defeating China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) and the czarist empire in the RussoJapanese War (1904–5). These victories gave the Japanese a voice in the West. Intellectuals like Okakura Kakuzō, an art historian and one of the top intellectuals around the turn of the

century also known by his pen name Okakura Tenshin, published books on Japan that were well received by Western readers. The Japanese government also published thick volumes on Japan that gained some authority because of the prominence of the authors and the government’s backing.58 But these publications often replicated Orientalist arguments on Japan and its special aesthetic understanding of nature. They were linked closely to the Western discourses, though they were also rooted in Japanese discourses on Japaneseness labeled kokugaku (teachings of the nation) that had sprung up in the Tokugawa era.59 The proponents of kokugaku, most of all Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801), had championed a pure Japan free from all foreign influences. During the shogunate rule this meant most of all Chinese teachings. Motoori and the other kokugaku scholars held the view that, among other things, Japan had a much more refined sense of aesthetics and nature than China. Like Okakura, other leading Japanese intellectuals around 1900 reassembled the argument of the kokugaku teachings and directed it against the West instead of China, which was no longer seen as a cultural threat, especially after its defeat in 1895. But if, within Japan, the old kokugaku argument on nature and aesthetics was marshaled against the West, at the same time it was very helpful in polishing the Japanese image in the West. The inner Japanese discourse on national qualities that took off especially in the late nineteenth century also focused from the very beginning on a special aesthetic relation to nature. Okakura himself did not champion the Japanese love of nature expressly in his most important writings for Western readers. Instead he stressed aesthetic arguments when introducing tea and the rituals surrounding it or Asian arts in general. However, the point of a special Japanese love of nature had taken deep root in Japanese discourses on Japaneseness.60 Authors like Endō Ryūkichi often argued that the magnificent nature of the Japanese archipelago created a deep love for nature, unmatched by Westerners, in the Japanese people.61 These points were also translated into Western languages and further fed the already well-established discourses. On March 10, 1918, Ienaga Toyokichi published a long article in the New York Times titled “The Spirit of Japan” that set out to explain the Orientals to America. In this piece he argued that the spirit was the perfect antithesis of the degradation of the mind taking place in Europe. Ienaga argued that the spirit of Japan had both an ethical and an aesthetic side: “There are, however, two essential features in it—one ethical, the other esthetical. The esthetical feature is seen in the Japanese love of nature, which has produced ‘Miyabi-Gokoro,’ or the refined mind.” Ienaga had earned his doctoral degree at Johns Hopkins University in 1890 and after 1900 was affiliated with the University of Chicago. But he was also working for the Japanese government.62 His assignment was to strengthen the image of Japan in the West, a task he fulfilled marvelously with articles such as the one published in the New York Times. He was just one voice among others championing a Japanese love for nature, although his opinion garnered more weight than some of the others through his contact with the government and his position in America. But his experience shows how the idea of an aesthetic sense for nature was strategically used to further Japan’s cause in the West. Both Japanese and Western authors used this argument largely in unison.

One Hundred Kyoto Gardens The idea of a special Japanese relation to nature was also part of a new influential wave of the discourse on Japanese gardens. In 1935 another important chapter of theorizing Japanese gardens began when the American Loraine Kuck, who lived in Kyoto as an expat between 1932 and 1935, published her One Hundred Kyoto Gardens around the same time that other books by Japanese authors on the gardens were published in English and German.63 The occasion for this burst of new books on Japanese gardens was the visit of the Garden Club of America to Japan. Ninety garden lovers had gathered to examine the Japanese gardens they no doubt had heard much about.64 Their visit was the talk of the town in Japan. The media followed the steps of these Garden Club members throughout the country and noted exactly where their itinerary was to take them. One of the leading national papers, Asahi Shinbun, reported on January 17, 1935, on the “rich guests from the country of the dollar” who would visit Tokyo, Nikkō, Nagoya, Kyoto, Nara, Miyajima near Hiroshima, and Takamatsu among other destinations (see Figure 8). Articles swiftly followed about their visit to the Meiji Shrine and Yokohama. Because the club members were from the American upper class—a trip to Japan was a costly undertaking—some social glamour surrounded the visit. Asahi’s reference to the dollar clearly shows this.

Figure 8. Members of the Garden Club of America crossing a bridge in a Kyoto garden. This photograph was printed in the Asahi newspaper. Courtesy of Asahi Shinbun.

In addition to the classic tourist spots, the club members also visited places that were

famous but a little off the beaten track, including the flamboyant Nikkō Tōshōgū, the shrine commemorating the first Tokugawa shogun Ieyasu and the more somber Buddhist temple gardens of Kyoto. In no way was the Garden Club limited to what would today be deemed the canonical gardens of Japan or to those Kuck would present as such in her book. The Nikkō Tōshōgū, for one, had been a favorite tourist destination in the early twentieth century.65 This even prompted a Japanese immigrant in New Jersey to open a theme park prominently featuring a model of the Tōshōgū.66 Because of the foreign interest, it also had some positive standing in Japan, but since the 1920s, modernists had blamed the Tōshōgū for being completely overladen with ornaments. Its reputation was already in decline by 1935.67 Kuck’s book was originally written as a series of articles for the Japanese Advertiser, a newspaper for the English-speaking population in Japan on the occasion of the Garden Club’s visit. It is significant because Kuck popularized a new argument about Japanese gardens that eventually became a standard interpretation. For Kuck the uncluttered, somber stone gardens were the most appealing part of Japanese-garden culture, even though the Garden Club’s interest might have been much more liberal and widespread. As Yamada Shōji and Kuitert have shown, Kuck’s interpretation of Japanese gardens as Zen gardens was novel for Western readers.68 There had been discussion of the influence of Zen on Japanese gardens before Kuck’s book was published.69 For example, Harada Jirō had written about the influence of Zen on Kyoto’s gardens in 1910.70 But in his book The Gardens of Japan (1928), which was widely read in Europe, Harada only alluded to Zen in general, writing, for example, about “eminent Zen priests” who designed “gardens to suit their own teachings.”71 Harada categorized the Ryōanji simply as a stone garden and added that this garden was inspired by a story of a mother tiger who carried her cubs across a river. This classic legend of Chinese origin had been associated with the Ryōanji for centuries, but it bore no connection to Zen in any way as Yamada has pointed out.72 Harada reiterated common knowledge on the Ryōanji. Other publications from around 1935 did not include much more on Zen either. However, various authors had argued since the 1890s that Zen somehow was integral to Japanese art. Okakura Kakuzō’s The Book of Tea mentioned Zen as one important factor among others.73 The main champion of Zen Buddhism in the West in the 1920s and 1930s was the philosopher Suzuki Daisetsu, whose works were often translated into English. His Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture, which appeared in 1938, claimed a sweeping influence of Zen on Japanese culture, as did many articles and lectures he had given before publishing his masterpiece.74 But Suzuki mentioned gardens only in passing, even three years after Kuck’s book appeared.75 Yet, as Kuck’s neighbor in Kyoto, Suzuki certainly could have influenced her interpretation of the Ryōanji as a Zen garden.76 Another of Kuck’s neighbors was even more important in establishing this connection. In 1934 Shigemori Mirei had started to extensively document Japanese gardens for his Nihon teienshi zukan (Illustrated book on the history of the Japanese garden), which appeared from 1936 to 1939. According to Katahira Miyuki, Shigemori focused on the arrangement of stones in Japanese gardens.77 This appreciation of stone arrangements, which had fully evolved in the Japanese middle ages, was

only possible through a detached mind, developed by Zen. Stone gardens and Zen and Japanese culture were blended together in Shigemori’s interpretation. He thereby extended Suzuki’s points on Japanese culture and Zen to gardens. In a later book Kuck acknowledged Shigemori’s encouragement to write about Zen gardens.78 The first chapter of Kuck’s One Hundred Kyoto Gardens gives the history of Japanese gardens in a conventional way. She points out that she could not believe some widespread opinions on Japanese gardens that she had read, especially because they seemed to contradict one another. Japanese gardens in America did not satisfy her curiosity: “None of the transplanted copies of Japanese gardens I had seen abroad had been of any help in giving me an adequate idea of what the originals were like. And these copies failed signally in arousing that enthusiasm so lavishly exhibited by those who had been in Japan.”79 So Kuck decided to go to Japan herself. The introduction of the book begins with a classic story of arrival in Japan, what Mary Louise Pratt has called the “royal arrival-trope” in the context of “writing culture.”80 Kuck relates how she saw her first quite usual Japanese garden in Kamakura shortly after going ashore in Yokohama and instantly understood the full meaning of Japanese gardens. She thereby assured her authority versus the reader’s in stressing her real experience of Japan and the immediate inspiration she got there. In her account of the history of Japanese gardens, Kuck introduces Zen, which arrived in Japan in the fourteenth century. After that point, Zen Buddhism remains the most important explanatory factor for Kuck throughout the rest of the introduction. After the introduction, Kuck provides a description of the one hundred gardens, categorizing them by district and describing them primarily for the tourist. Regarding the Ryōanji, Kuck includes the story of the mother tiger and her cubs but then completely rejects it: “Minds unable to grasp this inner meaning have invented a number of explanations. One of these is the tiger story, the legend that the sand represents a flowing river and the stones a mother tiger swimming it with her cubs. . . . But students of real understanding realize that the aim of the designer was something far more subtle and esoteric.”81 In other words, Kuck justifies her interpretation of the Ryōanji’s garden with esoteric knowledge—probably even hermetic knowledge, given that only she advocated this theory. Such justification was typical for the emerging discourse on Zen in the West. Kuck’s additional information that Zen is the “most highly developed form of Buddhism” and the creator of the garden “a follower of Zen” also fit very well into this discourse.82 The interpretation of such gardens as the Ryōanji as Zen-inspired was not an obvious one. Not all stone gardens are associated with temples of the Zen school nor do all such temples possess such a garden.83 Yamada’s guess that Kuck was influenced by Suzuki is very likely true, but Shigemori was also important for Kuck’s conclusions. Suzuki used similar arguments and tropes for claiming the paramount importance of Zen in Japanese culture. Shigemori’s interpretations of Japanese gardens allowed Kuck to extend Suzuki’s ideas to gardens, focusing in particular on the Ryōanji, which started becoming famous around that time. Still, the interpretation of the Ryōanji as a Zen garden seems to have been convincing even for garden experts from Japan. An article by a Japanese author in a German gardening journal reinforced Kuck’s points without citing her directly.84 Niwa Teizō did the same in Zōen zasshi, a journal about landscape gardening, during wartime Japan.85 While Kuck’s categorization of the

Ryōanji as a Zen garden was rather novel to the discourse on Japanese gardens, her arguments for the nature-loving Japanese were shared by other authors in the 1930s. Love of nature for Kuck was “one of the most often-mentioned and easily observed of the national traits” in Japan.86 Other authors of this decade, such as Tatsui Matsunosuke, who had written a widely distributed book on Japanese gardens for the Tourist Library, also stressed this point: “All the technique in Japanese landscape gardening is learned from nature itself.”87 Tatsui and the other Japanese authors were simply following the earlier arguments for the Japanese love of nature —if only adhering to them more rigidly. In contrast, Kuck tied Zen, the tea ceremony, and love of nature more closely together than other authors, even though Okakura, Harada, and others had made this connection earlier.

Ancient Modernity Kuck’s book and the others published on the occasion of the Garden Club of America’s visit were part of a broader reassessment of Japanese art and architecture. These writings of the 1920s and 1930s would deeply influence the second vogue of Japanese gardens in the West during the 1950s and 1960s. Japanese gardens had been presented as an essential element of traditional Japanese culture in earlier decades. They represented the refined understanding of nature that was ascribed to the noble class of former times: the samurai. Deeply rooted in history, the Japanese gardens spoke of an unchangeable core of Japanese culture. Hearn in particular had taken this up, but it was not absent with Conder or others. However, in the 1930s a joint effort of Japanese and Western architects and garden architects began to reinterpret Japanese gardens. In the 1920s a bitter dispute on modern architecture was raging in Japan. Orthodox architects were trying to contain their younger rivals, who wanted to sweep away ornamental buildings for a new functional and geometrical way of building. This battle, of course, was more complicated than the short summary here can convey, and it was fought not only in Japan. But the new generation of Japanese architects found a clever way to further their course, as Inoue Shōichi has shown in his book Tsukurareta katsura rikyū shinwa (The construction of the Katsura Imperial Villa’s myth). The young rising architects made ample use of the presence of the famous German architect Bruno Taut in Japan. Taut had had to leave Germany after the National Socialists had seized power in 1933, and he had come to Japan at the invitation of some friends. Due to his fame, his arrival and stay did not go unnoticed by the Japanese public. For a circle of modernist architects who had established the connection to Taut, they did not want to miss a chance to promote their cause. They did so by taking Taut to some examples of classic Japanese architecture they saw as agreeing with their goals of simple functionality. These included Katsura Rikyū, the Detached Palace in Kyoto, as well as the Ryōanji garden in Kyoto (see Figure 9).88 In contrast to these two spots, the Nikkō Tōshōgū was disdained for being outrageously overladen and dysfunctional (see Figure 10). The modernists also attacked it for being a favorite of foreign tourists. Additionally the Tōshōgū was figured as a realm of memory for shogunate rule, having been built by the second and the third shogun in the early seventeenth century to commemorate

the founder of shogunate rule, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Rising ultranationalism of the 1930s objected to the shrine because the rule of the Tokugawa family was seen as an infringement on imperial rights. The modernists joined them and heavily criticized the Tōshōgū. In contrast, the Katsura villa signified imperial power. It had been built in the thirteenth century for the tennō. In the 1920s and 1930s a nationalistic fever rose again after having cooled down a bit around the turn of the century. Placing the Tōshōgū as a symbol of old, overladen architecture against Katsura Rikyū as a symbol of modernism was a clever, strategic move.

Figure 9. Experts praised the garden of the Katsura Rikyū for its calm serenity and its complete lack of flamboyance. Photograph by Raphael Azevedoo Franca.

Having Taut certify the Katsura villa as an authentic Japanese forerunner to simple, functional architecture added to the modernists’ credibility. Taut later wrote a book titled Houses and People of Japan about his experiences. Comparing Katsura and the Grand Shrine of Ise with the Nikkō Tōshōgū, he concluded that the former were astoundingly modern while the latter was “barbaric overloaded baroque.”89 Taut’s book met the Japanese modernists’ expectations. It was translated into Japanese and became a best-seller. Inoue has shown how Taut was partly misunderstood to be a herald of modernity in Japan.90 He never was modern to the degree that the Japanese modernists wanted him to be. However, the Japanese public responded well to Taut’s book, and he thus helped pave the way for the modernists. Taut himself seems to have had a good understanding of what the modernists expected of him. In a paper read before the Peer’s Club, a society for the nobility based in Tokyo, he remarked with subtle humor: “One of the most famous Japanese authorities on Oriental architecture, Professor Itō, recently wrote in a Japanese technical magazine somewhat as follows: ‘Fifty years ago Europeans came and told us, “Nikko is the most valuable,” and we thought so too; now

BrunoTaut [sic] has come and told us, “It is Isé and Katsura which are the most valuable,” and again we believe.’—Fine Oriental irony, and superior to our systematization.”91 Taut had understood very well that he was instrumental in promoting the cause of Japanese modernist architects. His judgments also helped pave the way for a completely new appreciation of Japanese gardens as being modern. Along with the villa itself were the gardens of Katsura, which impressed Taut the most: “The Japanese art of gardening has penetrated these elements too with the spirit of simplicity and clarity, as can be best seen in Katsura near Kyoto.”92 The same might be said of the Ryōanji’s garden in Kyoto as well as for the gardens surrounding the Grand Shrine of Ise. For Taut these gardens were not just historical but excellent examples of how to avoid kitsch. For him Japanese gardens were so impressive because history presented its modern qualities within them.

Figure 10. In contrast to the Katsura Rikyū, the Nikkō Tōshōgū is laden with decorations. The buildings in the picture form just a small part of a huge baroque ensemble of buildings that have been popular tourist sites for a long time. Photograph by Stella Uhrner.

After half a century the Japanese garden had been freed from simply acting as a realm of memory. It was no longer merely an anchor for translating a national identity into a representational space. It was also no longer simply a repository for interesting forms and features to be adapted by wealthy Westerners. The Japanese garden had become the space for an alternative modernity to the Western one. One of the most influential books on modern gardening in the first half of the twentieth century took up these new possibilities offered by Taut on a theoretical base and by Kuck on a practical one.

In 1938 a series of articles Christopher Tunnard had written for the journal Architectural Review were published as Gardens in the Modern Landscape. Tunnard, an Englishman, had just come to Harvard to lecture on garden architecture that very same year. Harvard had established the Design School, led by Walter Gropius and Joseph Hudnut, who had both been in favor of inviting Tunnard. Tunnard tried to break with many of the classic conventions surrounding gardens and introduce a new, modern space for gardening. He was thus the first author on modernism in landscape architecture in the Anglo-American context.93 For Tunnard, the modern space was rooted in three inspirations: “those of ‘functionalism’, the Oriental influence and modern art.”94 He viewed contemporary gardens as sentimental and sterile. Functionalism had to be at the service of simplicity and clarity. Tunnard was deeply influenced by modern architecture at that time and cited Alfred Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier as examples.95 But Tunnard also sided with Japanese authors such as Tatsui by including Japanese gardens as a main inspiration for modern garden architecture: “Seeing as I do both the European and American architecture changing in recent times, I believe that the landscape gardening in these countries would do well to imitate the principle of the Japanese garden and not to remain content with mere curiosity of it.”96 For Tunnard the Oriental influence could add a spiritual layer to the otherwise rather neutral appearance of functionalism. It had to teach garden designers a special proximity to nature.97 The Oriental inspiration extended to stones and other additions to gardens: “The phenomenon of Japanese art most significant to modern designers should be the feeling for a spiritual quality in inanimate objects.”98 Garden designers would learn to use material in a spiritual way if they followed the Oriental example. When speaking of “Oriental gardening” throughout his book, Tunnard meant Japanese gardens only. Chinese or Indian gardens played no role whatsoever. Tunnard had read Kuck’s book in preparing his series of articles, but he was also inspired by fellow architects such as Percy Cane and Raymond McGrath, who had added chapters on Japanese houses and gardens in their treatments of modern architecture and garden design, respectively.99 Because of these influences Tunnard had already written a short paper about the Japanese influence on English gardens in 1935. Tunnard’s appreciation of Oriental garden art seems to be very conservative and Orientalist at first glance. He reduced Japanese gardens to spirituality and an aesthetic sense for nature. In this he seemed not to differ much from the mainstream discourse in earlier decades. However, there is an important twist to his argument that sets him apart. As Tunnard wrote, “Japanese landscape art [is] significant as a modern example.”100 Japanese gardens for him were not archaic or a sign of the need to develop the country. They were instead ancient pieces of modernity, very much in the sense that had fascinated Taut. It wasn’t that Japan had to catch up with the West; this time the West was lagging behind. In his paper on the influence of Japan on English gardens, Tunnard had already pointed this out: “The absence of superfluous ornament and the elimination of garish color has a special appeal to the modern mind of all countries.”101 Tunnard’s book appeared first in 1938 and became a stunning success. A second edition came out in 1948. Hence Gardens in the Modern Landscape served as a link between the first and second vogue of Japanese gardens in the West. Jacques and Woudstra have pointed

out that Tunnard’s book was the most influential text for a generation of garden architects well into the 1950s.102 It also influenced Japanese-garden planning. Uchiyama Masao, a member of the Ministry of Construction’s city planning bureau, published a paper about the book in Zōen zasshi just four years after the second edition’s release. He did not comment much on Tunnard’s ideas, not even those concerning Japanese gardens, but simply summarized them for the readers. The discourses that had begun by exoticizing and historicizing Japanese gardens had now moved on. Some renowned authors marked Japanese gardens as modern beyond Western modernity. This is not to say that the older interpretation had died out. Many books, newspaper articles, and informational boards continued to use the older interpretation. It was simply that some important voices, rooted in a much broader context, had offered an alternative interpretation. This alternative version became popular again in the 1950s and 1960s and helped start the second vogue of Japanese gardens. It was also instrumental in the connection to a completely other cultural discourse on Japan—that of Zen Buddhism.

Chapter 3

Spreading the Japanese Garden Worldwide

Garden Stroll III: Morris Arboretum, Philadelphia The Morris Arboretum is a spacious park in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of northwest Philadelphia. This affluent area, with its historic buildings, draws in tourists. Located at its northern edge, the arboretum is a trust administered by the University of Pennsylvania, but it was originally the private estate of John Morris and his sister Lydia in the late nineteenth century. Morris, a Quaker, had made a fortune in iron and steel manufacturing. He and his sister shared an interest in botany. The grounds adjacent to their summer house were dedicated to serving as an arboretum in order to host plant collections, including samples of Chinese species gathered by the plant hunter Ernest Henry Wilson. It also featured various garden types, such as a rose garden and a ravine garden. In 1932, after Lydia’s death, the arboretum was handed over to the university and opened to the public one year later. On entering the arboretum, the first Asian impressions that one comes across are offered by small stone Buddhas in front of the museum shop. The Buddhas are not very old, however, and serve only as decoration. One can next find a Japanese peace bell in a corner of the museum shop, but this, too, has only recently been added. However, farther along the path through the garden there are two much more historic spots featuring Japan. A Japanese hill garden lies slightly hidden in the middle of the park (see Figure 11). The informational board reveals that the garden was constructed in 1905 by Y. Muto, a Japanese gardener, in the year Japan won its war against Russia (see Figure 12). Japanese gardens had been popular on both coasts of America prior to the war, and Morris had been to Japan to collect plants and study ornaments, but Japan’s victory meant that the West now took the country more seriously. The informational board connects this small space to eternal qualities of Japanese gardens: “Each traditional Japanese garden element—hill, rock, water, tree, bridge, path, shrine, and lantern—has a symbolic meaning. The elements are arranged according to nature.” The garden itself is much more concrete than the informational board indicates. It consists of a tiny, rustic strip of land hidden beneath trees and bushes. A small stream runs over some stones, and a statue of a bodhisattva is hidden in the green as well as a lantern, while a bench invites visitors to sit and enjoy the scenery. One can only guess where the Japanese garden begins and ends because there are no fences or other markers.

Figure 11. A bodhisattva and a lantern in the small inconspicuous Japanese garden of the Morris Arboretum (Philadelphia) fit very well with their surroundings. Photograph by the author.

Seven years after the hill garden had been built, another part of the arboretum took on some Japanese features. The (Japanese) Overlook a few meters away offers a prospect over the arboretum from its very border. A Victorian-style zig-zag path leads to a small hill. Stones arranged by Muto as well as a small pagoda add to the atmosphere. Hidden on the hill is a marvelous reference to one of the most famous tourist spots in Japan in the early twentieth century. The three wise monkeys carved in stone at the Overlook recommend that visitors “hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil.” The original monkeys reside at the Nikkō Tōshōgū shrine, which was a must-see for all Western tourists to Japan at the turn of the twentieth century, and the shrine was most likely one of Morris’s stops when he visited Japan. In 1913 the Philadelphia Ledger praised the two Japanese parts of the Morris Arboretum as “an object lesson in the adaptation of foreign ideas to American conditions.” But after the University of Pennsylvania started to administer the arboretum in 1932, both Japanese gardens were neglected.1 In 1988 an internal report of the Morris Arboretum recommended that the Japanese hill garden and the Japanese Overlook be revitalized: regarding the hill garden, it was suggested that a restored pagoda would “act as a focal point” while the stone-encircled area of the Overlook was seen to have “potential as a Zen-type garden.”2 The map of the Overlook included in the internal report actually denotes it as such though this was anachronistic for a Japanese garden built in 1912 (see Figure 13).3

Figure 12. The Japanese garden was once more conspicuous, owing to its larger size and the less overgrown surrounding. The picture shows the garden in 1905 shortly after its erection. Courtesy of Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania.

JAPANESE GARDENS STARTED to spread around the globe more or less simultaneously with the publication of Western books and articles that described them. Most scholars agree that the first garden had been laid out for the world’s fair in Vienna in 1873, roughly a decade before the first extensive descriptions were published in 1885 and 1886 by Edward Morse and Josiah Conder.4 But it might be argued that the garden at the fair was not particularly “Japanese” after all. Although it had been planned and built by the Japanese, its conception as well as the intention of its designers differed very much from what constituted Japanese gardens only a decade later and what still constitutes them. As we have seen, the discourses shaped by Morse and Conder strongly influenced the emerging notion of what a Japanese garden was, but actually building a garden involved much more than simply following the ideas in books, even if they did contain sample layouts. The physical gardens diverged to a certain degree from the concepts proposed theoretically. It is not always easy to write about this in precise detail, as the gardens themselves no longer exist or at the very least have not remained unchanged. We can, however, get some sense of their original appearance from historical images, plans, and descriptions. One of the main differences between discursive and practical-spatial matters seems to be that there can be an ideal garden in descriptions. Reality intervenes when gardens are laid out.

Japanese gardens served various functions as spaces and sometimes were hotly contested areas of national representation. While the translation of Japanese gardens was a success overall, different interpretations and interests at times collided. The following stories are therefore not meant to describe how Japanese gardens came to the West or how they were invented there, but rather much more than that. I am most interested in the meanings that were inscribed in them. There are various agents of these inscriptions. Of course, the Japanese government features prominently as a sponsor of gardens at world’s fairs, and the government is not a stable agent. Politics change and so do those heading up the government. But changes are not necessarily visible at every turnover in leadership, even if they affected the course of daily political life in Japan. For my purposes, I will look only to those changes relevant to the topic of Japanese gardens in the West and simply treat the government as a relatively stable institution.

Figure 13. The plan for reconstructing the Overlook of Morris Arboretum bears the words “Zen Garden” in its center. Bian Tan proposed focusing on the Zen qualities of this garden though there had been no traces of this creed in the original layout and plans. Pugh & Hubbard, Atlas of Compton, Philadelphia, 1914. Courtesy of Morris Arboretum of the University of Pennsylvania.

Japanese Gardens at World’s Fairs Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, world’s fairs staged in major cities of the Western world attracted millions of visitors and shaped their understanding of global developments. The fairs were especially designed to foster comparisons between nations, thus arguably creating competition. Visitors could stroll around, easily view pavilions and the goods therein, and decide for themselves which countries were prospering the most. For Japan it was of the utmost importance to present itself positively at these large-scale events. After strictly controlling foreign relations for more than two hundred years, the country had been forced to take a more open stance toward the outside world in the 1850s. As a result the country had entered into treaties with nearly all Western powers that put the Japanese at a disadvantage. These treaties were a humiliating symbol of inferiority in the context of imperialism, so the major aim of the new government was to revise them. World’s fairs were a good opportunity to ameliorate the image of the country and convince the Western powers and its people that a nonWestern nation could eventually stand on equal terms with them.5 Japan first appeared at a world’s fair in 1862 in London. Rutherford Alcock, the English consul general in Japan from 1858 to 1864, tried to induce the Japanese to take part but without success. Instead Alcock himself organized a Japanese display.6 At the 1867 world’s fair in Paris, Japan reappeared in the expositions. The Tokugawa shogunate represented the country, but an opposing regional fiefdom also organized a display. A small garden seems to have been part of their efforts, though not much is known about it and it is not clear whether it was in the Japanese style.7 Japan’s first official participation at a world’s fair was in 1873 in Vienna, and it was organized by the Meiji government. The new government, which had replaced Tokugawa rule, understood very well that this was a chance both to represent itself to the world and to learn more about it. In order to display Japan at its best, all goods and objects were first gathered in Tokyo at a local shrine. After a visit by the tennō underlining the overall importance of the project, foreigners working for the Japanese government were to inspect everything. Afterward the public had a chance to learn about its country’s aspirations for the Viennese world’s fair.8 This display was one of the starting points for Tokyo’s National Museum and had a deep impact on the development of Japanese popular and visual culture. With the help of foreign counselors, Japan was changing and adopting Western modes of knowledge production.9 In Vienna, the entrance to the Japanese pavilion was marked by a torii, a Shintō gate. The path led to a Shintō shrine and was flanked by kiosks where Japanese goods were sold (see Figure 14). In front of the shrine a lake, populated with carp, set the religious building apart from the kiosks. Japanese shrubs and trees, as well as stones and stone lanterns, made up a Japanese garden around the lake and shrine. Finally a picturesque drum bridge passed over the lake to provide access to the shrine.

Figure 14. A Shintō shrine stood at one end of the Japanese garden at the world’s fair in Vienna in 1873. The Palace of the Egyptian Viceroy in the background nearly overshadows the shrine. The scenery shows a global mélange of styles and buildings, which was typical for world’s fairs. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Wien Nr. LW 72.025-C.

The entire display captured the interest of the Viennese and other guests immediately. Even during construction, the Japanese carpenters drew curious watchers as the New York Times remarked on May 11, 1873: “Upon one side is seen a party of Japanese workmen in blouses of dark blue cloth, and ornamented with curious figures, engaged in building their house, which has already become a center of attraction. A crowd was constantly gazing upon the doings of these dark children of the East.” This quote hints at the status of the Japanese in their first official appearance at a world’s fair. Within the framework of emerging imperialism, Japan was seen as anything but equal to the West. But at least the Japanese were able to represent themselves, something China and other Asian countries had not succeeded in doing. As an Austrian fairgoer remarked, there was hope: “Among all the Orientals, the Japanese look most likable and apt for culture.”10 Not only the masses were interested in the pavilion. A few weeks before the start of the exposition, the Austrian Empress Elisabeth visited the fair, and it was her inspection of the Japanese garden that garnered the most attention from the press. Elisabeth was depicted standing on the drum bridge entering the garden (see Figure 15).11 Though it therefore seems as if the garden was well received and fulfilled Japanese hopes for it, the layout of the garden itself and various historical sources cast doubt on the formation of the concept of Japanese gardens at that point in time. For internal as well as external reasons, the Japanese government tried to accentuate the role of Shintō for Japan. Buddhism

had been one of the primary religious pillars for the shogunate, which had ruled the country up to 1868. After its fall and the resurrection of the tennō as a political center, the new Meiji government did its best to promote Shintō as the state religion. Buddhist temples and their gardens were partly destroyed during these years, and monks were persecuted.12 These measures were given up after a few years. Shintō, however, was now completely separated from Buddhism, although it had partially merged with it and been administered by Buddhist monks in the centuries before. In the end Shintō did reemerge as “state Shintō,” backing the imperialist and increasingly ultranationalist politics of Japan in the decades leading up to 1945.13 This is why the garden in Vienna displayed a Shintō shrine at its center. Yet Shintō shrines generally do not display magnificent gardens; such gardens are rather typical for Buddhist temples. Thus displays at later world’s fairs started to use Buddhism as an inspiration, making the garden shown at Vienna an exception. The Japanese pavilion was planned to resemble a shrine during a festival, when kiosks typically flank the main path and a jovial atmosphere is promoted. The garden itself was not meant to be the focus; it was simply meant to enhance the festival atmosphere. But there was also a deeper strategic aim in building the garden as it was. According to the report of the official Japanese commission to the fair, “Our garden will without doubt give rise to laughter for ordinary people who admire only shiny things; but it looks natural for those who know how to appreciate all that is picturesque and simple—to a certain extent it forms a contrast to the splendid surroundings, becoming an all-new fresh attraction.”14 In later times this argument would be presented in the guise of the aesthetic concepts of wabi and sabi, both terms denoting a certain modesty and subtle beauty. But the early writings of Japanese officials had not yet taken up these keywords.

Figure 15. Attended by Japanese and Austrian officials, Empress Elisabeth visits the Japanese garden at the world’s fair in 1873. The etching places her in the center of the bridge leading from the kiosks to the garden. The huge lanterns on the right side stand out in the picture. Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Wien Nr. 237159-B.

The Japanese commission’s understatement about the display met two of its aims. The gradual samuraization of Japan, which had taken place shortly after the Meiji Restoration,15 was mirrored in the pavilion in Vienna. Values and ideals, which up to the mid-nineteenth century had belonged to the small ruling class, were now promoted for everyone as the essence of Japanese culture, while cultural modes of the other social castes were disdained. This reflected the crucial role of young samurais in the new government who wanted to break away from the strong cultural influence of rich merchants or the leisure culture of city folks that had held sway during the shogunate era. But the understatement also helped cover up the weakness of Japan, which was a result of a lack of funds and the fact that Japan played a very minor role in the imperial world order. Its lack of brilliance compared to the displays of Western nations was thus, paradoxically, turned into an asset. Still the aesthetic category of the picturesque seems to contradict this claim of distinction to some degree by exoticizing the Japanese garden more than setting it apart for its subtle understatement. Three years later, the Centennial Exposition, commemorating the Declaration of Independence a century earlier, opened its gates in Philadelphia. It was the first world’s fair in the United States and, like its European counterparts, it drew in the masses. This time Japan

erected a two-story dwelling that acted as, among other things, housing for the commission and a Japanese bazaar. In addition a “Japanese Government Building” with an adjacent teahouse was built.16 Merchants and their families sold lanterns and bronze figures at the bazaar to visitors who had become enchanted with “things Japanese” after seeing the much more exquisite objects in the official displays in the main exhibition buildings.17 A Japanese garden was also attached to the bazaar. The official catalog went into much detail, describing Japanese gardens in general as well as the actual one set up there.18 Interestingly, the catalog clearly indicated that Japanese gardens were more or less just a subspecies of those found throughout East Asia, and that therefore they did not differ greatly from Chinese gardens. The main difference was that “Japanese gardeners . . . have kept themselves free from those exaggerations which are so frequently imputed to Eastern culture.”19 Promoting the refinement of Japanese gardens, the catalog did not mention any connections between religion and gardens. Instead, it stressed the long history of gardens in Japan, dating from their introduction through Korea, and the magnificence and incredible size of the Imperial Gardens. In addition, some remarks implied that nearly all Japanese were cultivating their own gardens, however small. Even with this official interpretation, American authors in Philadelphia seemed to have had trouble understanding the Japanese-garden concept. Thomas Westcott described the Japanese exhibit in his Centennial Portfolio as follows: The little piece of grounds which surrounds this building have been enclosed and fixed up in Japanese garden style. The flowerbeds are laid out neatly and fenced with bamboo. Screens of matting and dried grass divide the parterres. There is a fountain guiltless of jet d’eau from which water trickles. At the southern entrance a queer-shaped urn of granite on a pedestal shows marks of great age, being weather worn and dilapidated. It must have done garden service years before Perry opened Japan to the Western nations, and it was carved by Nipponese who have never seen a foreigner, and who never could have expected that their work would be transported thousands of miles to be inspected by millions of strangers. The garden statuary is peculiar. Bronze figures of storks 6 to 8 feet high stand in groups at certain places, and a few bronze pigs are disposed in easy comfort in shady places.20 Flowerbeds and parterres, jets d’eau and storks cast in bronze seem to be much more apt for a European garden than for a Japanese one. Was the Japanese garden adapted to Western taste? Or was Westcott simply using his own categories to describe the garden? Probably a bit of both. Most curious is the depiction of the granite urn. The plate next to this description would suggest that Westcott mistook a strangely shaped lantern on its foothold for such an urn (see Figure 16).21 Meiji Japan enjoyed much success at its first two world’s fairs. Japanese merchants sold all of their products in Vienna, while other nations did not fare as well; both official representations led to a long-lasting interest in Japan.22 The Japanese garden in Vienna was even transferred to Alexandra Park in London after the fair’s end.23 The two exhibitions helped

spark Japonism on both sides of the Atlantic. However, as official records and other sources suggest, there was not yet a conceptual framework for promoting and appreciating Japanese gardens in the West. The official interpretations by the Japanese did not try to advertise Japanese gardens as something unique. They most of all stressed the imperial context either through Shintō or historical accounts. In addition the gardens were shaped by the ulterior motive of advertising Japanese arts and crafts. Bronze was promoted by Meiji governments as an export article and world’s fairs helped showcase it.24 Storks and other pieces of bronze most likely decorated gardens not only because they fit into the scenery but also because they advertised the industry and could open markets for Japanese craftsmen in the West. Western pundits and visitors were not entirely certain how to fully appreciate Japanese gardens. But the gardens themselves were also not yet refined to a degree of Japaneseness that would have enabled them to be completely set apart from Western ones. Most striking of all is that the gardens at the fairs were not measured against counterparts in Japan. There are no comparisons with gardens in Kyoto or elsewhere. In other words, the Japanese gardens at the fairs in Vienna and Philadelphia stood on their own and not for some distant realms.

Figure 16. The plate accompanying Westcott’s description of the Japanese garden shows the lantern that he probably mistook as an urn on the very right side next to a bronze-cast stork. Free Library of Philadelphia, Print and Picture Collection.

The 1878 world’s fair in Paris was the first occasion on which a Japanese garden was compared to those in Japan. In order to spread knowledge about Japan, the government compiled a book full of information on the country’s history, politics, and economy.25 The last two pages of the first volume dealt with gardening in Japan under the rubric “horticulture,” thus using the typical classification of world’s fairs. Clearly the Commission Impériale Japonaise

had learned its lesson about categorizing things the Western way. The Japanese garden in Paris was introduced as a representation of the plants typical in Japanese gardens and thereby stressed the biological aspect of gardens. However, the government’s book also mentioned the Ginkakuji in Kyoto as an outstanding example of Japanese-garden art, thereby setting a standard.26 Japan’s pavilion itself did not draw much interest. An official guide to the fair only mentions it briefly.27 The garden was placed in the Trocadéro, which hosted mostly pavilions of colonies and ethnographic displays on craniology, the science of measuring heads. According to the official guide, the bamboo fence that surrounded the garden seems to have impressed the public more than the space itself. While the gardens in Vienna, Philadelphia, and Paris today might not be deemed as typically Japanese, they nevertheless represented Japan for their contemporaries. Had the Japanese garden developed directly from there, the script we read today would have been a rather different one. Focusing on storks cast in bronze and other ornaments, gardens in the eyes of the Western public might have evolved into Art Nouveau spaces a few decades later. But as late as 1878, the definition of what constituted a Japanese garden was still very unclear. In that sense it was premature for Clay Lancaster to have claimed about the garden in Philadelphia: “Considered as a whole the treatment lot alongside the bazaar was far from that of a typical Japanese garden.”28 This judgment is simply anachronistic, even when reconfirmed by Ōnuki Seiji.29 The garden in Philadelphia could have served as the blueprint for Japanese gardens in the West in the coming decades. But Japanese gardens took another course.

World’s Fair Gardens Contested Within the next two decades, the idea of Japanese gardens became much more refined in the West. At the same time, the Japanese government understood much better how Japanese gardens were able to inspire Western visitors. This is partly due to the fact that Western books on Japanese gardens helped shape the expectations in Europe and North America and probably gave Japanese officials themselves a better understanding of what would be a successful representation. Because of this, displays within Japanese gardens used much better scripts than they had before. But other problems arose for Japanese officials. Starting in the 1890s and especially after the turn of the century, they lost the power to use gardens as an exclusive means to represent Japan. Competing “Japanese gardens” were presented by private entrepreneurs.30 On the other hand, the Japanese government proved that it was able to push its cause without relying on the magic of huge Japanese gardens. Japan had refrained from building an extensive garden for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, the biggest and most prestigious fair up to that point. On October 9, 1892, the New York Times had very much looked forward to such a garden, but the Japanese commission for the fair was not able to establish anything representative next to its main pavilion. This was due to the placement of the main pavilion that came to be erected on Wooded Island (see Figure 17). It had been very difficult for the commission to secure this exclusive spot for its pavilion.31 Frederick Law

Olmsted, the planner of the fairground and a highly acclaimed landscape designer most famous for New York’s Central Park, had originally contrived to reserve Wooded Island for nature and recreation.32 The complicated deal behind securing the place for the pavilion was probably the reason why no full-fledged Japanese garden was erected on the island.33 The building of the main pavilion, the so-called Hō-o-den (Phoenix Palace), united three styles of classic Japanese architecture. Visitors marveled at the structure and strolled around the parklike island. Even without a larger garden, then, the major impression was that Japan was somehow a special realm of nature.

Figure 17. The white buildings stand out in the fort of the bird’s-eye view of the World’s Columbian Exposition’s grounds. Wooded Island is in the middle of the image, and the Japanese pavilion is situated to its right. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

The tiny island was set apart from the Midway Plaisance, an avenue stretching one mile, where non-Western countries had been invited to present themselves under the direction of the fair’s Department of Ethnology.34 The Western nations only set up amusement displays on the Midway, presenting their achievements in the national pavilions on the proper grounds and in the exhibition halls.35 The fair’s organizers thereby discriminated between countries they judged to be modern and countries that were not. Their spatial politics reflected social Darwinist theory, which stressed the fundamental difference between modern Western states and the rest of the world.36 Like the Western nations, Japan erected a bazaar on the Midway,

but the position of the national pavilion on the island avoided direct competition with the displays of Western nations, which had their place at the center of the exhibition. According to social Darwinist standards, Japan was not yet grouped with the modern nations but had at least succeeded in leaving behind the non-Western countries. Within two decades of its first official appearance at a world’s fair, Japan had been able to gain some measure of respect from the Western countries. The Japanese commission presented two small gardens to visitors. One had been set up in the Horticultural Building as an official display, and it showcased a bridge and a huge lantern. Another small garden was attached to the Japanese Tea House, which was built on the other side of the lagoon that surrounded Wooded Island and the main Japanese pavilion (see Figure 18).37 It was run by the Japanese Central Tea Association. The admission fee was 10 to 50 cents and “light lunches and samples of high priced teas” were served.38 Two tall bronze-cast storks and some equally high lanterns dominated the small garden stretch. All in all the garden was not very elaborate and served mainly as an appealing setting for the guests of the teahouse. Staged a year later in San Francisco in 1894, the California Midwinter International Exposition in Golden Gate Park was not as big as Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. While the Japanese government invited the public into yet another tea garden, George Turner Marsh, an Australian entrepreneur, had financed a Japanese village. This was much larger than the tea garden and received the official backing of the fair’s commission. It featured a Japanese garden with a drum bridge, lanterns, and a gate. However, the village enraged the Japanese officials in San Francisco because they felt that Japan was being misrepresented. The Japanese consul forbade his countrymen to work for the village so that in the end Caucasians costumed as Orientals drew the rickshaws there.39 After the fair, the tea garden was dismantled and forgotten while the village remained and was renamed the Japanese Tea Garden. Hagiwara Makoto, a Japanese immigrant, continued to offer refreshments there until he was detained along with most Japanese living on the West Coast shortly after Pearl Harbor during World War II. As Kendall H. Brown has shown, the question of who built the garden belonging to the village is not only complicated but at least as contested as the village itself was in 1894.40 Was it Hagiwara or Marsh, and was the garden therefore authentic or a very good adaptation? While the questions can be left open in the case of San Francisco, other Japanese gardens were often planned and laid out at fairs over the next decades without Japanese involvement.

Figure 18. The Japanese Tea House in front of the Fish and Fisheries Building had a Japanese garden that allowed visitors to take a break with a cup of tea.

San Francisco was only at the beginning of the trend whereby private projects competed with official Japanese pavilions at fairs. At the Paris world’s fair in 1900, the Japanese government sponsored a garden, and the privately run Tour du Monde displayed a Japanese pagoda along with a garden and flamboyant buildings constructed in Chinese, Hindu, and other Asian styles. It had been built as an advertisement for a travel company. While the official Japanese pavilion was cramped in between others of non-Western nations and colonies, the Tour du Monde drew the masses next to the Eiffel Tower.41 The pagoda’s French architect, Alexandre Marcel, subsequently built another pagoda for Belgium’s king, Leopold II, at Laeken in Brussels. Leopold II had been excited by the Tour de Monde in Paris and wanted to promote Japan in his country by copying it in order to stimulate economic exchange.42 European garden fairs also often displayed Japanese gardens. In Germany’s fairs at Düsseldorf (1904), Mannheim (1907), Frankfurt am Main (1909), and Breslau (1913), Japanese gardens planned by Germans were displayed to the public.43 They functioned as “drawing pieces” as one pundit dubbed the garden in Frankfurt am Main; the masses came to see them even though they were not authentic.44 The garden in Düsseldorf was especially interesting. It had been planned solely by professors using one of the photographs in Conder’s book as a template. The Japanese came into the garden only afterward as hostesses to serve tea in the teahouse.45

The Japanese gardens in European garden fairs not only drew many people but also provoked puzzled comments, proving how the pundits were still lacking proper categories to describe them. A German author remarked about the London summer fair of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1911 that “again there were Japanese gardens, which we admire, because we do not understand them. I do not think they will ever get popular with us.”46 The Japanese garden in Frankfurt was described by a German garden specialist as eigenartig (curious) three times in a short article. He declared in the gardening journal Gartenwelt, “Hopefully some pictures of this garden can be published in Gartenwelt later to show what cannot be described with words.”47 Though the books of Conder, Hearn, and others had helped spark interest in Japanese gardens and were even used as templates to create garden fairs, Japanese gardens remained not only exotic but also incomprehensible to most. But these problems in understanding differed a great deal from the descriptions of the first Japanese gardens in Vienna and Philadelphia. The commentators now knew that European technical terms for gardens would not be suitable for Japanese ones. They also probably figured out that their own texts would benefit from a certain sort of exoticization and mystification of the Japanese gardens. The Japanese government itself took up gardens as a successful means of representation once again in the early twentieth century. Two major projects made clear who was in charge of presenting Japanese gardens to the world. For the Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 in St. Louis and the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910 in London, Japan went to great efforts to represent itself at its best, and gardens played a central role. St. Louis Imperial Garden was laid out around a replica of Kyoto’s famous fourteenth-century temple Kinkakuji.48 Various accounts reported that the fair was a huge success for Japan even though the government had to spend enormous sums. Tensions between Japan and Russia had been intensifying since Japan went to war against China in 1894. Two months before the Louisiana Purchase Exposition opened its gates, Japan and Russia went to war. It was important for Japan to secure good diplomatic and public relations with key nations such as the United States. Meanwhile, the Russian government was putting all its effort into the war itself and withdrew from the fair. Japan was able to secure the land that had been set aside for the Russian pavilion and to enlarge its own display.49 To the surprise of the Western world, the Far East island defeated the well-established European kingdom a year later, and Japan’s standing rose dramatically. Given its victories and expanding imperial ambitions, Western powers began to view Japan as nearly an equal. Japan’s colonial exhibition in St. Louis reflected its new position in the world. The vast Japanese garden was built by specialists of the Imperial Household Ministry, thus underlining its importance.50 Parallel to the garden signifying Japan itself, various displays on Taiwan, Hokkaidō, and the Japanese imperial mission were presented. Japan also tried hard to claim Asian art heritage for itself and to diminish the role of China.51 The Imperial Garden would never have been described, like the 1876 Japanese garden in Philadelphia, as an offspring of Chinese garden culture. Japanese gardens were instead seen as unique and authentic expressions of Japan’s leading role in Asia while Chinese gardens were disdained for their overladen decoration.

In 1910 in London the Japanese government tried even harder to emphasize its leading role as an imperialist power in Asia. The Japan-British Exhibition was a joint effort of the government and Imre Kiralfy, an entrepreneur who organized such fairs in London. The government once again spent much more money than it had for previous fairs. This time two gardens were built: one was named the Garden of Peace and the other the Garden of the Floating Island.52 The Garden of Peace featured a replica of the Kinkakuji just as the garden in St. Louis had done. Compared with the first two gardens in Vienna and Philadelphia, the planning and execution of the gardens in St. Louis and London were decisively different. Most important, the gardens were now linked to Buddhism instead of Shintō. Buddhism, as we have noted, was under siege in the early Meiji years because it had served as a quasi-state religion during Tokugawa times. But by the early twentieth century Buddhist buildings and especially temples had regained the favor of the Japanese government. They now served as the backbone for building a classic canon of Japanese architecture. This was overly obvious in London, where many architectural models were presented to the public. None was a model of a Shintō shrine and not even castles or palaces were displayed.53 The gardens themselves were no longer representations of shrine gardens and were clearly linked to canonical examples of Japanese architecture like the Kinkakuji. Finally the gardens were planned by garden designers who were not only well known in Japan, as was the case for Vienna’s and Philadelphia’s artists, but who had also been in contact with the West, were well versed in both Japanese and Western art and gardening, and spoke mostly fluent English. Two garden designers planned the gardens in London: Ozawa Keijirō, an outstanding theorist on Japanese gardens, and Honda Kinkichirō, a famous Western-style painter. Both are of interest (and will be discussed later in this chapter) because their writings prove that they were much more than simply Japanese gardeners. The gardens in St. Louis and London were well received. The East Anglian Times remarked, “Japan without gardens would not be Japan at all.”54 When Queen Victoria visited the fairgrounds in London, the gardens received a great deal of her attention and she chatted a while with one of the Japanese gardeners.55 The gardens were portrayed as ideal representations of Japan, as the Morning Post reported: The magic charm of Japan is compounded of many elements. There is the exquisite scenery of a hilly and mountainous country, thickly wooded, rich in flowers, full of placid lakes and rushing rivers. There is a courteous, kindly, and seemingly ever cheerful and smiling people. There is the strangeness and quaintness of a life, the condition and customs of which are so remote from the experience of the West. There are the allpervading signs of artistic genius and taste, showing themselves not only in masterpieces of color and sculpture, but also in the details of everyday life. Further, there is the fascination always derived from the ever-present contrast between the new in a country where ancient temples with their exquisitely carved lacquered panels can be seen in close proximity to raw, smoking factories, resounding with the whirr of the latest machinery.56 This general description of Japan was in perfect harmony with those of Japanese gardens; after

all, hills, rivers and lakes, art, sculptures, and the replica of an ancient temple constituted the gardens in London. No other word was used more often to describe those gardens by the English press than “quaint,” which can be seen as the English equivalent of the German eigenartig. Indeed, “quaint” had been used to describe Japan for some time. In 1885 a Japanese village, regularly referred to as quaint and picturesque, had opened its gates in London.57 Japanese gardens were seen as exotic, quaint, and eigenartig and most of all not only as models or replicas of Japanese gardens but as perfect representations of Japan in general—at least when they were “authentic,” another term often used in discussion of the gardens. Japanese gardens were “quaintified,” as David A. Slawson has aptly remarked.58 But in the cases of St. Louis and London, where Japanese artists had planned the gardens and many of the materials used to build them had been shipped directly from Japan, no one would question their authenticity. Though the Japanese government did sponsor gardens in St. Louis and London, the decision as to what they should look like was not fully under its control. For example, Kiralfy intervened when it came to the design of the London fair.59 Because the fair was organized by the Japanese government and Kiralfy together, the entrepreneur had a strong interest in drawing as many visitors as possible to make it a financial success. Gardens for him were first and foremost attractions and, as previous fairs had proven, very successful ones.60 Because of this he tried to intervene when he discovered that one of the garden’s designs was not appealing enough for the public.61 Not surprisingly, the official catalog of the fair advertised the gardens with a larger headline than that for any other display and cited Lafcadio Hearn at length about the mystique of Japanese gardens.62 Gardens were not just representations of Japan but attractions that helped publicize the fair even if this contradicted Hearn’s comments about them.

Honda Kinkichirō and Ozawa Keijirō The English public and press mostly credited the gardener Izawa Hannosuke for the two gardens at the Japan-British Exhibition. But Izawa actually only executed the plans of Honda Kinkichirō and Ozawa Keijirō, who were asked to plan one garden each.63 The crediting of Izawa was thus a sort of intercultural misunderstanding. Instead of those who had come up with the ideas for the gardens, the gardener who executed their plans was personally complimented by the queen during her visit. Honda and Ozawa were fascinating interpreters of Japanese gardens—for foreign visitors as well as in their own accounts. In many respects, neither was a typical garden designer. They had not been trained within one lineage of famous garden builders, which had been typical in earlier times. But they were also not like the planners of the first Japanese gardens in the West in 1873 and 1878. These had been planned by the first Japanese specialists in modern agricultural economics.64 However, in the following decades gardens were seen as something more cultural than agricultural by the Japanese government. Honda and Ozawa were typical Meiji intellectuals. Born in the last decades of Tokugawa rule, they were thrown into the turmoil of early Meiji when Honda was a teenager and Ozawa

was in his early twenties. Ozawa in particular had been well prepared for the political and cultural landslide following the Meiji Restoration. He had been trained in rangaku, the Dutch studies promoted by the Tokugawa shogunate and local daimyō, the feudal lords, as a means to gain knowledge of the world. Access to the outside world was otherwise severely regulated except for contacts with China and Korea. Ozawa went to Nagasaki, the one port the Dutch East India Company was allowed to enter in order to trade goods and information. After returning to his home he taught himself English and even set up a school to teach the language.65 Honda studied the West early in his life. He learned English and Western-style painting from an Englishman in the last years of shogunate rule, when restrictions on contact with foreigners began to be lifted. Honda and Ozawa went to Tokyo a few years after the Meiji Restoration to immerse themselves in the intellectual scene of the capital. Both started studying gardens at this time. Ozawa recorded the daimyō’s gardens, which once had formed part of their residences and now had sunk into decay.66 These gardens were mostly built over, as they were no longer cared for after the daimyō had lost their power and abandoned their residences. Space was urgently needed in the new capital of Japan. Ozawa also started to publish papers on gardens that introduced the keywords of Western gardening to Japan. He coined teien and zōen as the equivalents for “garden” and “gardening.”67 His studies in Japanese gardens led him to reevaluate the Sakuteiki, a gardening book of the eleventh century that had been frequently used as a template by gardeners of earlier periods but had not been known publicly. Ozawa helped establish the Sakuteiki as one of the classic and canonical garden sources. It replaced the Tsukiyama teizōden and its supplement, which had been extensively cited by Conder and Morse as the most valued historical source on Japanese gardens in Japan as well as in the West, not least of all due to Ozawa’s influence. In 1893 Ozawa wrote an influential paper about Western public parks and compared them to Japanese gardens. His article started with a definition of the concept of “public parks,” which at that time was still new to Japan: “Public parks are essentially gardens set up for common public [kōshū kyōdō] enjoyment and relaxation.”68 He went on to explain the history of public parks in the West. This led Ozawa to criticize Japanese gardens heavily. In his opinion Western parks served the people living in their vicinities well, but the Japanese gardens did not.69 To back up his claim, a year later he published plans of New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.70 In the meantime Honda had made a name for himself as a Western-style painter but had also published work on Japanese gardens. His Zukai teizōhō (An illustrative guide to gardens) was published in 1890. Suzuki Makoto of the Tokyo University of Agriculture has called it the “first book to adopt a modern perspective in writing about gardens and landscape gardening in Japan.”71 The “modern perspective” can be understood quite literally since Honda introduced perspective and other techniques into his drawings of Japanese gardens, proving that he had learned his lessons from Western art. However, Honda also relied on illustrated guidebooks of Kyoto and its gardens that had been published by Akisato Ritō, as Ursula Wieser Benedetti and Katahira Miyuki have shown.72 These guidebooks were very popular around 1800 and anticipated some of Honda’s presentations.73 A short introduction accompanied many drawings

and sketches that helped explain Japanese gardening. Honda expressed his hope that the book might help readers design gardens.74 The clear drawings and etchings helped to categorize bridges, lanterns, and stones. The grouping was not as elaborate as Conder’s but a Linnean logic was not completely absent. It was therefore no coincidence that Conder used many of Honda’s illustrations for his book. However, Conder did not always set out to explain the same things on the plates even though he often followed Honda’s sequence of explanation. Conder seems to have had a strong impact on Honda as well, especially in terms of Linnean logic. This is most obvious in a paper he presented in 1900 in Washington, D.C., to the American Institute of Architects. It was published two years later in a volume titled European and Japanese Gardens, where it followed papers on Italian, French, and English gardens.75 This paper could have been written by Conder in terms of its style and type of argumentation. Without much of a general introduction it started to categorize elements of the Japanese garden in the same way Conder had done eleven years earlier in his groundbreaking Landscape Gardening in Japan. Ten types of garden stones were explained first; trees, types of gardens in general, and lanterns swiftly followed. Plates accompanied the paper, grouping members of families such as fences in Linnean fashion.76 Clearly Ozawa and Honda had learned much from the West concerning Japanese gardens and parks. But they also actually planned gardens. Ozawa in particular had played a part in one of the most important gardens in Japan. He had helped reorganize the inner garden of the Ise Shrine. The shrine is dedicated to Amaterasu Okami, the legendary sun goddess and most important god in the mythological lineage of the imperial family. As such the Ise shrine was transformed into the center of state Shintō after the Meiji Restoration. Taking part in reconstructing this garden was a very honorable task for Ozawa. But Ozawa was unable to realize his vision of public parks and Japanese gardens. His plan for a Japanese garden as part of the new Hibiya Park, the first Western-style park in Japan and thereby a highly prestigious project of the capital Tokyo in late Meiji era, had been rejected in 1903.77 Nevertheless, Ozawa was commissioned along with Honda to plan one of the gardens of the Japan-British Exhibition in London in 1910 (see Figure 19). Honda and Ozawa chose highly representative designs for their garden. Imre Kiralfy as well as the Japanese ambassador Katō Takaaki voiced their discontent about the outspoken design of Honda’s Garden of the Floating Island. But in the end they were talked into accepting the design, being told that visitors would like it very much.78 Visitors and press reactions proved Honda and Ozawa correct. Izawa supervised the completion of both gardens in London. While Izawa went on to build another garden for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco,79 Honda and Ozawa returned to Japan, where the latter took up teaching at the age of seventy at the Tokyo Metropolitan School of Horticulture, thereby deeply influencing future generations of garden and landscape designers.80 Ozawa and Honda were intellectuals, not classic, professional gardeners. Both had actively changed the notion of Japanese gardens during the Meiji era. Ozawa had promoted knowledge of the Sakuteiki and many old gardens at the very moment they were left to decay. Honda had helped Conder construct his idea of Japanese gardens. The Japanese government had not simply commissioned two gardeners for the London exhibition, then, but two

intellectuals who were able to translate the scripts of Japanese gardens. A statement from the Japanese Educational Department proves that the loss of authenticity that accompanied this translation of the Japanese-garden script was not entirely unwanted: “The gardens are not purely Japanese. They manifest the good feeling existing between the horticulturalists of England and Japan; equally they symbolize the alliance between our two countries, for Japan supplied the ideas and the plants while Britain contributed the site and materials.”81 Surely not all governmental institutions would have consented or put it that bluntly. But there was clearly an understanding that the gardens of Honda and Ozawa were built for specific reasons and thus did not have to be genuine.

Figure 19. Ozawa Keijirō designed the Garden of Peace for the Japan-British Exhibition in 1910. Postcards of the gardens, such as this postcard, were popular souvenirs. Postcard from the author’s collection.

Representing Japan In summarizing the role of world’s fairs in spreading Japanese gardens globally, it is helpful to take a look at the fairs’ general impact in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. World’s fairs and their smaller national and regional offshoots helped to establish a new order of knowledge as well as new modes of acquiring this knowledge. Spatial classifications played a crucial role in this endeavor. Items from various countries were grouped together in displays. The groups in turn were arranged according to classificatory expertise. Exhibition halls for art, industrial machines, or horticultural products brought all of the items together in a wellordered state. It was therefore easy for visitors to view similar products with one glance and to compare everything.82 By strolling through the corridors, visitors also got an idea as to

which items belonged together systematically. The exhibition order very closely resembled Linnaeus’s classification of plants and animals. Conder’s treatment of the elements of the Japanese garden followed the same logic as did exhibitions. This arrangement of items at world’s fairs made the world completely intelligible and transparent for visitors. Every exhibited item was categorized and its place in the exhibition was chosen accordingly. The Crystal Palace, which Paxton had built for the first modern world’s fair in London in 1851, was a metaphor for this transparency as well as for the progressive stance of the fairs. Accordingly the new mode of acquiring knowledge at the world’s fairs was visual. The Crystal Palace’s construction of glass and steel made the interior quite light and allowed those outside to gaze into the inside. National pavilions added another classificatory category to the fairs in the age of imperialism. Nations competed against one another on equal grounds. But national pavilions were not part of modern world’s fairs from the beginning in 1851. Actually Japan’s attempt in Vienna in 1873 to present itself positively to the world was one of the first displays of this kind. In the lead-up to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, the Philadelphia Inquirer on August 7, 1875, published a comment by the U.S. minister who had been sent to Vienna to study the fair there two years earlier. He proposed generalizing the concept of national pavilions to foster competition among the countries taking part and to add novelty to the fair: “If adopted by the principal powers it would constitute a feature which no previous exhibition has presented excepting the Japanese garden at the Prater.” Not only were the Japanese among the first to present themselves with a national display, a garden was the ideal means to do so and to spark public interest. However, the competition was hardly fair. The most modern nations’ pavilions were gathered at the center of world’s fairs, while the pavilions of peripheral, “exotic” nations were placed at the outer bounds of fairgrounds. Japan had moved somewhere in between these two categories. The placement of the Japanese pavilion in Chicago in 1893 was most telling. Floating on the Wooded Island, belonging neither to the ranks of the most modern nations nor to the most backward, Japan was in a liminal stage. The country meanwhile had accepted the imperialistic order of fairs in two ways: it took part in international fairs while it also staged its own fairs at home.83 Internalizing the new order of knowledge, the Japanese were thus able to adjust at international fairs. The country occupied a unique place in the world order. As the only non-Western country with its own pavilion, Japan was able to escape imperialist dictates. Establishing itself as an imperialist power in Asia, it could reach near equal status with Western countries. But before Japan could evolve as an imperialist power, it was subjugated to the Western categorization of the world. One characteristic of world’s fairs was the Orientalist notion inherent in them.84 Countries like Egypt, India, China, and Japan to some degree were subject to Orientalist reasoning, which assumed a racial or cultural essence. The Oriental traits were judged to be in opposition to the modern West and characterized by an absence of rationality and other Western virtues. Mitchell has pointed out how the presentations of Egypt at the 1889 Paris fair worked along these lines.85 An old quarter of Cairo was erected. The chaotic, picturesque goings-on there proved to the audience how Egypt was the exotic opposite of

modern France, how it had presumably been like this forever without much development, and how it lacked order and reasoning. Japan was mostly able to escape such notions by building its own pavilions, proving that there was development and modernization in the Far Eastern country. But this came at a cost.86 By including Japanese art and gardens in its displays, Japan was promoting a certain essentialism, because those gardens were presented as eternal, cultural assets. Japanese gardens acted as static reminders of the country’s culture and love of nature. Even though they changed quite dramatically in the first decades of their appearance in the West, they were simply presented as further examples of the same. While the garden in Vienna played with clever understatement, gardens in later decades were more flamboyant, often having replicas of the Kinkakuji, the golden temple from Kyoto, at their centers. Meiji baroque had taken over and Kinkakuji worked as a recognizable icon from the tourist trails of Westerners traveling Japan. Of course very few visitors at world’s fairs had ever visited Japan or would do so in the future. But the Kinkakuji was not only golden and shining and thus an attention-getter, it also was regularly mentioned in descriptions of trips to Asia and depicted in travel guides. It acted as an icon of mystic Japan. Jordan Sand argues that Japan in this era Orientalized itself in three ways: it put itself in opposition to the West, its own past, and the Asian continent, most especially China.87 The culturalist Japanese gardens at world’s fairs were a means to express at least two of these oppositions in their representation of the past and of the difference between East and West. The gulf between Western and Japanese gardens was stressed often. The last opposition that Sand discusses, the one to China, was only elaborated gradually. While Japanese commissions in 1873 and 1876 openly admitted the Chinese inheritance of the Japanese garden, they denied it in ensuing fairs. In trying to join the imperialist countries of the West, Japan had to distance itself from its less successful neighbors. When Japan defeated China in 1894–95, the longestablished hierarchy between the two countries was turned upside-down. Japan was no longer a satellite of the cultural center (China), as it had been for more than a millennium. Instead Japan had evolved into the new leading political force in Asia. Especially at the 1904 world’s fair in St. Louis, the Japanese government tried to convince the world of the principal gap in development between both countries.88 For the Japanese government this gap had justified expansion to the continent in order to “help” China against Western imperialism and to propel the country into the twentieth century. The Japanese government could not fully escape the Orientalist modes of presentation by Westerners that the other peripheral countries had experienced. Its own were not the only pavilions dealing with Japan, and Japanese gardens were not its own exclusive means of expression. Others intervened and created gardens according to their own needs. Japanese gardens simply proved to be too profitable an attraction to be used by the Japanese government alone to advertise the country. Competing visions of Japan run by private operators sprang up in San Francisco and Paris. In addition, privately owned gardens, like the Morrises’ at their arboretum, represented Japan in a way the Japanese government could not control. As Japanese gardens proliferated in the United States and Europe, the official versions at world’s fairs were no longer the only ones to give an idea of how such spaces might look.

How did fairgoers look at the displays? They certainly compared objects and grouped them together and bought some of the “exotic” things they saw. But mostly fairs were attractions that somehow had a displacing effect, as Eric Breitbart writes: “The fair itself must have seemed like the Emerald City in the Land of Oz. First-person accounts of visitors to the fairs in Chicago and St. Louis stress the feeling of disorientation, of being overwhelmed. Without a normal frame of reference, it is easy to see how one’s critical faculties could lapse, and why it became difficult, if not impossible to distinguish between what was real, what was simulated, and what was total fantasy.”89 With all the foreign, exotic, flamboyant pavilions, it was easy for visitors to become completely overwhelmed. World’s fairs offered a virtual trip around the globe in a few hours. Visitors could wander within minutes from a street in Cairo to a Japanese garden and end up in a German beer hall. In doing so they probably did not always notice which pavilions were “authentic”—in other words, set up by an official institution—and which pavilions belonged to a company advertising a product or trips to far-off and exotic countries. Thus competing visions of Japan, official and private, most likely ran together in the minds of visitors. As a result, the Japanese commissions at the world’s fairs lost control of their country’s representation.

Japonism and the Gilded Age Along with Conder’s book, Japanese gardens at world expositions sparked the interest of people in the West for this new and exotic kind of garden design, then, but only a few had the means to take matters a step further. Rich connoisseurs started to build Japanese gardens for themselves, especially in the United States but also in Europe. Satō Akira has argued that only the actual knowledge of Japanese gardens in Japan would be sufficient to explain the vogue abroad.90 A mere acquaintance through books would not have led anyone to plan one of his own. Surely some owners of Japanese gardens had been to the country and learned to love this style, savoring the originals to such a degree that they wanted to imitate them back home. But there is more to the vogue of Japanese gardens than just personal nostalgia for a trip to Japan. In following the spread of Japanese gardens to private estates in the West, I abandon the rigid timeline that has led us through world’s fairs. Gardens and owners are rather freely cited in what follows to explain the impact of private Japanese gardens. The analysis thus slips back to the nineteenth century or rushes to the end of the first vogue of Japanese gardens in the 1930s whenever necessary. Carl Duisberg’s garden in Leverkusen near Cologne, Germany, is a good though somewhat late example that shows how traveling to Japan might have been one reason for building a Japanese garden. Duisberg was the general director of Bayer, a leading chemical and pharmaceutical company. He went to Asia in the early 1920s and wrote a long letter to his gardener, in which he told him of his decision to build a Japanese garden next to his villa. Duisberg described his motivation as follows: “The highlight for us was and is Japan, where everything is completely different from elsewhere on this globe and where nature, art and humans form a splendid triad.”91 This triad again hints at the reasons Thomas W. Kim has

brought forth for the Japanese vogue.92 Rich Westerners admired the way in which nature, art, and daily human life seemed reconciled in Japan. This must have been a tempting image, especially for the general director of a huge company—even more so because this triad could be easily transplanted to Germany by buying diverse decorative bronze storks and stone lanterns. Most gardens of the Japanese vogue were built one or two decades earlier in the United States, England, or France, but their rich owners’ ideas and plans most often resembled those of Duisberg. Duisberg was an exception insofar as he did not rely on a Japanese gardener. In order to authenticate their garden, many owners employed the Japanese to plan and build them; for example, the Morrises hired Muto. Sometimes, however, those hired were not qualified for the job, at least not in a strict Japanese sense. Fukuhara Masao has researched Tatton Park in the vicinity of Manchester, England, which was built in 1912 following the Japan-British Exhibition two years earlier.93 The exhibition had sharply increased English interest in Japanese gardens. Photographs from that period show Japanese gardeners working the land, and local memory also points to the Japanese as builders of the garden. Japanese working two years earlier in London were probably recruited for laying out the new garden by its owner, Allen de Tatton Egerton. But as Fukuhara has observed, the placement of the stones and some other elements, such as the waterfall, seem strange if not “un-Japanese.”94 The only exception for him is the shrine, which he thinks was built by the Japanese. Without any sources other than the photographs, he concludes that there is no real proof of Japanese participation in building the garden. More likely, though, the Japanese in the photographs may simply have been helping hands with no real expertise in garden layout. If so it is unlikely that they would have known how to build a good Japanese garden that would be pleasing to the eyes of a Japanese researcher ninety years later. Most likely Tatton Egerton employed them only for some authenticating effect. Fukuhara’s argumentation is typical in Japanese studies of Japanese gardens worldwide. International gardens are compared to some authentic Japanese ideal. If the gardens fail this test, the conclusion is that no Japanese could have been involved in building them. Fukuhara and many of his colleagues implicitly assume that every Japanese person is capable of building a perfect Japanese garden and anyone who cannot is not Japanese. It was much easier to employ Japanese gardeners in the United States than in most European countries. There was a considerable migration of Japanese to both the West and East coasts of America. Some of the migrants had been talented gardeners before going to America; some started gardening only after arriving in the United States, and in this sense they were educated under diasporic conditions. Many of their gardens would stand up to the judgment of Fukuhara even today. These gardeners usually made a good living from creating contracted gardens during the Japanese vogue in the first three decades of the twentieth century. But after Pearl Harbor most of the Japanese were detained and Japanese gardens fell out of fashion for a decade. The Japanese gardeners went on to build gardens in the detainment camps as a form of solace.95 Europe was not without its migrant gardeners. Kusumoto Seiemon, for example, built many gardens in England and displayed examples at the annual Flower Show of the Royal Horticultural Society in Chelsea.96

Having a Japanese garden was a luxury. Advertisements of estate agencies in the Times of London give a rough idea of who owned them and how they were integrated into their estates. Of course the Times was too costly for minor agencies to advertise in, but the data are still valuable for the insight they offer. The first estate on sale “seated in ground beautifully shrubbed with unique Japanese garden” was the Lambourne House, advertised in June 1877, only four years after the first world’s fair in Vienna and one year after the Centennial Fair in Philadelphia. Surely the Japanese garden mentioned in the sales pitch must already have been established for some time. Lambourne House is a proper residence commanding twelve acres of land (roughly three hectares), not exceedingly large by the standard for houses offered in the Times, but providing nevertheless a clear indication that it was the richer among the rich who built Japanese gardens. Seven years later another residence with a Japanese garden, this one belonging to H.R.H. Duke of Cambridge, was offered for sale.97 Houses with Japanese gardens started to be sold on a regular basis only in the 1920s, when two or three offers were advertised yearly. Each house commanded nine or more acres of ground and was located in the countryside, often within a half-hour car ride to London. In nearly all cases, the Japanese garden is mentioned along with one or two tennis lawns and sometimes also a croquet lawn. Tennis lawns seemed to have been a prerequisite for country residences in those days and only a few advertisements did not mention them; Japanese gardens were treated as an extra. The column “The Estate Market,” which discussed such offers, concluded that for one case in 1922 “the picture of the Japanese garden serves a useful purpose in providing the real importance and attractiveness of this seaside home.”98 In the 1930s there were fewer such advertisements and those estates that were advertised were considerably smaller. Even houses with one or two acres and a Japanese garden were now to be found. These were still residences not made for the middle class but more affordable for the “average” rich. Japanese gardens were popular in the United Kingdom even around the turn of the century, but they started to become very fashionable after the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910. The Times published some fundamental discussions on Japanese gardens in 1910, including an article written by Conder.99 After World War I Japanese gardens were hardly mentioned in the editorial content of the Times for another decade. In contrast, advertisements by estate agencies offering houses with Japanese gardens appeared much more regularly than before. It is highly likely that these gardens were built during the first two decades of the century when Japanese gardens were in vogue, even if the residence was on sale in 1927 or 1931. Tennis lawns were widespread, as I’ve noted, yet offers for more conservative, olderstyle estates sometimes did not mention them. Quite frequently, on the other hand, estates with Japanese gardens were often advertised as “modern residences.” The advertisements seem to be meant for rich buyers with a certain open-minded attitude. Duisberg in Leverkusen and Morris in Philadelphia were both modern entrepreneurs and had earned their fortune on their own. Not every owner of a Japanese garden in England, Germany, or America was liberal or modern, but, reading between the lines, there seems to be a certain congruence in the data: for private owners in the West, Japanese gardens were associated with being en vogue and modern.

Japanese Gardens as a Stage It was not only the rich who wanted to enjoy Japanese gardens; as we have seen, they had captured the imagination of a broad public through the world’s fairs. For many who wanted to enjoy the atmosphere of Japanese gardens but were not able to build a full-sized one for themselves, Japanese tea gardens were especially popular.100 They did not resemble the more contemporary versions of such gardens but were rather teahouses with a Japanese or japonaise appearance. Some of the gardens at fairs were transformed into durable attractions by turning them into tea gardens; the former Japanese village of Golden Gate Park is no doubt the most famous one in North America. References to commercial Japanese tea gardens can be found quite often in American newspapers of the times. In addition, stone lanterns and other devices for Japanese gardens were on sale so that everyone could at least transform a small strip of green into something like a Japanese garden. Finally, Japanese-garden parties were in fashion. On August 6, 1905, the Philadelphia Inquirer announced in a lengthy article “the up-todate hostess who goes in for bizarre effects in entertaining cannot make a happier choice than by regaling her friends with a Japanese garden party.” Kimonos and makeup were de rigueur for these parties as well as the decoration of the lawn: “The ingenuity and the financial limitations of the hostess determine the diversions for the lawn and the refreshment tables.” Not all of the Inquirer’s suggestions make sense today. While fireworks are quite typical for Japan, the suggested dish of Fan Tan Chop Suey is not (gardens, decorations, and clothes were often displayed at fairs, whereas food was not and so the Inquirer substituted Chinese food for Japanese). Newspapers had suggestions not only for how to celebrate a Japanese-garden party but often for how to build Japanese gardens, whether full-size or in miniature—and at a low cost as well. Being able to build a real Japanese garden instead of celebrating a fake Japanesegarden party was surely a means of distinction. In Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, published in 1899, gardens signify conspicuous consumption, “useless” expenditures that are made not just for the enjoyment of them but also for setting their owners apart from the less well-to-do.101 Many of the Japanese gardens on the American West and East coasts as well as those in Europe surely served as a means to these ends as well. The economic meaning of Japanese gardens at world’s fairs was more obvious than in the case of privately owned ones. Fairs were less about conspicuous consumption; the driving force behind the competing Japanese gardens was the lure of economic success. According to Breitbart, world’s fairs combined three objectives.102 They served as scientific showcases, commercial shop windows, and amusements for visitors. Everything on display was instructive about the countries being represented, but attractions like a Japanese village in San Francisco or the Tour du Monde in Paris were first and foremost built for making money. Authenticity was only needed insofar as it helped draw customers. The official Japanese pavilions were no exception. Though financial considerations had a more long-term outlook overall, parts of the gardens such as the lanterns and plants were sold and therefore were not just decorative but counted as export goods.103 The economic background of the world’s fairs eventually led to the commodification of everything displayed, be it goods meant for sale or displays of cultural essence. Japanese artifacts had gained popularity in the United States and Europe in a vogue

called japonaiserie. Lacquerware and prints of ukiyoe, furniture, and stone lanterns were sought-after objects. A plant nursery from Yokohama started to expand globally and opened branch nurseries in the United States and Europe that offered the necessary species for American and European Japanese gardens.104 As Thomas W. Kim has remarked, Western consumers received Oriental objects as an “education in beauty,” a lesson in nature, and a method for forming the aesthetic senses.105 Or as the Philadelphia Inquirer recommended in an article on Japanese gardens on July 1, 1914, “If every child were taught how to plant a little Japanese garden he would be delighted and he would become an artist in soul at least.” Even the less well-to-do could buy objects, such as the highly popular stone lanterns, or build miniature gardens. Because of this commodification, merchants in most cities staging world’s fairs sought to secure their piece of the economic pie. They offered similar things to what the fairs’ traders themselves were offering. During the Japan-British Exhibition stone lanterns could be bought all over London, for example.106 The boundaries between world’s fairs and cities blurred even though they were clearly demarcated with fences and walls.107 This was true in another respect as well: trade itself was transformed. Department stores competed with small retailers and they took up the mode of presentation from the world’s fairs. Everything was on display; nothing remained hidden in the stockroom. Many similar articles were offered together so that customers had a broad choice. Prices were no longer negotiable. The commodification led to the use of Japanese gardens as a scenic background for selling goods and raising interest for a show or benefit sale around the turn of the twentieth century, especially in the United States. Numerous parties, festivities, bazaars, and vaudeville acts started to feature a Japanese garden as a decorative theme, background, or stage decoration. Vaudeville in particular, a truly American variety-type entertainment, included Japanese sketches and songs. Japanese fans, plants, and lanterns helped create an atmosphere that was normally meant to denote a Japanese garden. At the Mechanics Fair in Boston in 1898, the Japanese garden was the setting for yet another spectacle. Four times each day, a model ship was blown up on its pond.108 The USS Maine had exploded earlier the same year in Havana. This incident was restaged in Boston to draw the attention of the visitors and help promote the fair. Calmness and an atmosphere for meditation that are attributed to Japanese gardens today do not seem to have been a requirement around the turn of the twentieth century. In the end, the Orientalist gap separating the West and the East created a space in which Japan could be consumed via art, furniture, gardens, or other means. Japan was exotic, but it was also readily at hand, or as the Philadelphia Inquirer remarked on August 6, 1905, “The war in the East has flooded the shops with all manner of importations from the hands of the wily Jap; so that to impart a Japanese background is not as difficult as one might suppose.” Sand has argued that this consumerism actually created a space in which Orientalism faded away as “Japan” was simply transformed into something purchasable just like other goods.109 It might be more apt to speak of a certain oscillation between commodification and Orientalism, however, an alternation between exoticization through displays at world’s fairs and de-exoticization through consumption. In any case, Japanese gardens were well

established as part of Western popular culture by the turn of the twentieth century. A whole vogue of Japonism had evolved, and the Japanese garden had played a central role therein.

Chapter 4

Between Essence and Invention

Garden Stroll IV: UNESCO Garden, Paris The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has had its headquarters behind the Champ de Mars in Paris since 1958. Planning for the complex began in the early 1950s with many famous modern architects—Marcel Breuer, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Antonio Nervi among them—playing a part in its design. The location is highly appropriate for an international organization such as UNESCO, as the Champ de Mars served Paris as the location for its world’s fairs from 1867 onward. The Eiffel Tower is a close neighbor and is a reminder of the spot’s international history. The headquarters is housed in four modernist buildings that were state of the art in the late 1950s. The Y-shaped main building is connected to one of the smaller buildings by a garden possessing a charm all its own (see Figure 20). An artistic landscape extends around a pond. Sculptures, stones, trees, and shrubs form an oasis for UNESCO staff. Spots such as the rough-shaped stone basin called Tsukubai offer evidence of the consideration that was given to small details. Natural stones create an interesting tension as they are placed on cobbled pavement. The huge lantern named Akari, located in one corner of the garden, provides a good example of the garden’s character. It is a huge stone block in which a cubic opening has been carved that is reminiscent of a traditional Japanese-garden lantern. In all of the artifacts in the garden as well as in the general layout, one senses the presence of an artist. The garden lies open to visitors and offers its many sculptures freely to view. The garden fits in with its modernist surroundings. Adding green to the headquarters, it is nevertheless clearly modernist itself (see Figure 21).1 Naruse Hiroshi calls it the “Japanese Garden” on the UNESCO website’s homepage, but its artistic background is more complex than that.2 In 1955 Isamu Noguchi was asked to design a garden for the new headquarters. Noguchi, the son of the Japanese poet Noguchi Yone and the American writer Leonie Gilmour, was born in 1904 in Los Angeles but he spent much of his childhood in Japan before returning to the United States to attend school. In the 1920s and 1930s he established himself as an artist, moving back and forth from New York to Paris but also to Kyoto.

Figure 20. An early photograph of Isamu Noguchi’s garden at the UNESCO headquarters gives a good overview of its design. The garden extends around a pond between the buildings of the headquarters. Various sculptures by Noguchi populate the garden and add an artistic note. Today the garden’s plants are larger and overshadow the paths and artwork. Courtesy of the Noguchi Museum, New York.

Figure 21. Water flows through Noguchi’s garden. Photograph by John Dixon Hunt.

In 1942 Noguchi decided to become an internee in one of the camps that the Japanese on the West Coast were forced to enter if they did not move eastward. Because Noguchi had already been living on the East Coast, his internment was voluntary. According to Masayo Duus and Peter Duus’s biography, Noguchi soon found out that he did not have much in common with the other internees.3 In addition, his plans for enhancing the camps with Japanese gardens were not welcomed by authorities. It escaped the attention of Noguchi that his co-internees had also very actively built Japanese gardens and had tried to ameliorate the camps in a similar fashion.4 Noguchi was able to get a leave from the camp after just seven months and never returned. Once again pursuing his artistic career, he went back to New York, though in the years after the war’s end and for the remainder of his life, he spent much time in Japan as well.5 All in all Noguchi led the life of an intellectual artist with many international connections and possibilities. UNESCO’s decision to commission a garden from him is testimony to his standing in the decade after the end of World War II. Noguchi interpreted the commission rather freely and was able to convince the Japanese government to sponsor the material necessary for the garden, thereby also gaining UNESCO’s approval to expand it into something larger than originally planned.6 In order to collect stones for the garden and learn more about garden design—a craft with which he was not very familiar—he turned to Japan. After getting advice from a famous garden architect, Shigemori Mirei, he went to Shikoku to find appropriate stones, which then were shipped to Paris.7 Building the garden seems to have been very strenuous. Noguchi had hired a gardener

from the sixteenth generation of an established family of Kyoto garden masters. This gardener, Sanō Toemon, recalled decades later in an interview that his cooperation with Noguchi was rather burdened by differences and tensions.8 Noguchi wanted to showcase his sculptures in bright light; Sanō argued that Japanese gardens were a form of understatement. Art would have the most effect if it were not visible to visitors initially; it should be hidden and then discovered. In the end Noguchi got his way. Sanō offered a culture-based explanation for the differences between himself and Noguchi in the interview. He concluded that Noguchi was not really Japanese, had seen too much of Tokyo’s dazzling gardens, and had no taste for the “real” Japanese gardens of Kyoto.9 In 1999 Sanō got a second chance to lay his hands on the garden without any interference from Noguchi when he was commissioned by UNESCO to restore the garden, which had become slightly run-down. On the UNESCO website, Naruse demonstrates some problems categorizing Noguchi’s garden. “UNESCO’s garden” and “Japanese gardens” are described on separate pages. Of the latter, he writes, “Human participation in the ever-changing existence of the garden is indispensable, not only in its creation, but also in its upkeep and, lastly, in the gaze of the walker. Whereas a single axis would impose a mind-numbing, the Japanese garden offers changing vistas from its various viewpoints with a sophistication rooted in sobriety.”10 Naruse enumerates many deviations from this in Noguchi’s work of art. The open vistas and diagonal axis are atypical; for Japanese people, the use of asphalt in a garden would be “highly shocking.”11 Nevertheless, Naruse aims to point out that the garden is Japanese and tries to reconcile Noguchi’s biography with essential Japanese traits: “His creation is perhaps more profoundly Japanese than anything a Japanese artist who had remained in Japan would have created. . . . Isamu Noguchi is a deeply Japanese sculptor but ultimately very international and modern in his assertion of himself as an artist (a Western concept).” Ultimately, as Naruse argues, the garden is also authentically Japanese because Sanō had a hand in its creation.

WE HAVE SURVEYED the early history of Japanese gardens in the West and the discursive formation of a body of knowledge accompanying their practical arrival. A decade after the beginning of the twentieth century, the popularity of Japanese gardens reached its peak. In the 1930s it started to decline gradually. The numbers of gardens as well as numerous books and articles offer evidence of how popular the gardens were. But how can we discuss Japanese gardens in the West in theoretical terms? What is happening here between East and West? What exactly are East and West in this equation? Are they not mere constructs of the mind? Were gardens part of forming the binary? Questions like these pertain to more than gardens, of course; they have been asked about many cultural artifacts around the globe and many different theoretical models and explanations have been offered. These discussions have moved well beyond academic circles to newspapers, magazines, and popular books. This can be seen very clearly in the case of Japanese gardens.

Only a few publications exist that offer theoretically founded explanations for the global spread of the gardens, but myriad popular books and articles deal with the topic and offer explanations for their popularity in the West. These popular explanations are not really the focus of this chapter, but we should keep in mind that they exist and form the body of knowledge about Japanese gardens to a considerable degree. In addition, it is not always easy to distinguish between scholarly and popular books. Some authors operate in both fields. Books on Japanese gardens can sell quite well, and it is therefore understandable that authors would try to aim to appeal to the general public as well as more specialist readers. Kendall H. Brown is one such American author.12 He has published a very thoughtful book on Japanese gardens on North America’s West Coast that is insightful and yet capable of attracting a broad readership.13 Recently he expanded the scope of this book and published another one covering gardens in North America in general that stands out because of the beautiful photography by David M. Cobb.14 Another author of such books was the late Irmtraud Schaarschmidt-Richter, who had attracted readers to Japanese gardens since the late 1970s.15 Her books are mostly directed at a broad public; however, she also defined the Japanese garden for German East Asian studies.16 Although her analysis suffers from a narrow concept of culture, her publications have nevertheless been very popular. Her writings fit into the first category of theories that will be discussed in this chapter: the essentialists. In contrast, Brown is more of what I call an inventionist, though he does not fully fit into that scheme. Both are legitimate heirs of Edward Morse, Josiah Conder, and Lafcadio Hearn, and then Loraine Kuck, Bruno Taut, and Christopher Tunnard in carrying the discourse on Japanese gardens into the second half of the twentieth century. Of course, many other authors have added to this discussion, including the American Samuel Newsom and the Japanese Itō Teiji, who has been actively publishing in English.17 Nevertheless, I have chosen Schaarschmidt-Richter and Brown as the most useful for analyzing the major trends in Japanese gardens in their second vogue. In doing so, my mode of discourse analysis changes slightly. Conder, Hearn, Morse, and the others in the first vogue could be analyzed in a Foucauldian way, stressing the historical importance of their works for establishing a canon of knowledge on the subject. Schaarschmidt-Richter, Brown, and the contemporary authors are more like counterparts in an ongoing scholarly discussion.

Garden Essentialism The essentialist mode of theorizing Japanese gardens in the West has a long history, dating back to the start of the twentieth century. With Japanese gardens becoming popular and private gardens springing up, the question arose as to whether these gardens interpreted their Eastern models correctly. Doubts were raised about the authenticity of Western gardens. In 1910 the Times of London ridiculed Japanese gardens in the West as “mere freaks.” With two “authentic” gardens on display at the Japan-British Exhibition in London, the many private gardens’ flaws became obvious. The Times advised its readers to adapt only some of the ideas underlying a Japanese garden and to abstain from “slavish imitation.” This type of advice was

often given by newspapers, garden journals, and garden theoreticians alike in the following decades. In 1916 the Times added a good reason for this type of warning: “We must not imitate them, for if we do, we shall merely parody them. Bamboos and stones and lanterns will not make a Japanese garden.” Advice like this had a very practical basis. Since many gardens were still being built, the question remained about how they could be most authentic. Some abandoned the idea of the perfect Japanese garden. Rudolf Hartnauer, who planned the Japanese garden in Leverkusen, modestly proclaimed that his piece was in the manner of Japanese gardens but not a Japanese garden itself.18 Westerners could not hope to grasp the philosophy of a Japanese garden fully at any rate. Therefore building an authentic Japanese garden was not even possible. In stating this, Hartnauer admitted that the West had difficulty understanding Japanese gardens. It was not up to Westerners to copy Japanese gardens; all they were able to plan was japonaise. Be that as it may, the Japanese garden in Leverkusen was more of an Oriental garden in an art deco mode, combining statues from Indonesia and art from China along with Japanese lanterns, a teahouse, and many flowers. The basic idea behind these discussions is an attempt to uncover the essential Japanese garden. This idealized garden has a fixed meaning and does not change throughout history. It is built by a Japanese person. A transfer to the West is complicated. The main limitation is the lack of understanding of fundamental Oriental principles. Schaarschmidt-Richter has argued this frequently and is a strong proponent of the essentialist view. She wrote many books on Japanese gardens from the 1950s until her death in 2009. Some of them have been translated into English and some coauthored with Mori Osamu, a prolific garden historian who also published one of his own books in English. As late as 2008 Schaarschmidt-Richter argued that Japanese gardens have not yet been well understood by the West—the notion of Japanese gardens is still “vague”: “In the West strange ideas about building a Japanese garden exist. One needs only to place some stones, plant some Japanese plants and add pebbles to the whole thing—done! But it is not that easy.”19 Building a Japanese garden is much more complicated for Schaarschmidt-Richter: “The Japanese garden has not really changed a lot throughout history, but yet has developed intensively. However, its basic concept has stayed the same since its beginnings.”20 This has been a very typical assumption that has been put forward by authors from the West and the East alike. In fact, Schaarschmidt-Richter’s admired teacher and coauthor on one book, Mori, has worked hard to prove the point. He has excavated many old gardens and tried to show how contemporary gardens are related to them. Along with many other of Mori’s assumptions, Schaarschmidt-Richter’s concept of an essential Japanese garden, even though published in a book in 2008, seems to be outdated. However, this publication helps to more fully clarify the essentialist view that most if not nearly all scholarly books on Japanese gardens have taken. Schaarschmidt-Richter’s position, therefore, cannot be called peculiar or eccentric though it is highly conservative: “The power of the Japanese garden is documented by the fact that it has become exceptionally popular in the West, in Europe and America. Whether it has been correctly understood remains an open question. But this is of no consequence in our context. One wants to say that the Japanese

garden in its totality is a real ‘World Cultural Heritage.’ ”21 Japanese theorists have also formulated mostly essentialist assumptions, but not many of them have actually reflected on Japanese gardens in the West. Kajinishi Sadao was probably the first who tried to present an overview shortly after World War II.22 He asserted that Japanese gardens had been appreciated in the West since the 1878 world’s fair in Paris. But “the essence of their beauty was not understood.”23 This was partly due to the appearance of the gardens themselves, which was anything but perfect, according to Japanese standards. The West had started to perceive the gardens, but misunderstandings prevailed to a certain degree. Kajinishi’s critique of Conder and Morse, which built on articles by Harigaya Kanekichi and Satō Akira in the 1930s questioning Conder’s understanding of Japanese gardens,24 shows that this was more than a problem of imperfect representations at world’s fairs. According to Kajinishi, Conder and Morse had not been able to grasp the essence of Japanese gardens while analyzing them.25 It was Hearn who understood them nearly as well as the Japanese. Satō carried on this tradition, renewing and sharpening his much older critique-filled stance.26 He argued that Japanese gardens in the West were reproductions of the essential Japanese garden. As such, the question was whether the Western adaptations were authentic. In 2006 the Japanese Institute of Landscape Architecture published a special edition of its journal Randosukēpu kenkyū (Landscape research) on the topic of Japanese gardens worldwide, which reproduces these judgments of Kajinishi and Satō. Essentialism stipulates a certain mode of explanation for cultural transfers that has by no means been limited to gardens or to Japan. For at least a century it has been quite popular to theorize about the flow of other cultural units across borders. Those cultural units are assumed to be either correctly understood or more often to be misinterpreted in their essential identity. For example, the journey of Buddhism to the West has often been studied as a process of interpreting essential religion unaffected in its essence by internationalization. The same is true for all kinds of philosophical systems or thoughts, political systems, and even sports. Essentialism is clearly linked to other assumptions about culture, its distribution, and its comprehensibility—at least in most cases. Essentialists construct cultural containers in order to stabilize the referent. These containers are mostly national ones. Japanese gardens are cultural entities defined as being Japanese. Japanese culture defines their outward appearance —if only because their gardeners are Japanese. This methodological nationalism lets a national territory, the people living there, and the culture stemming from this all coincide. Everything within the container or territory is in principle fully intelligible to the people inside. At the same time it causes problems of understanding for people outside of it, living in other nations. Taking the essentialist view has strategic dimensions for authors. In the realm of Japanese gardens this strategic positioning is easily discernible. Since Western authors such as Schaarschmidt-Richter blame the West for adapting Japanese gardens superficially and in a distorted way, they carve out a distinguished position for themselves. It is SchaarschmidtRichter who is able to point out where gardeners and planners have failed. They cannot understand Japanese gardens fully because these gardens are unintelligible to most foreigners. Schaarschmidt-Richter is a foreigner herself, of course, yet she does not side with Hartnauer,

who modestly admitted to problems of interpretation and their consequences for building a Japanese garden. Instead she implicitly asserts that she is the rare being capable of bridging the gap between the illegible Japanese garden and her Western readers. Japanese authors benefit in a similar way from pointing out the problems of understanding Japanese gardens in the West. They safeguard their authority against Western competition. Because only Japanese can fully understand Japanese gardens under the essentialist paradigm, even authors such as Schaarschmidt-Richter have problems defending their position against authentic Japanese experts. No outsider can ever fully hope to reach the level of insiders. Japanese experts are the only ones in possession of the true knowledge, and they can rank Westerners according to their degree of understanding. Kajinishi, for example, has compared Conder, Morse, and Hearn, coming to the conclusion that Hearn’s account is most Japanese— though not entirely.27 Conder and Morse lack the Japanese understanding of gardens when they analyze them, while Hearn comes closer with his synthetic approach. Of course the question arises as to how someone like Honda Kinkichirō would fit into Kajinishi’s analysis. Honda’s accounts of Japanese gardens are no less analytical than Conder’s. In fact each seems to have learned from the other. Though Honda is Japanese, his approach would probably be labeled as Westernized according to the logic of essentialism in order to keep categories clear and separate. In principle essentialism seems to be outdated. However, there are still followers. Hermeneutical studies as well as many theories of “intercultural communication” use assumptions similar to essentialism. Garden magazines, art catalogs, or best-sellers on Japanese gardens still depend on an essentialist logic to describe Japanese gardens outside of Japan. Finally, Japanese experts also willingly submit to this strand of explanation as it solidifies their standing in a global world and helps secure contracts.

Inventions of Gardens Essentialism is still put forth within many publications about Japanese gardens. However, a new strand of analysis has been established in the last decades concerning Japanese gardens in the West, owing to a general criticism of essentialism. In contrast to Schaarschmidt-Richter, Kendall H. Brown can be labeled as an inventionist. In his book Japanese-Style Gardens of the Pacific West Coast, he comes to the following conclusion: “Japanese gardens are literally Western constructs. . . . Given their great numbers and often distinctive formal as well as functional differences from gardens in Japan, Japanese-style gardens constitute a distinct type of Western garden.”28 The West has invented its own kind of Japanese garden. Although they pretend to be based on authentic Oriental forerunners that are essentialized, the “Japanese garden becomes whatever we want it to be.”29 Brown has reiterated this point in his latest publication but notes that Japanese governments and Japanese living in America have also added to the invention of “North American gardens in Japanese style.”30 This interpretation fits very well into a trend from the 1990s when many things started to be seen as invented or constructed. Ian Hacking lists twenty-six socially constructed entities

(in alphabetical order), including “authorship,” “brotherhood,” and the “child viewer of television” up to “Zulu nationalism.”31 The Invention of Tradition, edited by Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger in 1983, is probably one of the most important starting points for the tradition of inventions in the humanities. Various “traditions” are deconstructed here. The rituals and practices are not nearly as old as people generally assume. Most of these “traditions” were invented in the process of nation-making in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They serve to anchor national identity in history and help to set up boundaries of national distinction. The Scottish kilt is certainly the most-cited example from this collection. Hugh Trevor-Roper has shown how the patterns of Scottish kilts were invented on the occasion of a royal visit to Scotland at the end of the eighteenth century and are not nearly as traditional as people believe.32 Their use in a historical film like Braveheart is simply anachronistic, because the Scottish hero William Wallace never wore a tartan, as Mel Gibson did. But the claim of the tartan tradition is backed up by such uses of the kilt in popular culture. Stephen Vlastos has adapted the notion of invented traditions very successfully for Japan.33 An array of essays on topics like the “Invention of Edo”34 and the invention of home through a new form of Japanese domesticity in the Meiji era35 prove the viability of Ranger and Hobsbawm’s concept for Japan. Many inventions of tradition helped smooth Japan’s rapid modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century and legitimize the new state. Yanagita Kunio, the founding father of folklore research in Japan, even stated that Japan had been able to modernize without losing its ties to tradition.36 This assumption could only be made by deliberately ignoring the fact that most of these “traditions” were actually rather recent inventions and did not fit into the framework of modernity by chance. Japanese gardens in the West, or Japanese-style gardens as Brown cleverly terms them, also seem to fit very well into the scheme of inventions as introduced by Hobsbawm and Ranger and expanded to Japan by Vlastos. Scottish kilts do not differ much from Japanese gardens: both cultural artifacts try to essentialize the history of a nation. But there is a major difference between Japanese-style gardens and the kilt. In Scotland a certain group of people invented the kilt for their own purposes. The nobility wanted to stage a Scottish nation in front of the royal visitors in order to strengthen their role in the United Kingdom. In contrast, Japanese-style gardens were an invention in the West claiming authentic counterparts in Japan. Brown more or less leaves out the role of Japanese agents in the invention of Japanese gardens and focuses on processes abroad. At times, these processes of invention do include layers of the Japanese diaspora, as Brown shows.37 Rich citizens commission designers to plan their Japanese gardens, and as the rich want something “authentic,” most of these designers are of Japanese descent. As customers, however, the rich shape the gardens according to their needs and desires. Instead of transferring Japanese gardens from the East to the West, they invent their own Eastern realms. The Japanese do not have much agency in this process. In contrast to the Scottish example, it was foreign and not local interest that led to the invention. Therefore, Edward Said’s classic Orientalism seems to be more fitting for describing Brown’s approach.38 The discourses on the Orient that took form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were relatively ignorant about the actual situation in the Middle East.

Instead they focused on historical sources. Orientalist statements were derived without visiting the contemporary Orient. In consequence the discourse formed its own grammar for deciding which new statements on the Orient would be acceptable. Said did not compare the “real” Orient to the discourses. His point is not to blame the Orientalist discourse as inaccurate compared to its subject; rather, he tried to bring the grammar of this discourse into the limelight. Brown’s theorizing about Japanese-style gardens operates along similar lines. His Japanese-style gardens reflect the West’s creation of its own version of Oriental wisdom. The garden’s design follows its own grammar on the Pacific West Coast, as well as in other parts of America. It does not ultimately reproduce Japanese knowledge on garden design, be it historic or contemporary. Gardens as well as the texts about them establish a discourse in its own right and with its own logic. Of course some authenticity is asked for—but not too much. The difference between invention and essentialism is very clear. Essentialists establish a referent (Japanese gardens in Japan) to determine the accuracy of the cultural transfer. In contrast, the referent is of no interest to inventionists. They look at the dynamics of the invention, unaffected by any original in Japan that could serve as a point of reference. Inventionists in Hobsbawm and Ranger’s tradition would even deny the existence of a referent in many cases. Scottish tartans are only loosely connected to history, and points of reference have to be invented. The invention of tartans has thereby rewritten history all along and authenticates the tartans in return. Said’s theory is also not concerned with the assumed referent of the sign. Orientalist discourses might present themselves as if they talked about the “Orient” referent, but in reality the connection of their discourse to the Orient referent is merely superficial. We cannot state anything in relation to the referent on top of the discourses as they are concerned with their own grammar. In the 1970s and 1980s many park commissions, determining that the old gardens were not Japanese enough and did not meet the standards of being “authentic,” decided to rebuild their gardens in order to align them more closely to the Japanese examples. On occasion, Brown was invited in as an expert. In these cases he urged park commissions to treat their Japanesestyle gardens not as representations of Japanese gardens per se but as historical examples of a certain Orientalist frame of mind that should be maintained as such. Traces of such advice by Brown can be found in archives like Maymont in Richmond, Virginia, and elsewhere. In many cases, however, Brown’s inventionism probably came a decade too late. Brown’s inventionism differs from full-fledged Orientalism or constructivism in at least one important respect. He proposes an inventionist approach when analyzing Japanese-style gardens in the West, yet he does not ignore the referent of “Japanese gardens in Japan.” For him these gardens have an essence, even though this essence is in constant flux. Brown has recently proclaimed that it lies in the “tradition of transformation.”39 This essence is mostly unaffected by the construction of Japanese gardens in other parts of the world. It is simply historically and socially founded in Japan, as Brown explains in his rather conventional historical narration of gardens in Japan.40 Though Brown already criticizes essentialism concerning Japanese gardens in his theoretical introduction of his earlier book, Japanese-Style Gardens of the Pacific West Coast, he stumbles into this pitfall in the end.41 When describing

a Japanese-style garden in Costa Mesa, California, designed by Noguchi, he declares, “Here, the essence of Japanese garden design thrives, even as the external features have been discarded.”42 As Noguchi’s garden is the final example for Japanese-style gardens on the Pacific West Coast, this is more or less Brown’s final statement in the book. His inventionism is only one step away from older essentialist patterns. For Brown there seems to be a possibility of going beyond the inventions of the early twentieth century and building Japanese gardens in the West that are no longer Japanese-style but rather Japanese. As a consequence Brown’s idea of terming Japanese gardens in the West “Japanese-style gardens” is misleading. It suggests that gardens in Japan can be rightfully called “Japanese gardens,” while the gardens in the West are only “Japanese-style.” This introduces essentialism through the back door. Gardens in the West are invented; gardens in the East are not. Brown’s terminology offers no remedy and, because of that, I do not take up his suggestion but only write about “Japanese gardens.” As a result, there is some ambiguity regarding the term “Japanese garden” that runs through this book, for I use it to denote both gardens in the West and gardens in Japan. These two types of gardens seem to be different from one another, but if we distinguish them, the danger of falling back into essentialism becomes very real. I can thus only beg readers to live with this ambiguity since it is an important aspect of my theoretical approach. Inventionism regarding Japanese gardens could be carried much further and surely beyond where Brown ends. Why is it only the gardens in the West that are seen as an invention? The history of the first gardens in the West sponsored by the Japanese government shows how the idea of what constitutes a Japanese garden had only been elaborated gradually. The gardens in Vienna and Philadelphia would no longer be seen as pure Japanese gardens today, neither by Japanese nor by Westerners. Japanese gardens were not a finished form or design from the outset when transferred to the West. The notion of the gardens was stabilized only two or three decades later—for Western observers as well as for the Japanese. A radical constructivist would claim that Japanese gardens in Japan were also an invention in the late nineteenth century. These invented gardens served the Japanese government in strengthening national identity. Japan was itself an invention during the process of nation-building in the late nineteenth century, as has been claimed by Shimada Shingo.43 Gardens would fit into this process as a device to represent the newly generated nation to the outside and imbue it with certain qualities, such as a special love for nature. Early in the twentieth century Japanese governments had fully understood this and found a distinct form of gardens, proven by the presentations in St. Louis and London in 1904 and 1910, respectively. Indeed invention or construction is a powerful concept in dealing with Japanese gardens. It is very tempting to simply deconstruct the idea of Japanese(-style) gardens altogether. The gardens would end up as simulacra, not tied to any referents but to the nineteenth-century mode of thinking.44 Thus nation-building would serve as a motive behind the immense task of constructing the image of Japanese gardens. The theoretical gain would be a story of coconstruction transcending Hobsbawm and Ranger as well as Said by blending them together. But this is probably too simplistic. First of all Hobsbawm and Ranger as well as Said have been targets of criticism, and for good reason. One of the most outspoken critics is the cultural

anthropologist Marshall Sahlins.45 He criticizes the notion of invented traditions outright, using the paper on Japanese sumō in the Vlastos volume as an example.46 Alterations to sumō do not prove the invention but rather the inventiveness of tradition for Sahlins.47 Sumō simply adapts creatively to a novel situation. It is not surprising that critics such as Sahlins have raised their voice since the theories in question are about three decades old. New and probably more accurate notions of tradition, invention, construction, and discourses have been introduced. This does not mean that the whole complex is completely outdated and wrong. The theories of Hobsbawm and Ranger and of Said remain central for the analysis of Japanese gardens. Nevertheless, critical voices have to be taken into account. Even more important and challenging is a kind of paradox that springs up when labeling Japanese gardens as an invention. Brown made a valuable point when stressing that gardens in Japan are real places, a fact so obvious that it might be easily ignored in constructivism.48 Everyone can visit gardens in Kyoto that are hundreds of years old. They cannot be modern constructions because they are medieval ones. Gardens like the Ryōanji have been around for a long time. This reasoning asks for a much more precise treatment of concepts like invention or construction in order to unravel what at first looks like a refutation of these concepts.

Ideas and Constructs The paradox about the construction of Japanese gardens is in fact only paradoxical if the content of what is constructed is mistaken. The philosopher Ian Hacking has cleverly scrutinized concepts of construction in his book The Social Construction of What? Japanese gardens in Kyoto are not constructions and yet then again they actually are—in the literal sense of the word. Hacking, whose book is about social construction in general, has incidentally used the Japanese garden of the Detached Palace in Katsura as an example of this difference.49 Gardens are constructs—nobody would deny that landscape architects, their clients, and workers have created them. However, the notion of construction can relate to many things, among them objects, ideas, or ideologies.50 Construction of Japanese gardens thus has to refer to ideas, ideologies, and interpretations. When the discourse on Japanese gardens began with Conder, Hearn, and Morse, an essentialized construct started to come into existence. But these Western notions did not leave Japan unaffected. This is a first important point going beyond Brown’s idea of invention. Gardens in Kyoto were reinterpreted to fit into nationalistic ideology by the Japanese themselves, as has been demonstrated quite impressively for the garden of the Katsura Detached Palace and the stone garden at the Ryōanji temple. Inoue Shōichi has deconstructed the myth of the Katsura Detached Palace in Kyoto and its garden.51 As we have seen, the palace was promoted in an attempt on the part of modernist architects to gain full acceptance in Japan. Because of that, the palace’s garden became an icon for Japanese taste and simplicity.

Yamada Shōji tells a very similar story about the Ryōanji temple’s garden.52 The stone garden, now ubiquitous as an iconic image for Japanese gardens, was rather neglected up to the 1930s. At that time it was turned into a symbol for Japaneseness just like the Katsura Detached Palace. Yamada deconstructs the idea of the Ryōanji in various ways. Its history does not reach as far back as many historians and popular belief would have it. It probably goes back only three or four centuries and not seven or eight, and it may not have even been a pure stone garden in the beginning. Roots of cherry trees were found beneath the soil, indicating that cherries blossomed in the Ryōanji’s garden three or four centuries ago.53 Finally, Ryōanji is mistakenly seen as a prime example of the Japanese Zen garden. This idea was erroneously introduced by Loraine Kuck and has become a global commonplace. Historic sources in no way back up this claim. In other words, whereas no one doubts that the garden was constructed by someone, the ideas and ideologies surrounding it have been essentialized in many ways. Currently the garden is surrounded by an aura based on false information. Deconstruction can unveil this and demystify Ryōanji’s garden. The gardens have long been in existence; however, their meaning changed quickly when they were drawn into nationalist redefinitions of Japan.54 This process clearly indicates the force of social construction—not of gardens themselves but in the realm of ideas and ideology. The contradiction between the notion of social construction and the gardens already having been there for centuries becomes meaningless if ideas, ideologies, and objects are distinguished. It is these ideas and ideologies surrounding the gardens that are the prey of deconstruction, not the gardens themselves. Deconstruction only makes sense if seemingly natural things are unmasked as being not so natural after all; if everybody knows that a thing is constructed, its deconstruction is meaningless.55 If constructivism and deconstruction as modus operandi work so well with Japanese gardens, why go further? Hacking offers some answers. Deconstruction has lost some of its ability to scandalize. Constructionists began by unveiling commonplaces such as the assumption that the binary of man/woman was a simple biological fact. This helped to reveal matters in a different light and in many cases had a liberating effect. If gender is not a fact of nature but a social construction, it is possible to rethink social categorizations and the politics based on them. Many other similar cases have benefited from deconstruction. However, social constructionism itself has already become orthodoxy. Often enough, the game of deconstruction is only scandalous in its conservative insistence on unmasking scandals. Findings are no longer surprising. In a sense it has become clear that each and every thing is constructed or at least can be constructed if it has not yet been constructed. Deconstructing has become a routine operation for many researchers in the humanities. Of course there are still many who have not converted to constructivism and insist on categories, ideas, or objects that have an essence or existence beyond the means of deconstruction. Probably few would doubt that some deconstruction in the case of Japanese gardens is helpful or even necessary. Some might question the more radical findings of Inoue or Yamada. But these critics would certainly be concerned about the specific history of construction and whether, for example, Yamada is right to claim that cherry trees blossomed in the Ryōanji’s garden. Deconstruction is rejected to a much greater degree on a more popular level. Popular

authors will lose their topic if Japanese gardens and Japanese-garden designers are stripped of their “essential” qualities. A special relation to natural, mystical, or synthetic qualities and a thorough rootedness in Zen Buddhism help sell books on Japanese gardens as well as the gardens themselves. For this stratum of writers and their readers, deconstruction might still cause a scandal and shake their precious beliefs. But that is not the main goal of this book; Brown, Inoue, and Yamada have already partly done this. The theoretical stakes are greater than simply impressing those who need essential beliefs as a secure haven. The analysis of Japanese gardens should go beyond simple deconstruction. Hacking added another layer to social construction of interest when he introduced the concept of interactive kinds.56 Some kinds of constructs interact with the ideas and ideologies formed about them. For example, people categorized as migrants under certain circumstances might start to act according to socially constructed beliefs about migrants. The social construction becomes selffulfilling as the migrants turn into interactive kinds, accept their categorization, use it strategically, or try to alter it. As Hacking points out, not each and every socially constructed thing can become an interactive kind.57 Japanese-garden masters might be impressed by discourses treating their gardens and adjust their future designs. However, gardens cannot be impressed because they are inanimate objects. Hacking’s example of Katsura was surely not meant to illustrate what is happening with Japanese gardens and their designers but was chosen more or less by chance. Nevertheless, it fits very well and clarifies some points if extended. It is not just the garden masters who are responsive to the social construction of Japanese gardens, as they react to voices discussing and stereotyping their gardens. All others involved in sponsoring, planning, and finally building the gardens also respond to the discourses on their subject. Discourses and spatial practices are not completely separated. But not everyone involved is an interactive kind. Patrons, sponsors, and garden masters certainly are interactive kinds in this context as they are mystified by the outside and model themselves and the gardens according to the mystification. The workers building the gardens are sometimes interactive kinds as well, but not regularly enough. In our case, Hacking’s definition is therefore applicable not to all involved, but solely to the garden masters. The others rather actively construct gardens themselves. Combined with another problem of simple social constructivism, Hacking’s addition drives the example of Japanese gardens to yet another interesting problem. Simple constructivism misses many points that make the case of these gardens interesting. Applying invented traditions or Orientalism to the gardens highlights this. The gardens are neither an invented tradition within one culture nor an Orientalist construct from the outside. Both West and East take part in shaping the Japanese gardens of the twentieth century and beyond, both within Japan and in other parts of the world. It is a co-construction under special historical conditions. The Japanese garden’s history described in Chapters 2 and 3 took place during the age of imperialism. Though Japan is a non-Western country, it was able to escape colonial rule by the West. Japan even managed to turn into an imperialist power to be reckoned with in the first half of the twentieth century—which led, of course, to the catastrophe of World War II and the ravaging horrors of destruction that were both inflicted on and suffered by Japan.

Gardens as representative spaces played their role in ameliorating the image of Japan within the imperialist ranking of nations. Ideas and ideologies surrounding both ancient and new gardens, and the construction of new gardens, were embedded in a highly dynamic process of negotiating a Japanese position in the world. Although according to Hacking, gardens are not interactive kinds, their constructors cannot help but react to discourses. As a result, gardens change. This is true not only for new gardens but also for ancient ones. Advertisements for them can adapt to discursive constructions. Spatial presentation is also not fixed. Even if the garden stays more or less untouched, altering its spatial context with fences, benches, informational boards, and other devices may help make it fit into discursive assumptions. In that sense gardens are interactive kinds as their custodians are involved in webs of meanings. Because the discourses as well as the gardens themselves were situated at the borders of cultures, negotiations over them took the form of translational and relational conversations. Noguchi’s UNESCO garden offers a prime example of the complexities of translation and interactive kinds. The garden may simply be seen as a stroke of genius by an American artist with Japanese roots, but the case is in fact much more complex. Noguchi, Sanō, the Japanese government, diverse UNESCO commissions, and even stones and plants started to interact intensively in the late 1950s. They exchanged interpretations, cooperated, and formed a spatial arrangement that went on to evolve over the next decades. The whole process is extremely dynamic. It is surely no case of invention, even though an artist is involved. The garden is constructed, but this also does not explain it adequately. Noguchi, Sanō, and some Japanese workers can be seen in the autumn of 1958 actively constructing the garden onsite.58 The problem of the garden’s appearance goes well beyond this point of construction.

Chapter 5

Zen and the Art of Gardens

Garden Stroll V: Portland There are many magnificent Japanese gardens on North America’s West Coast. Among them, the Japanese Garden in Portland, Oregon, has a special status. Located in Portland’s Washington Park, the garden (Figure 22) attracts more than 200,000 visitors each year. Just beyond the parking lot, and before visitors climb a path to the admission kiosk, they pass through the Antique Gate. In his book on the garden, Bruce Taylor Hamilton notes the function of the gate: “Immediately, one enters into another world, sequestered, settling and calming.”1 Once inside the garden proper, the Flat Garden catches the eye first. A plain of raked pebbles extends between the gentle green and trees. The terrace of the Pavilion, added in 1980 and the largest building in the entire garden, provides the best view of the Flat Garden.2 From the other side of the Pavilion one can view Portland’s skyline. The Natural Garden and the Strolling Pond Garden are roughly as large as the Flat Garden. More secluded than these three gardens and considerably smaller are the Sand and Stone Garden and the private Tea Garden. The Sand and Stone Garden lies in a sink among trees and so can be viewed from above. A yellow wall covered with dark gray tiles encloses the plain, and stones seem to float on white raked pebbles. The resemblance to the Ryōanji is obvious. Connecting paths among the five gardens—as well as plants, stones, a surrounding wall, and other details—help unify the areas. In 1959, Portland had established a twin-city agreement with Sapporo on the northern island of Hokkaidō. Portland’s mayor at the time, Terry Schrunk, believed that a garden would help develop a friendship,3 and plans for a Japanese garden, as a symbol of their partnership, were quickly put forth. In the early 1960s the Japanese Garden Society of Oregon was founded to raise funds for the project, and, in 1963, Tono Takuma, a professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture, was officially commissioned to design and build it. Sapporo donated a precious pagoda, a “Japanese treasure,” which now stands in the Strolling Pond Garden.4 Construction of the garden began in 1963, and it was officially opened to the public in 1967.

Figure 22. The Japanese Garden in Portland consists of five garden areas. The Flat Garden and the Strolling Pond Garden are the largest and most accessible. Courtesy of Andreas Steinbrecher.

Tono was a good choice because he had spent a few years in the United States after graduating from the Hokkaidō Imperial University with a degree in agronomy. He received another degree, this one in landscape architecture, from Cornell University in 1921 before returning to Japan.5 His first commissioned garden was the “Japanese style garden” at Delaware Park, in Buffalo, New York, built in 1920.6 In Japan, however, Tono designed mainly Western-style gardens, amusement parks, and recreation areas, capitalizing on what he had learned at Cornell. Nonetheless, he remained interested in Japanese gardens, as evidenced by a 1925 paper on Japanese gardens in North America and various papers from the late 1930s, in which he marveled at the simple beauty of the Ryōanji in Kyoto.7 After World War II, Tono started teaching at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and once again took up writing about Japanese gardens, a subject on which he published an interesting book in 1955. Despite being aimed at a Japanese readership, it contained many English headings and captions. Tono argued that the Japanese had recently renewed their appreciation of Japanese gardens as part of their heritage. But through his use of English, he suggested that the gardens were not just Japanese but also a contemporary fashion in the West, probably a strategy to arouse more interest. In 1958 Tono returned to the United States to lecture about Japanese gardens and

started to build some outstanding examples, among them the Portland Japanese Garden. Because Tono had a long-standing history of mediating between Japanese and Western garden art, and also because he spoke English, it was relatively easy for him to capture the imagination of Portland citizens and to promote the Japanese gardens through lectures and radio and television appearances. Initially, Tono had planned only three garden areas for Portland, which he later expanded to four. (The Natural Garden was added in the 1970s, to make the current five.) With these gardens, Tono was able to display one of each of the three accepted categories of Japanese gardens that had been outlined by Josiah Conder and Honda Kinkichirō, and, with the addition of the Sand and Stone Garden, he introduced visitors to the Zen garden, which had become so popular after the 1930s (Figure 23). In contrast to the overcrowded “un-Zen-like” Ryōanji, Portland’s Sand and Stone Garden has fewer visitors and therefore offers a truly meditative atmosphere, as Hamilton has remarked.8 But the sand used in Portland is exactly the same sand as at the Ryōanji: it was taken from the Shirakawa River in Kyoto.9 In 2013 the garden celebrated its fiftieth anniversary and was able to look back on its success. Tono had foreseen the difficulties in maintaining the vast garden and so from the outset volunteers were recruited to help with its construction. This has paid off in the long run as the Portland Japanese Garden remains able to rely on a broad membership base and the ongoing help of volunteers.10 The garden promotes Japanese culture through many regular activities, such as poetry readings, tea ceremonies, lectures, and lessons in tree pruning. During a visit in 1978, Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda Takao claimed that the Portland Japanese Garden was the “most authentic [Japanese garden] outside of Japan.” Whether or not that claim is accurate is open to debate.

Figure 23. The Sand and Stone Garden is nearly a replica of the Ryōanji’s stone garden. Photograph by Laurascudder.

THE LOOK OF Japanese gardens in the West changed decisively between the prewar period and the 1950s and 1960s. Before World War II, Japanese gardens had fallen out of fashion, and the war only accelerated their fall from grace in most Western countries except for Germany and Italy, the countries Japan had sided with in the war. In America and England, Japanese gardens often had to be renamed “Oriental gardens” in order to avoid public disdain and even attacks. The discourses described in Chapter 2 and the spread of Japanese gardens in the West described in Chapter 3 had come to a halt. But it did not take long for Japanese gardens to regain their popularity. Within ten years of the end of World War II most Oriental gardens were once again renamed “Japanese” and new ones were built. A new vogue of Japanese gardens began to spread throughout the West. During the first vogue, gardens included such elements as stones, lanterns, and bridges, but plants dominated the gardens so that they appeared as green oases. In this new wave, however, only a few of the new gardens resembled the older ones, and the most noticeable difference was the prevalence of stone gardens. From early on, the literature on Japanese gardens mentions stone gardens (kare-sansui) but only in passing. Conder did not even reserve a group for them when classifying different garden types.11 They did not play a major role when it came to actual design, and only a few stone gardens had been built in the West prior to the late 1950s. Compared to the

overwhelming number of green gardens, their presence was negligible. The new taste for more somber or even austere gardens was probably due to Loraine Kuck’s book One Hundred Kyoto Gardens (1935), along with Bruno Taut’s admiration of the garden of the Katsura Detached Palace and the Ryōanji. From the 1930s onward, the Ryōanji had started to draw more and more visitors both from within Japan and from without, and by the 1950s, the Ryōanji had regained its prominence just as Japanese gardens were regaining their popularity in the West. But what became newly popular were not Japanese gardens in general but the stone garden in particular. Portland’s Sand and Stone Garden offers a useful point of comparison to the gardens that introduced Chapters 2 and 3. Those two gardens—Clingendael and the Morris Arboretum—fit into their surroundings, which were parks based on European designs. Although Japanese stone gardens have also been part of larger parks, they are more often part of a stand-alone garden, as in Portland. In defying the usual conventional garden, Portland’s stone garden exemplifies a new generation of Japanese gardens in the West. Words like “quaint” were no longer used to describe them. They inscribed themselves into the Western appreciation of Japanese representational spaces, and the qualities ascribed to them somehow changed yet stayed the same.

Zen Gardening A variety of factors worked together to bring about the new vogue of Japanese stone gardens in the 1950s and 1960s. Although there had been some academic interest in Zen Buddhism before 1945, the new interpretations of Zen by the philosopher Suzuki Daisetsu led to its popularization in the 1950s. In addition, Japanese governments, seeing gardens as ideally suited for cultural diplomacy, played a major role in promoting stone gardens. Finally, modernism in architecture as well as in interior design called for austerity, a feature associated with Japanese gardens since Kuck, Taut, and Christopher Tunnard. The result was that highprofile projects to refurbish the image of Japan and to reintegrate the country into the international community were focused around architecture and gardens. Nonetheless, without the growing interest in Zen, Japanese gardens would most likely have not featured so prominently in the 1950s and 1960s. The story of Zen Buddhism’s new vogue is complex. One starting point was surely the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This late date might at first sound surprising since Zen has been a major branch of Japanese Buddhism at least since the Middle Ages. But modern Zen and Zen gardens were scripted in the late nineteenth century, with Suzuki Daisetsu as one of the major drivers of this change. Robert Sharf has shown how Suzuki’s modern, nationalist interpretation of Zen Buddhism has become the canonical understanding.12 In 1893, he had taken part in the World’s Parliament of Religions, which was hosted in Chicago and led to a fundamental reformulation of more than one Eastern creed and, most famously, of Hinduism. It was there that Hinduism was amalgamated from various regional practices and promoted actively by Vivekananda as a unified religion comparable to Western religions.13 Because

Buddhism had been under siege by the Meiji government since 1868, Japanese Buddhists took Chicago as a chance to rehabilitate themselves and appeal to the Western public, hoping international attention would help their cause back in Japan.14 As a young secretary and interpreter, Suzuki was part of that Chicago contingent, and afterward he stayed in the United States to study. William James’s religious pragmatism, in particular, helped him formulate a version of Zen that would prove appealing to the West. After his return to Japan, Suzuki started publishing on Zen Buddhism in English. Since only a few Japanese scholars wrote in English, their publications became those most referred to by Zen scholars and adepts in the West. Suzuki’s major work, Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture (1938), dealt with the canon of Japanese high culture formed in the Meiji era and showed how Zen Buddhism heavily influenced each of its forms of cultural expression.15 According to Suzuki’s interpretation, Zen thinking shaped not only gardens but also flower arranging, martial arts, and archery. Some earlier English publications on Japan, such as Nitobe Inazō’s Bushidō (1900) and Okakura Kakuzō’s The Awakening of Japan (1904) and The Book of Tea (1906), used Zen as a foundation—though not as radically as Suzuki—and they had helped pave the way for his new interpretation of Japanese culture. Although Suzuki’s works had been well received in the West before 1945, their popularity soared after the war. As Brian Victoria points out in his groundbreaking work Zen at War, Suzuki had been entangled with Japanese ultranationalism,16 and Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture contained occasional nationalist sentiments. After the war, when his thinking had changed, Suzuki prepared a new edition with the new title Zen and Japanese Culture (1959). Nevertheless, Zen had found adepts in the West before World War II who often cited Suzuki as an authority. One example is a German professor of philosophy, Eugen Herrigel, whose book Zen in der Kunst des Bogenschießens (Zen and the art of archery) remains a favorite of Zen lovers. Like Suzuki, he also rewrote his work after the war. It had originally appeared before 1945 as a paper in the journal Nippon.17 Later Herrigel removed the parts obviously influenced by his early sympathies with National Socialism.18 After 1945 more Western writers joined Suzuki in portraying Zen as the underlying religious principle of Japanese culture. The most popular were Alan Watts in the United States and Christmas Humphreys in England, but many more could be named. Their writings generally painted Japan in Orientalist terms. While the West was described as rational, individualistic, and analytic, the East was emotional, collectivist, and synthetic, with Zen anchoring one half of this binary.19 Suzuki’s analysis of Zen, in contrast, employed an important strategic move in order to avoid the grip of such Orientalist descriptions. He approached Japan’s Zen not as rational or irrational but as able to synthesize the two. Such an approach placed it, implicitly, at a higher level than Western civilization (which could only command rationality) and, of course, much higher than undeveloped countries (which remained mired in irrationality). In this respect, Suzuki exhibits the influence of the Kyoto school, a philosophical circle that had come to the same conclusion in pondering the problems and drawbacks of modernity.20 Suzuki’s strategic positioning introduced love and a special relationship with nature—characteristics the West had lost—as typically Japanese. Such a characterization might formerly have consigned the Japanese to classification as a “primitive” people—who were thought to be

closer to nature—but Suzuki’s achievement was to successfully distinguish the Japanese as outside such Western categorizations. As a new architectural anchor for Japanese gardens, Ryōanji’s stone garden was the perfect replacement for the ubiquitous Kinkakuji of prewar Japan. The Ryōanji was, of course, the canonical icon of the Buddhist creed, but, more important, it proved the tenability of Suzuki’s strategic move by expressing his teachings artistically. Because it appeared to transcend both rational analysis and irrational emotion, it defied Western analysis so that only the Japanese and a few Westerners were able to fully grasp its meaning. And yet the austere appearance of Ryōanji’s garden set it far apart from primitivism, normally the opposite pole of Western rationalism. A special closeness to nature was fundamental not only to the essence of Japanese tradition but also to modernist design, with its high level of abstraction. Thus the Ryōanji was a riddle for modernist thinking and sharpened the image of Zen both in the West and in Japan.

Cultural Diplomacy and Architectural Modernity After the war, in efforts to rebuild its reputation, the Japanese government used gardens as a form of cultural diplomacy as they had done at world’s fairs up until the late 1930s.21 Samuel Newsom’s A Thousand Years of Japanese Gardens (1952) helped in these efforts. In the foreword to the book, which was published the same year Japan regained its sovereignty, Newsom explained the deep moral impact of gardens: “As gardens are to the Japanese a vital part of living, they must not only express the spirit and essence of nature, but also the dignity of man.”22 In the postwar context that Brown has termed “Cold War Orientalism,”23 Japan used gardens as straightforward gestures of friendship throughout the world, not only in the United States as in the case of the Portland Japanese Garden. In 1954 the Japanese government sponsored a pavilion with an adjacent garden in Säo Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park.24 Since many Japanese émigrés lived in the region, this helped strengthen their position in the country as well as diplomatic ties between Japan and Brazil. The Japanese government also agreed to sponsor the Noguchi garden at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. It helped when Noguchi wanted to expand his plans to bring stones from Shikoku and to build a much larger garden than had been originally commissioned. Without additional money and the official backing of the Japanese government, he would not have been able to convince UNESCO to accept his new design. The Japanese government sponsored another important project in New York. Since 1949, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had been staging exhibitions of model modern houses on its grounds. Marcel Breuer, who had played an important role in the new UNESCO headquarters in Paris, planned the first of these houses. A year later the American architect Gregory Ain provided the plans for another. These two houses were genuinely Western and modern. After them, MoMA wanted to display a traditional Japanese house for the third stage of the project.25 Arthur Drexler, the curator and director of the Department of Architecture and Design, believed that traditional Japanese houses would add a new angle to its display of

modern architecture. He traveled to Japan with three Japanese architects and an art critic who, together, formed the committee for the exhibition house and wrote a book about his experiences.26 By 1955, he succeeded in having a Japanese house with a surrounding Japanese garden built for MoMA. Although the house’s proper Japanese name was Shofuso (Pine Breeze Villa), it was usually referred to as the “Japanese house” to emphasize its character as a national model. The costs for the project were split between MoMA and the Japanese government. The Japanese paid for all costs in Japan, and MoMA for those in the United States.27 John D. Rockefeller III provided financial support to MoMA.28 He had long been enchanted with Japan and in 1950 had proposed one of the first plans to bring a Japanese house to MoMA. The exhibition drew long lines of visitors and was the most successful in the series of modern model houses up to that point. Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru visited the house, too, which is more proof of its importance to Japan as cultural diplomacy. Drexler saw the house as an important Oriental contribution to modernity. As seen in Chapter 2, the modernity of old Japanese houses had been “discovered” only in the 1930s— and not by chance. Taut’s writings on classic Japanese houses and their meaning for modernity laid the groundwork for Drexler’s own “discoveries.” The young modernist architects of Japan, who had used Taut to further their cause, had succeeded. Their reading of Japanese architectural history had become canonical. However, in contrast to Breuer and Ain, the Japanese modernist architect Yoshimura Junzō had been commissioned to build a traditional house according to his own understanding of architectural history. His house satisfied the Japanese government, which had spent heavily on the show, and Drexler, too, saw the Yoshimura MoMA house as authentic. But in a 1991 interview with the Japanese magazine Approach, Yoshimura contradicted Drexler. “My work at the Museum of Modern Art was not typical, because it was about introducing Japan, and I planned something appropriate for this goal. It is not an original of mine, and, well, it is of course not authentically Japanese. I intended it to be easily grasped by Americans.”29 Given his point of view, one might say Japan was denied a truly modern modernity.

Figure 24. Edward Winters (construction supervisor), Arthur Drexler (curator and director of the Department of Architecture and Design), and Yoshimura Junzō (architect of the Japanese house at the Museum of Modern Art) (from left to right) discuss the final stages of construction in the surrounding Japanese garden. This publicity photograph was released in connection with the exhibition Japanese Exhibition House, MoMA, New York, June 16, 1954, through October 21, 1954; April 26, 1955, through October 15, 1955. Museum of Modern Art 1954, ©Photo SCALA, Florence.

The exhibition house was surrounded by a garden that, though not the main focus of the exhibition, added to its overall success (Figure 24). Drexler had praised the Ryōanji in his book on Japanese architecture and stressed its connections to Zen Buddhism: “The most beautiful of all sand gardens is that belonging to the Ryōanji Temple near Kyoto. Ryōanji was a Zen temple.”30 Consequently, the garden of the Japanese house at MoMA was partly modeled after the Ryōanji of Kyoto (but with a small pond added).31 Its gardener was even a member of the family that had been in charge of the Ryōanji’s stone garden for centuries.32

The Zen Icon After the success of the Japanese house at MoMA, as a direct result, the Brooklyn Botanic

Garden (BBG) installed a replica of another Japanese cultural icon—none other than the famous stone garden of Kyoto’s Ryōanji (Figure 25). The MoMA house’s garden had been partly modeled after the Ryōanji, and when BBG director George Avery traveled to Kyoto in search of a garden to replicate, he once again decided that the Ryōanji would be the ideal. He chose Tono Takuma to execute the project. After its debut in 1963, BBG’s Ryōanji became a successful replica in scale as well as look-and-feel, and it drew an enormous number of visitors. The Ryōanji replica was BBG’s second Japanese garden. Since 1914, the BBG had prided itself on a Japanese garden planned and built by Takeo Shiota, a first-generation immigrant who had come to the United States with the dream of becoming a famous gardener. When the BBG had wanted to join the Japanese vogue of the early twentieth century, the Japanese consulate proposed Shiota, who had already built several private Japanese gardens on the East Coast. Although the BBG had much else to offer, the Japanese garden remained one of its main attractions until the late 1930s when the Japanese garden turned into a liability and, like so many others, had to be renamed an “Oriental” garden. Unknown vandals burned down its Inari shrine in April 1939, presumably a sign of protest against Japan’s aggressions in Asia and its political stance toward the United States.33

Figure 25. The replica of the Ryōanji’s stone garden in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden was nearly perfect. Photograph by Elizabeth Scholtz. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Following in the footsteps of MoMA, BBG’s informational brochure likened the Ryōanji to a piece of modern art: “To compare the garden with traditional gardens in the West would be like comparing abstract painting with traditional art—or contemporary symphony music

with the old well-known symphonies.”34 But it went further. The MoMA house had shown how the traditional architecture of Japan had something to offer European modernism. The Ryōanji, however, was itself modernist but of a different sort: “The picture thus created is purely symbolic, and the whole is intended for contemplation and quiet meditation.” Furthermore, the brochure quoted Kuck at length (see Chapter 2). Zen, contemplation, and meditation were at the heart of the BBG’s introduction of the garden. For the opening of the Ryōanji replica in 1963, “Reverend Hozen Seki, head Priest of New York City’s Buddhist church,” as the New York Times labeled him, was invited to speak.35 It was an immediate success. Thousands of visitors viewed the garden, and the message of Zen was well received. Newsweek wrote, “Zen grows in Brooklyn”; Flower Grower Magazine said, “Japan is nearer than you think”; and Life Magazine called it a “lovely ungreen garden.” Finally a New Yorker reporter touched upon the paradox of the garden: “In proper Zen fashion, we returned to the office at the end of the day not with an answer but with another question— one we have not answered to our satisfaction, and that we are willing to throw open to discussion: What is a garden?”36 The replica was meant to remain for just a few years before being disassembled, as the MoMA house had been, but it stayed for nearly twenty-five. In 1987, it was torn down to make room for a garage. According to the staff of the BBG, the replica had been worn out and was beyond restoration. In its place, Shiota’s original Japanese garden from 1914 was re-promoted as a Zen garden. This development proves the anthropologist Joy Hendry correct, when she contends that Zen gardens have become metonyms for Japanese gardens in general.37 The BBG’s archive holds no documents that suggest any connection between Shiota’s 1914 garden and Zen. The BBG’s yearly reports, which regularly touched on the garden, never once mentioned any relation between it and Zen. Shiota’s writings also never speak of Zen.38 For him the garden was first of all a means to “illustrate the Japanese landscape for the American public.”39 If anything, he was proud of Japan’s art of gardening, which for him exceeded that of other countries.40 Only from the 1970s onward did Zen become part of the BBG’s interpretation of its original Japanese garden. Kuck and other authors writing at the time were regularly cited in manuals for guided tours.41 A caption next to a model of the BBG near the information desk read: “The Japanese Garden, designed by Takeo Shiota, was completed in 1914. The shape of the lake borrows from the character for heart or mind which, in Zen, translates into ‘meditating center.’ ” Invocation of Zen now buttressed the older discourse, which had stressed spirituality and the religious foundation of Japanese gardens. This shift of interpretation held true not only for Brooklyn but also for many gardens in North America and beyond. Brooklyn’s stone garden was not the only one in the United States built during the 1960s, but it adhered more faithfully to an original model in Japan than any other garden, even if others also sought to reproduce Ryōanji. One interesting example is the garden at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C. There, in 1960, a teahouse was opened.42 The teahouse had been constructed in Japan, disassembled, brought to the United States, and then reassembled at its now-permanent location. The Japan-America Trade Committee sponsored its erection to

commemorate the ratification of the Japan-U.S. Treaty of Amity and Commerce one hundred years earlier. The surrounding garden was modeled after the stone garden of Ryōanji.43 The teahouse and its garden are important diplomatic symbols, but because they are on the embassy grounds they are only partly accessible to the public. A different stone garden, built in 1962, was much more accessible to visitors than the embassy’s garden. During the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle, a stone garden formed the core of an art exhibition at the Japanese pavilion (Figure 26). As part of an interior design, it suited the Seattle exhibition’s official twenty-first-century theme. Its stones had been brought from Kyoto and, after the end of the fair, they were reused for building the Sand and Stone Garden in Portland, which, as we know, was built by the person in charge of the BBG Ryōanji replica— Tono Takuma.44 Tono thus built his overseas reputation by helping replicate Ryōanji not only in Brooklyn but also on the West Coast. The Sand and Stone Garden formed just a part of Portland’s Japanese Garden but certainly was crucial to its success and reputation.45

Figure 26. The Japanese display at the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962 exhibits another Ryōanji replica, planned by Tono Takuma. Courtesy of the University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW35817.

Tono himself had wondered why Americans wanted to build Japanese gardens of their own. In a paper published in 1962, he argued that American soldiers stationed in Japan had been massively impressed by Japanese flower arrangement, ukiyoe wood prints, bonsai dwarf

trees, and Japanese gardens.46 After returning to the United States, they told their families and friends about them and started building small Japanese gardens at home. This line of argument resembles Satō Akira’s on Japanese gardens during the first half of the twentieth century.47 Both conclude that only direct contact with the original culture could have turned foreigners into connoisseurs. Tono also claimed that the contemplative atmosphere of stone gardens was popular in North America because it addressed feelings of alienation caused by scientific advances and industrialization. Whether American soldiers developed a deep interest in Japanese high culture while in the country, and whether they were decisive in the spread of Japanese culture in the United States are both debatable, but the popularity of Japanese gardens in the West remains strongly connected to the continuing appeal of Zen.

The Tea Garden and Wabi-Sabi Tea gardens became popular in America and Europe in a similar way to Zen gardens. During the first vogue of Japanese gardens, tea gardens were teahouses serving Japanese tea in “authentic” surroundings.48 Such tea gardens were set up as businesses, usually by Japanese immigrants to the United States. But since the 1950s Japanese tea gardens have been understood as the typical scenery for tea ceremonies. The tea ceremony had been introduced to the West around 1900 by popular books such as Okakura’s Book of Tea and had taken firm root in Western discourses.49 Okakura mentioned the relation among teahouses, tea ceremonies, and tea gardens only in passing. It was not until the second vogue, starting in the 1950s, that the tea ceremony and Japanese gardens became strongly linked. With the rise of Zen in the West, the tea ceremony and tea gardens were effectively bundled together and seen as stemming from one fundamental philosophy or way of life.50 When Zen and gardens started to form a similar set, it was logical to associate gardens and tea more closely. Tea started being served in Japanese gardens worldwide—not just as a commodity but as a means of creating a holistic experience of Japanese culture.51 In Germany, Horst Hammitzsch published a small book titled Zen in the Art of the Tea Ceremony in 1958 that popularized this connection between tea and gardens. He argued that the tea room and the tea garden form “a harmonic unit,” and so he treated the garden in depth. An essentializing vision of Japan drove Hammitzsch’s writings. In line with the teachings of Suzuki Daisetsu, he also viewed Zen as the main philosophy behind Japan, and the tea ceremony and the tea garden were excellent examples that proved this. In the United States Urasenke has been a driving force in staging tea ceremonies in Japanese gardens. Tracing its foundation to the sixteenth century, Urasenke is one of the main schools for teaching the Japanese tea ceremony. In the postwar period, as Kristin Surak has shown, Urasenke headmasters (iemoto) actively sought to promote the tea ceremony abroad.52 In 1950 the crown prince of the iemoto system, who became iemoto Sen Soshitsu XV in 1964, spent four months in the United States on a “tea ceremony mission,” followed by another twelve-month trip the following year. After these successful trips Urasenke furthered its international reputation by donating tea rooms, establishing chapters worldwide, and

publishing the journal Chanoyu Quarterly from 1970 to 1999. Nakane Kinsaku, one of the most eminent garden designers and theorists of postwar Japan, published three papers about Japanese gardens and tea during the journal’s first two years.53 The Japanese government promoted Urasenke’s activities as positive diplomatic missions of Cold War Orientalism. Japanese gardens in the West hosted Urasenke events, but the school also built gardens. On the occasion of the 1972 Summer Olympics, a Japanese teahouse and garden were donated to the city of Munich.54 More recent is the expansion in 2011–12 of the Japanese garden at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. There, a Urasenke-sanctioned gardener from Kyoto added a teahouse and garden.55 The tea garden emphasized Japanese aesthetics as simple yet beautiful. This mode of presentation had been of use to the Japanese delegations at the world’s fairs in Vienna (1873) and Philadelphia (1876). But it became much more powerful within the context of modernism in art and architecture, as it fit with functional Bauhaus principles and other design approaches. Two ancient Japanese terms are important here: wabi and sabi. Wabi meant a lonely atmosphere or even grief; sabi meant forlorn or lonesome. Combined, the terms eventually came to mean natural beauty with a certain understatement. Since the seventeenth century, wabi and sabi have significantly influenced tea ceremonies and other Japanese arts. The terms are often combined into wabi-sabi or used interchangeably. Their meanings suggest an ancient appearance so that a teapot that at first glance might appear imperfect, rough, and earthen is in fact a fine example of wabi-sabi. Such items are, accordingly, sold at high prices among connoisseurs. In the late nineteenth century the need for nation-building and Japanese selfrepresentation expanded the meaning of wabi-sabi.56 It became a national style that contrasted favorably to Western design, which was seen as ornamental and less refined. In the late 1930s, in a nationalist turn to early history, Japanese intellectuals and garden historians such as Nishikawa Issōtei stressed the importance of wabi, in particular, for understanding gardens as the foundation of Japanese aesthetics.57 Once demonstrated at world’s fairs, wabi and sabi started to catch on in the West and to be discussed in writing on Japanese art.58 Since the 1960s the idea of a combined wabi-sabi has interacted with Zen to great success in Japanese gardens. It revives the promise of escape from a cold machine-dominated world. With the help of wabi-sabi, modernity could be balanced in the way Tunnard had promised in his book Gardens in the Modern Landscape (see Chapter 2). The American artist Leonard Koren has offered a highly influential interpretation of wabi-sabi. Offering a long list of East-West dichotomies in line with classic stereotypical appreciation of things Japanese, Koren praises wabi-sabi as a concept that can resolve many problems of the West.59 For him, the modern West is rational, cold, and focused on industry or machines, but traditional Japan is the opposite, as expressed through wabi-sabi. It is warm, emotional, and focused on nature and wholeness. Koren essentializes wabi-sabi as others have essentialized Japanese gardens. As Wybe Kuitert has shown, wabi-sabi had practical consequences.60 In pictures of the Ryōanji taken before the late 1970s, the wall surrounding the stone garden was thatched with tiles (Figure 27). In the 1950s, Nakane Kinsaku was commissioned to restore the temple’s

garden. When removing the tiles from the wall, which was in bad shape, Nakane found evidence that suggested that shingles might have originally covered the wall and that the tiles were added later. Some old drawings of the Ryōanji seemed to confirm his theory, though others showed tiles. Whether or not the shingles were historically accurate, Nakane tried to convince the garden commission to exchange tiles for shingles in the restoration on aesthetic grounds. He believed that the shingles would make for a better balance among the stones, the texture of the wall, and the roof.61 Although the commission ultimately decided to stay with tiles, in 1978, the tiles were indeed replaced with wooden shingles in order to bring more wabi-sabi to the garden, as Nakane had wanted in the 1950s (Figure 28). This shows that even the most iconic Japanese garden of the postwar era had to be altered to accord with essentialist notions of Japan.

Figure 27. For a long time the Ryōanji’s stone garden had a tiled roof, as this picture from the 1970s proves. © Corbis.

Figure 28. The tiles of the Ryōanji’s wall were replaced by shingles in 1978. Because of that the garden today has more of a wabi-sabi appearance. Photograph by Elisabeth Scherer.

Postmodernity and the Deconstructed Original The BBG’s Ryōanji and the other North American replicas are simulacra in the sense put forth by Jean Baudrillard: they are copies that have surpassed their originals.62 Portland’s replica claimed to offer a quiet atmosphere much more suited to meditation than the original Ryōanji in Kyoto.63 The Brooklyn and Portland gardens referred to the Ryōanji but the Ryōanji also referred to its replicas elsewhere. And, although Brooklyn’s Ryōanji vanished in 1987, the Japanese MoMA house continues as a simulacrum up to the present day. In 1958 it was relocated to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. During a visit, the staff proudly explained to me that Japanese visitors tell them that houses like these no longer existed in Japan and that Philadelphia is the best place in the world to see such an authentic Japanese building. Whether tourists actually believe this is less important than that the staff does. In these cases, the replicas shape ideas about Japanese gardens more effectively than do the originals. And, furthermore, the copy dramatically changes the original. At this point the theoretical lines sketched out in Chapter 4 need to be extended. Translation theories can help to explain these unsettling dissimilarities between the “original” (in Kyoto) and the “translation” (in Brooklyn and other places). “Translation” in the context of

gardens is a metaphor that nevertheless helps clarify underlying issues. If, following Clifford Geertz,64 we can read culture as a text, gardens can be seen as semiotic systems that are translatable.65 As Boris Buden has pointed out, it was Walter Benjamin who first questioned the originality of the original in relation to its translation.66 In his essay “The Task of the Translator” (“Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers”), Benjamin proposed that the meaning of an original is never fixed. Rather, it is unstable and continuously evolving. The translator thus has no firm canonical ground to start from, and translation is never simply a practice in literal transformation. Benjamin stresses that staying too close to a word’s literal meaning will result in a bad translation destined to fail.67 Instead, a good translation transfers the original into a language that helps to unleash its potential. This is how translations become more canonical than the original. By unleashing the potential within the original, the translation brings it to a new level but at the same moment canonizes it by having elevated it. Benjamin’s work and that of his postmodern interpreters can help clarify the problem of the multiple Ryōanjis. If the meanings of “original” and “translation” are transposed, in the case of the Ryōanji in Kyoto and the Ryōanji in Brooklyn, what role does translation play here? Japanese landscape architects of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to translate the old gardens for a Japan that was rapidly reorganizing its identity. After 1868, the Japanese government fought to set up a nation-state similar to those of its Western counterparts, whatever the consequences. They developed a state religion, focusing on the tennō and Shintō, and the trappings of Western nationalism such as a flag, an anthem, a national school curriculum, and so forth.68 The Japanese government also copied some of the imperialist politics of the West. Despite having endured unequal treaties imposed upon it, Japan forced Korea to sign such treaties within two decades. Within this historical context, garden designers and theorists wanted to root Japanese gardens in the past. It was no coincidence that Ozawa Keijirō introduced the Sakuteiki as the canonical source for Japanese-garden design (see Chapter 3). The Sakuteiki was written in the eleventh century and is the oldest known Japanese source on gardening. But in order to be recognized as the canonical authority, the Sakuteiki had to be rediscovered beyond the small number of gardeners who knew it and to be made meaningful in a modernizing Japan. Today the canonization of the Sakuteiki has been achieved,69 but not without new problems. One is that the Sakuteiki had to be stripped of its connections to older systems of belief. Its rules had defied modern rationality such that, for example, placing a stone incorrectly might result in the death or misfortune of the head of the household.70 Its canonization required that these unsettling parts be ignored and that the Sakuteiki become a merely aesthetic canon. While lecturing on Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator,” Paul de Man claimed that an original is proven dead by its translation. De Man extended Benjamin’s conclusions to a point where the original’s mobility stood in stark contrast to the canonization of the translation.71 The translation has to be canonized beyond the point the original ever was in order to be authoritative. The original cannot be fully canonical. Its translatability proves that it is not perfect but can be heightened by translation (Über-Setzung), a point also made by Jacques Derrida.72 However, the mobility of the original’s language is lost in its canonization through translation. The original was not locked in time but lived on in a maturing process (Nachreife),

as Benjamin called it.73 Similarly the language of the original changed and allowed for new readings of the original, sometimes adding to its richness. For de Man, the translation simply disarticulates the original and proves that it was also dead from the start.74 De Man’s conclusion—that a translation is dead because its canonization stops the unfolding of new meaning—resonates well with the Japanese gardens of the twentieth century, be they in the West or in Japan. The example of the Sakuteiki proves his point, and yet the deconstructionist mode is not enough. The translation of Japanese gardens is even more complex. Because Japanese and Western Japanese-garden interpretations depend on each other, they blur into each other. These replica gardens involve not just one translation between two languages or two cultures, as in de Man’s examples, but rather a triangle of translation. First are the “originals” in the Japanese past; second are the translations of those old gardens into Japan’s unfolding modernity; and third are the Japanese gardens in the West, which involve yet another level of interpretation.

Back to the Original To deduce from the critical relation between translation and original, as de Man does, that the latter is dead from the start seems to take Benjamin too far. Benjamin subtly points out the qualities of the original that set it apart from even the best of translations. As we’ve seen, the translation canonizes itself because it unleashes the original’s potential. The original is not yet fixed. Its words ripen as do its meanings, and it becomes richer. The original leads a life of its own and is no longer tethered to the author and his intentions. This central point of poststructuralism—as in Foucault’s famous metaphor of faces imprinted on a sandy beach—is already discernible in Benjamin’s essay.75 Language is the driving force in Benjamin’s concept of the original and its evolutions, but this is not because readers add interpretations. At the very start of his essay, Benjamin makes clear that the readers’ reactions—even those of ideal readers constructed by literal criticism—are not criteria for an analysis of the original’s meaning.76 In other words, the original is not dead, as de Man claims. Rather, there is a dynamic gap between the original and the translation. Languages evolve and as a consequence the original changes its meaning through time. Good translations enable readers to see the original behind it, but they do so not by pulling the language of the original into the translation but by doing the opposite. Benjamin wrote that, when translating a classical Indian text, German should be Indianized rather than Indian Germanized.77 And, if successful, the translation will be unsettling to read. Native readers will be challenged insofar as “India” shines through the German. Some might turn away bewildered; others will use the resources offered by this translation to enrich their language and thinking. I situate the paradox raised in Chapter 4—of the Japanese gardens that were already in place before invention touched them—in this disjuncture between de Man’s reading of Benjamin and my own. If de Man is correct and the translation shows the original to be dead, there is no need to think about gardens in Japan before the nineteenth century. The paradox

falters because we do not need to go back to the original. It has lost its position in relation to the translation. The translation leads a life of its own, so that proving its invented character does not result in a paradox in relation to an “original.” This de Man–ian approach, however, misses the point about the relation between the historical gardens—that they have been continuously reinterpreted in modern Japan and in the West. Benjamin’s understanding of art is deeply rooted in German philosophy and a certain Jewish mysticism, and old Japanese gardens cannot be fully measured by Benjamin’s yardstick of originals and originality. First, gardens are not language. Benjamin’s essay served as the foreword to his translation of Baudelaire’s poetry, and gardens are quite unlike the texts of Baudelaire. Gardens resist decoding. There is no dictionary in existence that brings signifier and signified from one code into relation with signifiers of other codes. This makes the meaning of gardens even more mobile than that of texts, and so it is quite a hermeneutic adventure to regain the historical meaning attached to them. One might consider historical sources (such as court literature) that record the sensations experienced in Japanese gardens. However, such sources would only constitute that standpoint of the reader, which Benjamin has explicitly excluded. A further difference from Benjamin is that he views masterpieces almost as strokes of genius, a notion probably absent in Japanese art. Nonetheless, his understanding of the relation between originals and translations is an interesting starting point for thinking about the problem of the old gardens in Japan and their relation to modern discourse and practice. The problems on the side of the translation that Benjamin points to can be extended to gardens and taken in a different direction. Translations of gardens into modern language do indeed take on a canonical character. Conder and the others who shaped early discourse on Japanese gardens present such translations to the West. For Japan, however, Honda, Ozawa, and others not only reinterpreted the gardens but also put their interpretations into practice by actually designing gardens. These translations have one thing in common: they suppress the problems that old gardens posed for modern connoisseurs. Instead, they present gardens as fully intelligible by and for the Japanese —or, at least, those Japanese who adhere to and honor traditions. They omit the complex context of court life in Kyoto in order to nationalize the gardens and to make them emblems of modern Japan. They understood that these gardens are difficult to grasp for Westerners but attribute that difficulty to essential differences in culture and a break between modern rationality and a more holistic understanding of nature. I am not arguing here in favor of a hermeneutic approach that takes all historical circumstances into account in order to lead to a fuller understanding. This is the approach taken by the essentialists, and it is even less fruitful than the deconstructive one. If it has one thing to offer it is a certain respect for the original—but this respect is marred by the essentialism surrounding it. We cannot simply deny that gardens in Japan have been built for ages, nor can we simply attribute authenticity to them as the expression of an essential culture. Again, Benjamin has warned us not to see the original as stable but as constantly evolving. New questions arise by reading and rereading, since the context—language—is changing and sets free new meanings. Essentialist interpretations do not take this dynamism into account. Their reading of the old gardens in Japan proves de Man correct: the original is dead. But simple deconstruction on the other hand denies the potential decentering effect that originals have on

translations. What I am arguing is that it is neither possible nor necessary to fully understand old gardens. Applying Benjamin’s demand for good translation to Japanese gardens would mean that they should not be translated into the smooth language of modern Japan. In yoking the gardens to the nation their potential is forever lost. They can no longer unsettle visitors; they can only reassure them. A chance for reflexivity in the face of intended non-understanding is lost. To recover the garden’s meaning by hermeneutically circling around them would not only be futile, it would end in the same situation. Replacing discomfort with understanding does not unleash the potential in these old gardens.

Chapter 6

Elements of the Japanese Garden

Garden Stroll VI: Japanese Garden in Bonn In Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, a huge park extends along the Rhine, adjacent to the former government district. Created as part of the 1979 Bundesgartenschau (federal horticultural show),1 the Rheinaue Park is divided into small units, each centered around a somewhat sterile recreational area with steel park benches and small refreshment stands. Incongruous serpentine footpaths wind throughout. The first exotic sight upon entering, left over from the Bundesgartenschau, is an Indian totem pole. The Japanese garden is one hundred meters farther. Enclosed behind a fence, it cannot be fully seen until one passes through a small gate. After that, a hill-and-pond-style Japanese garden of some refinement is revealed (Figure 29). The large stones, cobblestones, and pebbled areas around the pond give the garden a gray hue that harmonizes well with the green on sunny days but has a depressing effect when it rains. The main path leads visitors around a goldfish pond. A few secondary paths take the visitor through the garden, which contains stone lanterns, a waiting room that bears a slight resemblance to a bus stop, a pagoda, a waterfall, and shrubs pruned into figures. Atypically, there are no explanatory signs. The Japanese government contributed 1.8 million German marks (roughly $1,050,000 today) to build the garden. Bonn’s initial plans for the Bundesgartenschau estimated its cost at around 30 million marks, but one year before construction was scheduled to begin, it became clear that the show’s cost would double—and, in the end, it tripled.2 In the midst of this and other problems, the Japanese government’s decision to include a large Japanese garden in the horticultural show was most welcome. As an investment in cultural diplomacy, the gesture paid off. During the year leading up to the show, the Japanese garden was covered extensively in local newspapers, and, because Bonn was the German capital, the garden had a national impact. Photographs of it dominated the lead-up to the opening, turning the garden into the Bundesgartenschau’s main advertising icon.

Figure 29. The Japanese garden in Bonn, built by Satō Akira for the Bundesgartenschau in 1979, tends to look gray and dull on rainy days. In the background the entrance gate and the waiting room for tea ceremonies are discernible. The importance of this garden for cultural diplomacy is indicated by its location near the Langer Eugen, a building that formerly housed the bureaus of members of Parliament. Now the Lange Eugen is partly used by the United Nations. The closeness of the Langer Eugen shows that the Japanese garden at the Bundesgartenschau was important in terms of cultural diplomacy as it was close to the former center of West German power. Photograph by the author.

Newspaper stories about the garden focused on three primary topics: Japanese gardens and their tradition in general; the architect of the garden; and the large stones imported from Japan. Newspapers described the garden, typically, as an invitation to meditation, though this was impossible during the Bundesgartenschau itself as thousands of visitors flooded the garden. On its best day, fifty thousand visited the garden. Even the calmest and most focused of monks would have had difficulty meditating under these circumstances. The architect of the garden was Satō Akira, a professor from the Tokyo University of Agriculture and the president of the Japanese Horticultural Society. As the Bonner Rundschau reported on July 8, 1979, Satō was the “emperor’s garden designer” and had built a traditional garden for the tennō. The stones shipped from Japan to Bonn were massive and were held up at customs for several days. The Bonner Rundschau scoffed at the customs officers’ ignorance: “The customs officers looked surprised when the crane pulled one container after another from the ship and the freight papers only noted ‘garden stones.’ They had not experienced anything like this before and reacted accordingly: ‘What the heck is this? Just stones.’ They did not realize that this was a present from Japan to the federal capital. Nonetheless, while shaking their heads, they let

what they deemed to be useless freight pass duty-free.”3 But the garden was not the only Japanese contribution to the Bundesgartenschau. A week of events devoted to Japanese culture raised even more interest in Japan than the garden itself, with displays of Japanese flower arrangement (ikebana), Zen-inspired paintings, tea ceremonies, films, and the largest display ever of Japanese fireworks in Europe. The Bonner Generalanzeiger reported on June 7, 1979, that the Japanese “owned the Bundesgartenschau” for over a week, but cultural events like these, albeit on a much smaller scale, took place throughout the six-month Bundesgartenschau. After the horticultural show ended, the other national gardens were either torn down or moved to other cities. Because of its popularity, the Japanese garden remained as a present from the Japanese government, which promised to send gardeners to take care of it regularly. Despite some acts of vandalism, the garden continued as a showcase for Japanese culture in the following decades. In the 1990s the Japanese presented additional gingko trees.4 Today the garden is a quiet area separate from the larger park, where guides are sometimes available to explain Japanese-garden culture to interested visitors. Since there are few benches and only a few paths, the garden does not invite visitors to relax, read a book, sunbathe, or meditate. These activities take place elsewhere in the larger park.

WE HAVE YET to answer some fundamental questions. What did these gardens mean for people in the West? What makes a garden a Japanese garden? How is a garden in Bonn just as Japanese as one in Kyoto? In Chapter 5 we saw that while stone gardens have since the 1950s become essential to Japanese gardens, they were not considered essential in the first vogue. And even today, despite the popularity of stone gardens, answers to the question of what a Japanese garden is will depend on who is asked. Visitors, journalists, ardent defenders of an essentialized Japan, actual Japanese gardeners, and experts on aesthetics will each offer different perspectives. Some might argue that Japanese gardens are representations of actual landscapes in miniature—just like pictures. Others might consider spiritual or meditative qualities to be the defining aspect of a Japanese garden. Gardeners will base their judgments on the selection of plants or the placement of stones. Popular literature has proposed a variety of answers, and historical sources such as the Sakuteiki are often cited as giving “authentic” answers. Various enumerations of the elements of a Japanese garden have been put forth. To take just one example, John Colleran and Eileen McCracken list the “necessary” features of a Japanese garden rather simplistically as “pavilions, bridges, certain trees and plants, stone lanterns and wells.”5 But then they hastily qualify those requirements with a remystification of the garden: “In isolation, however, or in haphazard arrangement, [these elements] do not make a Japanese garden. The Japanese garden is a unit incorporating all these components as symbols and the arrangement of the garden in a framework of water, stone and plants follows certain oriental principles.”6 They consider the arrangement of the garden symbolic and they

fail to explain what they mean by “oriental principles.” Colleran and McCracken’s attempt to define Japanese gardens based on their common elements represents a conventional approach to the topic. In this chapter, I, too, discuss common elements. However, while it is true that certain elements can be identified as common among Japanese gardens, I do not want to suggest that they “define” a Japanese garden. Such a claim would run counter to my argument throughout this book that there is no essential “Japanese garden,” only many versions and interpretations of the idea of a Japanese garden. So, in discussing the common elements of Japanese gardens, I am not offering a definition but an analysis of those typical elements: how they were introduced, how they have been interpreted, and how fashions have changed some of them over time.

Authenticity: The Garden Master For scholars, popular writers, and garden owners alike, the gardener is the most important element of an “authentic” Japanese garden. As is often claimed, only the Japanese can build true Japanese gardens. Westerners might succeed as Japanese gardeners but only if they have been partially “Japanized,” either by earning a degree from a Japanese university or by studying with a Japanese-garden designer in Japan for a long time.7 Such a requirement, however, is recent. At the turn of the twentieth century, Western experts built Japanese gardens that earned prizes at horticultural shows and became recognized as authentic. In some instances, Josiah Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan (1893) even served as a manual for building those authentic Japanese gardens. That said, Western knowledge never subjugated that of the Japanese, and Western gardeners never succeeded in occupying the position of Orientalists. As Edward Said described in Orientalism, an Egyptian’s knowledge about his country and its history had little worth in the eyes of Orientalist scholars and was thereby erased. In sharp contrast, Japanese-garden designers were not just heard; they also spoke with authority. The rich who wanted to build Japanese gardens, especially in the United States, wanted the authenticity that only a Japanese gardener could bring. This held true for public Japanese gardens as well. The tendency has only grown in the postwar decades. Informational boards that provide introductions to the gardens rarely neglect to name the Japanese designer. Authenticity, however, is hard to come by in a garden master. The Japanese garden in Bonn and its planner, Satō, illustrate this problem. Satō was successful as a scientist of gardening. He became a professor at the Tokyo University of Agriculture as well as one of the key urban planners for redesigning Tokyo’s green areas during the postwar era. After commissions for some Japanese gardens in the West, he had researched the history of Japanese gardens in the West and published a paper that is often cited in Japanese research.8 As the president of the Japanese Horticultural Society, Satō was an obvious choice to build a highly important asset of cultural diplomacy in the capital of one of Japan’s major Western allies. The economies of Japan and Germany were then ranked second and third in the world, respectively, according to gross national product, and the garden was valuable in strengthening the relationship. According to the records of the Japanese Parliament, the garden was so

important that the prime minister and the minister of finance were involved in the choice of the garden master.9 To the Germans, Satō seemed the perfect authentic gardener because the imperial family had previously commissioned him, but they failed to notice that Satō had primarily been involved in designing Western-style gardens and golf courses. During the Japanese colonial reign in the 1930s, Satō was sent to Manchuria to plan urban areas, where his suggestions were mostly Western-style parks. That said, Satō was at the same time taking part in growing nationalist discourses about the Western misunderstanding of Japanese gardens. In a 1933 paper, he criticized Conder especially.10 Then, after Manchuria once again became part of China after 1945, Satō designed numerous golf courses throughout Japan. This work formed a significant part of his income for decades. One of his major publications is a nine-hundredpage history of golf courses worldwide.11 Satō is obviously not the type of garden designer that Westerners would consider as a “garden master” or see as an “authentic” Japanese gardener. But neither journalists nor officials knew of Satō’s career and so it was no obstacle to building a perfect Japanese garden for their show. The case of diasporic Japanese gardeners sheds further light on how important nationality is for promoting a garden as authentic. Takeo Shiota designed the Japanese garden of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG; see Chapter 5) and many more on the East Coast, such as a Japanese garden in Lakewood, New Jersey. He moved to North America at the age of twentysix and did not return to Japan. On his hopes for what he might accomplish in the New World he wrote, “My greatest ambition is to create a garden more beautiful than all others in the world, and thus to prove the truth of the saying, ‘Japanese landscape gardening is the Queen of all the Arts.’ ”12 Shiota would most likely have been unable to create such a garden in Japan because he had no formal education with a garden master. He moved to New York to start a career and after about seven years he began to design gardens. He wrote two books in English and, by the time he died, he had lived far longer in the United States than in Japan.13 In the first two decades of the 1900s he was much sought-after and built many Japanese gardens on the East Coast.14 In the 1920s he fell into oblivion and died in a detention camp for Japanese Americans during World War II—if the somewhat incomplete sources are correct.15 The influence of Western knowledge on his gardening is obvious in his small book The Miniature Japanese Landscape. There, he lists no Japanese sources, only Conder’s treatments of Japanese gardens and Basil Hall Chamberlain’s Things Japanese.16 Notwithstanding all these facts, Shiota is still referred to as the “Japanese landscape designer” on the informational board in the BBG’s Japanese garden. This is even more surprising, given the willingness of the United States to assimilate foreigners. In the case of the Japanese, the same held true—until Pearl Harbor. After the war started, Japanese Americans were persecuted and sent to camps even when they were well integrated, like Shiota. But since a Japanese garden must be built by a Japanese person, it continues to make sense to garden administrators to downplay Shiota’s actual biography. Ignoring his Americanization and selftaught knowledge of Japanese gardening risks suggesting that the ability to design Japanese gardens resides in some sort of racial intuition. But Shiota’s case actually proves the efficacy

of adapting oneself to the U.S. market. When the BBG garden was to be restored in 1999 (Figure 30), a worried member of the garden’s auxiliary group insisted that a Japanese gardener—or at least a Western apprentice who had spent time in Japan—oversee the work: “The garden needs to have the hand of someone trained in Japan to certify the authenticity of the change. . . . Being about right or 99 percent right isn’t enough.”17 This concern wrongly assumes that the original designer, Shiota, was a gardener trained according to Japanese tradition. The member of the group quite mistakenly concluded that because Takeo Shiota is a Japanese name the gardener himself must have been trained in Japan. The American crime novelist Naomi Hirahara, who researched Shiota’s biography for a murder mystery set at the BBG, came to this conclusion: “Shiota had one foot in the Japanese world and one foot in [the] white world—and neither one embraced him totally as their own.”18 Underlying the notion that only Japanese designers can create authentic Japanese gardens is the assumption that only the Japanese can comprehend what a Japanese garden is all about. Westerners—including garden designers—cannot understand the deep symbolic layers that constitute the garden and give it meaning. Again and again Western commentators assert that Japanese gardens confound Westerners and are ultimately incomprehensible. At the same time, such a belief does not keep these same commentators from contradicting their own assertion by claiming to explain Japanese gardens. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Westerners were still able to compete with Japanese gardeners, Florence Du Cane and Ella Du Cane wrote, “The making of a Japanese garden is a true art, which it is not surprising that it is impossible for a foreigner to imitate, hence the lamentable failures of the so-called ‘Japanese Gardens.’ ”19 Twenty-five years later, Christopher Tunnard turned the problem into a matter of race: “It seems clear that copyism, even if desirable, cannot be carried out by those of another race.”20

Figure 30. This plan shows how Shiota’s garden was to be restored in 1999. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

As a further consequence of this culturalist argument, the Japanese person who lays out a Japanese garden is not simply a designer. He is a master. Take the example of Maymont in Richmond, Virginia, which hosts a beautiful Japanese garden first built in 1912. The original gardener of Maymont was thought to be Y. Muto, a designer who had been active in the Philadelphia area.21 Decades later, when the garden had become rundown, the Maymont Foundation hired a garden designer from the Richmond area, Barry Starke, to plan a new garden. It was completed in the 1970s.22 In 1993, Starke complained in a letter to the foundation that the garden’s informational boards still indicated Muto as the gardener even though Starke had significantly changed it. According to a staff member I interviewed, the foundation had deemed Muto’s original garden not authentic enough, because it had a Gilded Age character and was missing Zen elements. When they restored the garden, they asked Starke to redesign it so that it would be an authentic Japanese garden. Once it was completed, to further prove its authenticity, foundation members chose to continue to refer to Muto as the “garden master” on the garden’s information boards. A staff member told me she disagreed with the foundation’s decision to redesign the garden. She said, “How could [the new garden] be more authentic than a Japanese garden designed by a Japanese gardener in 1912?” During our conversation, she also asked me, as a scholar of East Asian studies and someone who had lived in Japan, whether I could confirm that the term “garden master” used in Maymont’s information material was correct for Muto. She told me that in her opinion “garden master” was much more appropriate than “gardener” or any other term. This belief—that the person designing a Japanese garden has to be both Japanese and a master—mystifies and exoticizes the role of the garden designer and excludes Western garden designers like Starke.

Plants—or Their Absence In the literature on Japanese gardens, discussion of their trees, shrubs, and flowers is conspicuously scant, but other elements such as stones are extensively debated. Still, Japanese gardens rely on certain kinds of plants. Early gardens were often praised for their flowers and blossoms. At the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, flowerbeds fenced with bamboo caught the interest of visitors23 who would not have categorized the garden as distinctly Japanese. Conder’s taxonomy (1893) includes comments on plants but they read more like a general Linnaean introduction to Japanese flora and did not spark much subsequent discussion about the varieties of plants that made up the gardens. By the time Japanese gardens had become fashionable in the West decades later, four plants were commonly mentioned in defining a Japanese garden: shrubs (especially conifers), cherry trees, wisteria vines, and irises. In 1921 the Boston Globe made this comment about a garden, which shows how some of these plants were typically connected with other elements: “The garden is quite Japanese, with its teahouse, its goldfish pool and wisteria, and colorful Japanese iris in full bloom.”24 Around this time, however, flowers were increasingly viewed as incompatible with Japanese gardens, especially when planted in flowerbeds. The 1917 annual report of the BBG included this remark: “One or other costly Japanese gardens in America have been practically ruined, from the Japanese point of view, by being formed into flower gardens, following American ideas.”25 As with so many other things, the appreciation of flowers was taken to indicate a fundamental difference between the Western and Japanese gardens, so that after the 1920s, blossoming flowers were mentioned only rarely as an aspect of Japanese gardens. Their absence intrigued those who wrote about Japanese gardens. George Avery, the BBG’s director from 1944 to 1969 and the driving force behind the replica of the Ryōanji, compared American and Japanese gardens along these lines. In 1976, he wrote that the Japanese garden had “acquired a dimension greater than the visual pleasure” that was so central for “gardens of our Western world.”26 Flowers came to represent a certain superficiality so that their spare use or even absence lent a philosophical or mystical aura. The move away from flowers accelerated after “Zen gardens” became popular in the 1950s. These gardens not only did not display flowers but also abandoned nearly all plants, replacing them with stones and pebbles. With Zen gardens as a new powerful icon for Japanese gardens, discussion of plants became even rarer, and the question arose: are gardens without plants gardens at all? As we saw in Chapter 5, a New Yorker writer put this question forth as a kōan—a Zen riddle—in the context of the BBG’s replica of Ryōanji.27 Zen gardens contrast between “superficial” flowers, geared toward the eye, and philosophical minimalism to an extreme. The original Ryōanji in Kyoto had most likely displayed cherry trees—which would have blossomed marvelously in spring—so that the East-West dichotomy seems a bit strange.28 Though stone gardens are only one type of Japanese garden and other kinds do feature various types of plants, the notion that plants are not the most vital element has prevailed.

Stones In the earliest gardens, stones were only one feature among many, with bridges, lanterns, blossoming wisterias, and irises featured more prominently. The bible of Japanese gardening, the Sakuteiki, demonstrates how to place stones correctly. It warns gardeners against placing a stone in the main axis of a palace lest it bring great misfortune to its owner and eventually kill him. Another classical book on Japanese gardens from the fifteenth century, Senzui narabi no yagyō no zu (Illustrations for designing mountains, water, and hillside field landscapes), also stresses the importance of setting stones correctly.29 Because they challenge Western notions about gardens, stones have long fascinated Western commentators on Japanese gardens. In the literature, stones take on a life of their own, so much so that, at times, the authors seem to have succumbed to a Naturreligion,30 believing that stones have souls and their active cooperation is necessary for a Japanese garden. Reginald Farrer helped stone gardens gain popularity at the beginning of the twentieth century. Farrer, an English gardener and plant hunter of some fame, had a sound knowledge of Japanese gardens. He also wrote widely read books about Alpine gardens made mostly of stones and a few plants. For Farrer, rock gardens were the real Japanese gardens as opposed to those he saw in England: “When I say Japanese garden, I don’t mean a silly jungle of bamboos, with Tori, and a sham tea-house, and Irises, and a trellis—I mean a rocky glen, a pinnacled flank of mountain such as every other cottage in Kioto possesses, and has possessed, for half a dozen generations.”31 Other writers found special qualities in the stones themselves. Clive Holland wrote, “It is not until one has learned to feel the pictorial possibilities of stones, even to admit that they have a character of their own, and possess values and tones of color which entitle them to consideration and to placing with a due regard to these characteristics, that one can hope to thoroughly enjoy or understand the beauty of a Japanese garden.”32 With the discovery of the Ryōanji by the Garden Club of America and Japanese modernists in the 1930s, stones and their best placement became central concerns within Japanese gardening in the West. If owners or planners wanted to show special diligence—and distinction—they imported stones directly from Japan. We saw this in the last chapter with the Japanese house at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). After the house was dismantled and transported to Philadelphia, the stones remained at MoMA because Philadelphia had planned a Japanese garden of its own. In the summer of 1958, forty of the stones were transported to Princeton, where David Engel, who had studied gardening for two years in Japan, used them in a Japanese garden.33 The New York Times reported specifically on how the stones were transported from New York to Princeton.34 The piece also commented on the philosophical import of the stones for the Japanese and for the new owner in Princeton.35 In the late 1970s, the press treated the stones for the Japanese garden in Bonn’s Bundesgartenschau in a similar manner. Along with reports on the construction of the garden by Japanese gardeners themselves, newspapers published stories about the massive stones. They marveled at the five hundred tons of Japanese stone, and an additional four hundred tons from the Bonn area, that were used for the garden. The process of setting stones presents a complex culturalist puzzle, as it is.36 Araki

Yoshikuni, an architect of many gardens in the West as well as Japan, explains the problem of harmony: “Everything has to be ordered in a certain angle to everything else. Yet everything has to appear as if by coincidence, just natural. Otherwise disharmony follows.”37 For Araki the responsibility for this lies with the gardener: “Either you have it or you do not.” But when one reads through Western commentaries, the responsibility seems to lie at least partially with the stones. They enable the Japanese gardener to prove his superior understanding of nature. They speak to him but not to the uninitiated Westerner. For many, the character of the stones and their placement together served as decisive factors for distinguishing a true Japanese gardener. The Ryōanji acted as the paradigmatic example of the perfect harmony of stones. Japanese and Western scientists have tried to understand the rationale behind the placement of its fifteen stones. At first glance, the stones seem to be placed at random. But ever since the Ryōanji came to be seen as the precursor of modern reductionism and the touchstone of Japanesegarden design, researchers have wanted to explain the pattern of the stones.38 The stones bring the translational space of the Japanese garden back to the modern logic of Zen Buddhism. In order to place the Ryōanji beyond Orientalist categories, many Japanese authors have found in the stones a harmony that seems to transcend Western rationality. Because the harmony of the stones’ placement defies mathematical explanation, Japanese gardens become mystical places that nonetheless appear modern—a challenge to Western thought that increases their appeal.

Lanterns and Bridges Stone lanterns have also fascinated Western observers. They were part of the first displays of Japanese gardens in Vienna (1873) and Philadelphia (1876). Conder classified about twentyfive lantern types into two families and described them in detail.39 Lanterns thus were an important part of Japanese gardens from the very start. Their popularity was evident in the Japanese-garden parties that were so popular around the turn of the twentieth century in the United States and Europe. Whenever a ballroom had to be decorated to represent a Japanese garden, lanterns were an important component—though most likely paper lanterns were used. In a short story published in the Columbus Ledger in 1911, two children build a miniature Japanese garden at home in a box, and the stone lantern proves the most complicated piece to complete.40 Japanese authors confirm that lanterns were one of the central pieces of Japanese gardens. In a 1928 book, Harada Jirō wrote, “Perhaps the most striking feature in the garden of Nippon is a well-placed stone lantern. It gives a character.”41 Lanterns added a religious dimension. According to many authors, lanterns had first appeared in Buddhist temples and sometimes in Shintō shrines before they were integrated into more mundane gardens.42 Lanterns became an important part of Japan’s cultural diplomacy during the second vogue of Japanese gardens in the 1960s. Japanese cities often donated old or not-so-old lanterns to sister cities. For example, a lantern from the Edo period greets visitors in front of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. It had once stood in a daimyō’s garden in New York’s twin city, Tokyo, which later donated it to New York. Osaka donated a modern lantern to its twin city, Hamburg, where it can be found

at the Japanese garden in the Planten un Blomen Park. Some lanterns were given without an intended placement in a Japanese garden. The Belgian city of Ghent features such an orphaned lantern in its city garden (Figure 31). The city of Morioka presented the Nitobe Family Crest Lantern to Vancouver in a slightly different way. Morioka is not Vancouver’s Japanese sister city, but Nitobe Inazō was born in Morioka and the city decided to donate the lantern to Vancouver’s Nitobe Memorial Garden. It was built at the University of British Columbia in 1959–60 to honor Nitobe, who died in nearby Victoria. It is a good example of lanterns used for cultural diplomacy.43 As popular as they were and still are, lanterns have sometimes caused misunderstandings. From the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia where a lantern was misinterpreted as an urn, to the Bonn Bundesgartenschau where a newspaper writer called a lantern a “little tower,”44 commentators have had difficulty identifying lanterns as lanterns. When the lanterns are not lit, the uninitiated cannot immediately understand what these objects are. Other elements besides stones and lanterns have impressed Western observers. Bridges, teahouses, temples, shrines, and, to a lesser degree, fences, gates, and basins for handwashing grabbed attention. As part of the landscape design, lakes, hills, waterfalls, and hamlets also contributed to the idea of a Japanese garden. While stones and lanterns can claim roughly equal popularity during the first and second vogues of Japanese gardens in the West, this was not always true for the other objects. In the first, bronze casts of storks and dragons were soughtafter additions to Japanese gardens because they had strong associations with Art Nouveau. In addition, as mentioned earlier, the Meiji government actively promoted its bronze arts and craft industry and promoted exports to the West.

Figure 31. Kanazawa presented a lantern to Ghent in 2007 to commemorate thirty-five years of sister citizenship. It was placed in the Citadel Park by Japanese specialists. Photograph by Andreas Niehaus.

In contrast, during the second vogue after World War II, garden commissioners and others responsible for maintaining Japanese gardens tried to get rid of these objects. They had come to be seen as inauthentic concessions to Western taste. Japanese bronze-cast storks had populated the pond in the BBG’s Japanese garden (1914), but they were removed in the second half of the twentieth century. The same can be said of bridges. Rustic drum bridges had been favorites up to the 1930s, only later to be judged as chinois additions and disruptions for a calm, meditational atmosphere. Some famous examples nonetheless remained, such as the drum bridge at The Huntington in California, though its red paint was stripped off in 1992 so that it would appear “natural” and less japonesque.45

Feminizing the Garden Planning and building gardens have until recently been exclusively tasks for men. Women have often been given the role of greeting visitors. In the first vogue, Japanese gardens were

typically thought of as feminine, especially when Japanese gardens acted as a stage for benefit events.46 When the Japanese garden at the Boston Music Hall opened in 1901, the Boston Globe remarked, “In attendance will be a charming little Japanese woman, and with her a boy baby 10 months old, both native in costume.” Native costumes—kimonos or fantasy Oriental dresses—were of utmost importance. If the women in charge were not Japanese, the women organizing these events dressed in Japanese attire. The role the women played often suggested the image of the geisha, serving tea to guests and selling small Oriental items or whatever helped raise money. Events of this sort took place all over the United States and England. In the second vogue, Japanese women continued to help promoting the gardens. Japanese hostesses were part of the attraction at the BBG’s Ryōanji replica. In order to attract more visitors to the Japanese house that had been transferred from the MoMA to Philadelphia, women were hired as hostesses. On October 19, 1958, the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin had remarked that “no one has ever suggested importing geisha girls to decorate the interior.” But that is precisely what happened in 1972 when the Fairmount Park Commission issued a press release announcing that “kimono-clad Japanese girls” would begin “regular performances of the traditional and symbolic tea ceremony while serving as hostesses and guides.” The park hired four female Japanese exchange students to greet the guests and give short lessons about Japanese culture. As Edward Said argued in Orientalism, the Orient as a whole has often been feminized, and in the West Japanese gardens have been largely feminine spaces. The symbolism of the garden as a space adhered to gender role expectations that held true throughout the twentieth century. Japanese men took an active role: they planned and built the gardens and this contributed to their authenticity. Greeting visitors with utmost grace was defined as a more properly traditional female role. Given this division of labor, Japanese men were visible only during the construction of the gardens. Once completed, women took over the gardens—at least in those gardens that employed hostesses. To a certain degree these roles still hold today for Japanese gardens in the West. Garden designers are still male. No female garden designers have risen to fame by building a Japanese garden in the West, and women exclusively present gardens to visitors. The gardens often serve as cultural hubs for various events, and women usually stage them. Japanese women give lessons in tea ceremonies or instrumental performances; Japanese men rarely do so. These labor divisions reflect modern gender roles more broadly, and the cultural patterns supporting these gender stereotypes are only gradually breaking down to allow for a more balanced view. Another example of gendered roles in the Japanese garden is that of the tea master. Rarely does a man—or, even less frequently, a non-Japanese person—perform as the tea master. The role of the tea master used to be masculine, but today tea ceremonies have largely become feminized.47 The fact that women share the main burden of bringing Japanese gardens to life worldwide as cultural hubs might be seen as a form of female empowerment. Kato Etsuko has shown how women in Japan have used serving tea as a means of bodily expression and have thereby opened up a space of freedom for themselves.48 Still this empowerment is Janus-faced. Women are often consigned to representing the past and tradition while the activity of men represents development, progress, and the future. Replacing the men with women as tea

masters therefore opens up new possibilities at the same time as it pushes women into the static role of embodying their country’s past.

Nationalizing the Garden Shortly before and during World War II, Japanese gardens in the United States were targets of politically motivated vandalism. As mentioned above, many were renamed “Oriental” gardens to protect them from further destruction. When vandals burned down the BBG’s Inari shrine in 1939, the New York Herald Tribune suspected the act was motivated by rising tensions between the United States and Japan. It wrote, “There may be grounds for opposing Japan’s militarists by wrecking her militarism; but to do it by wrecking her art, her civilization, her many valuable contributions to our common life is to reduce one’s self to the militarists’ level and below.”49 The violence surrounding Japanese gardens in the late 1930s and early 1940s as well as commentary on the violence made it clear that Japanese gardens had a particular connection to their mother country that other national gardens did not. Italian gardens in the United States, for instance, were not similarly vandalized even though Italy had been one of the Axis powers along with Germany and Japan. The Japanese garden in the United States was not simply a place where a style of gardening was displayed; it seemed to be Japan itself. The question of whether gardens merely represent Japan or are Japan has been asked ever since the first gardens were set up in the West. Some observers saw the Japanese gardens as clever representations. On June 16, 1901, the Boston Globe praised the Japanese garden set up in the Music Hall: “Japan, with its cherry orchards, its wisteria gardens and its quaint little houses amid fields and flower gardens, is mirrored in a clever landscape arranged for the benefit of the patrons of Music Hall.” The article, however, went on to explain that Japan is not quite present: “The story told by this bit of clever scene painting and landscape gardening is more educational and entertaining than a score of books on Japan. The visitor sees the land itself almost.”50 In this case, the gardens do not signify a presence but an absence. As such they do indeed re-present. But for many other observers the gardens were not merely representations. In 1930, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s annual report described its Japanese garden not as a metaphor for Japan but as a metonymy: “The Japanese Garden of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is a charming spot where visitors may temporarily forget their Western thought and enjoy a glimpse of the Land of the Rising Sun.”51 Metonymic descriptions like this abound. The gardens allow one to experience Japan in total. This metaphor of a short trip to Japan was often invoked. The New York Times commented on the same garden in an article under the heading “A Bit of Nippon in Brooklyn”: “On entering one feels that one has left the Occident behind. . . . The miniature garden in Brooklyn is not only a favorite haunt of the Japanese in this country, it also provides an opportunity for Americans who have not visited the Orient to see something of Japan.” The garden’s designer, Takeo Shiota, had always stressed that he wanted to reproduce Japanese landscapes in miniature for the benefit of the American public. Visitors should see authentic Japan in his gardens.52 The metaphor of a short trip was not limited to the first vogue of Japanese gardens

in the West; it was invoked again some decades later. For the Japanese house and garden in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, the commission wrote in a press release in 1972 that “a visit to the Japanese House in Fairmount Park has long been likened to a quick trip to Japan.”

Figure 32. The “arrival gate” at Bremen’s Botanika. Photograph by the author.

The Japanese stone garden in Bremen’s Botanika in northern Germany takes this metaphor even further. Since 2003 the glass house of the Botanika has hosted gardens of the East— Chinese, Javanese, and Japanese—as a special exhibition. The exhibition has two parts. The first part of the exhibition provides a general overview of botany, after which visitors pass through a check-in counter, as if at an airport, into a corridor designed as the interior of an airplane. On “arrival” in Asia, visitors have to pass through customs (Figure 32). After passing through a variety of Asian gardens, the Japanese garden is situated in a glass house of its own at the very end. In an atmosphere distinctively colder than the previous rooms full of heat and humidity, the garden presents itself as serene and austere, especially in comparison to the wild and fanciful others. Japanese gardens are a metonymy for Japan. They represent Japan as a whole, not just Japanese art or certain aspects of Japanese nature. In this respect, Japanese gardens differ markedly from their European counterparts. English, French, and Italian gardens have to some extent and at certain times represented their nations, as when, in the early twentieth century, nationalists in Germany proposed a national garden style.53 However, classic examples of European gardens survived the “litmus test” of two wars. Nationalist sentiments did not

encourage acts of destruction or the renaming of “enemy” gardens. In contrast to Japanese gardens, English, French, and Italian gardens were not seen as stand-ins for their respective countries, and thus there was no desire to rename or destroy them.

Chapter 7

Authoritarian Gardens

Garden Stroll VII: Brooklyn Botanic Garden Founded in 1910, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (BBG), together with the adjacent Prospect Park, forms the green lung of urban Brooklyn, New York. In the last two chapters, we learned the story of the BBG’s two Japanese gardens. Now it is time to stroll through the one that remains there today: the 1915 garden designed by Takeo Shiota (Figure 33). Created as one of the BBG’s first special gardens, Shiota’s garden is now among the park’s most popular attractions. Alfred T. White, an important Brooklyn philanthropist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, donated $13,000 for its construction.1 Entering through the main gate, visitors see a large pond. In the middle of the pond stands a replica of the famous Itsukushima Shrine Gate of Miyajima Island. Once painted brown, the gate has been restored to the trademark red of Miyajima. There are two information boards at the entrance. One begins by informing visitors that the garden has a “deeper meaning.” It then mentions the “Japanese landscape designer Takeo Shiota” and the year of its opening, and it displays two photographs showing its original appearance. The remaining text then goes on to explain Japanese hill-and-pond gardens and torii (Japanese gates) in general—however, with no reference to Miyajima as the obvious inspiration for the gate in the pond. The other information board at the entry outlines strict rules for visitors. Although in the rest of the BBG, the grass may be walked on freely, in the Japanese garden visitors must stay on the paths. The sign encourages them to “stroll” on the paths. They may use camera tripods but are asked not to block the walkways. These restrictions are significant because there are so few paths. One can go around the pond on just two short side paths. Borders of stone, ropes at ankle height, and wooden balustrades remind walkers to remain clear of the grass. In addition the garden itself is fenced off from its surroundings, denying even a glimpse of most of its sections from the outside. Only one area to the side of the pond, containing a small outdoor theater, can be seen from the outside.

Figure 33. The gate resembling Miyajima in Shiota’s Japanese garden. Photograph by the author.

On the other side of the pond there is a path leading to the small Inari Shintō shrine, mentioned in the last chapter. A large information board there informs visitors that the shrine is “typical for the tradition of Shinto shrines in Japan.” It mentions that Takeo Shiota was the designer of the original shrine at this site and that members of BBG’s garden staff reconstructed the shrine in 1960 (“from architectural plans prepared in Japan”), but it does not mention the destruction of the shrine in 1939 that occasioned the rebuilding. Though the garden is quite beautiful, it does not lend itself to an extended stay. After one has read the information boards, circled the pond, and discovered the Inari shrine, there is not much else to do. There is no place to rest within the garden except the “viewing pavilion” at the entrance that overlooks the pond. In contrast to many other spots in the BBG where visitors may rest on the grass or benches, the Japanese garden does not offer any opportunities for repose.

MOST PUBLIC GARDENS and parks have rules for their use: sometimes visitors are not allowed to step on the green grass; sometimes meadows are designated for sunbathing, playing, and relaxing. Enclosures mark areas that are off-limits, and signs indicate other regulations. When aristocratic parks in Europe were first opened to the public, citizens were educated on

how to use this newly gained open space. Proper behavior in parks and other public places was part of the bourgeois program to form the body in the sense outlined by Foucault in Discipline and Punish.2 A famous example is Prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau’s park in eastern Germany, a fine English landscape garden that, from 1815, was laid out as a public area open to all.3 This freedom led initially to excesses: flowers were picked and inappropriate behavior harmed the other plants. Only after Pückler and his staff patiently repaired the damage and pursued the delinquents did citizens learn how to respect and not harm the garden. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries garden rules became more and more liberal. One example of this, from Germany, is the Olympiapark laid out for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. There, instead of encountering signs prohibiting movement, flaneurs were actually encouraged to walk on the green area: “Please walk on the grass!” This, of course, was part of the politics to lighten up the games and present a new, open-minded Germany to the world.4 Gardens did not necessarily eliminate all rules, but it is clear that bourgeois corsets have been unfastened and public parks and gardens have become more open to different kinds of usage than they once were. Japanese gardens in the West, however, point in the other direction. Though often originally private, gardens of the early twentieth century were opened to the public after their owners’ death. On a more subtle level, however, the gardens remain closed off. In a variety of ways, restrictions have become key features of Japanese gardens. Although enclosures and rules might look like extensions of similar limits in Japan, they have frequently been introduced for ideological reasons or assumed Japanese traditions. These rules continue not only to command behavior in the gardens but also to shape the idea of these places for visitors. This has led to the perception that Japanese gardens are authoritarian spaces that restrict and inhibit free, creative use. Rules governing such authoritarian gardens are more than the explicit phrasing of what is or is not allowed, say, on information boards. They also adhere in architectural decisions such as whether to add enclosures and to limit access to parts of the garden. Although the explicit set of rules can be easily changed—and often is—the implicit architectural ones often cannot be. An informational board with rules may be easily replaced—a wall surrounding a garden is not so easy to tear down. Archival material helps explain how some of these rules developed, as do the actual practices of the gardens.

Enclosures Many Japanese gardens are fenced-off surroundings within larger parks, botanic gardens, or arboretums. These larger properties are themselves usually fenced off from the outside world. Thus Japanese gardens are effectively enclosed twice. At first glance, this closing off seems merely to copy Japanese gardens in Japan, which are often enclosed by wooden fences or stone walls. However, while it is true that the temples or estates that include gardens are enclosed, the gardens themselves were not closed off within the temples or estates.

The Japanese garden at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is an example of a thoroughly closed-off garden (Figure 34). It might be considered traditional because it is a dry garden, and dry gardens have been enclosed in Japan, as in the famous example of the Ryōanji in Kyoto. However, this “tradition” does not hold true in a number of other cases in Japan where enclosed gardens are not the general rule. Furthermore, there are no convincing historical sources to support the claim that they should be closed off. In the West, Japanese gardens are enclosed not to conform to Japanese traditions but for other reasons, and yet “Japanese tradition” is invoked to explain their enclosure. The BBG’s Japanese garden is a good example. Consistent with Josiah Conder’s description of traditional garden enclosures, a wooden fence surrounds half of it.5 A 1995 BBG manual for tour guides explains that fences are an integral part of the layout and that they “help define space.”6 The manual gives the impression that these fences were actually part of Shiota’s initial plans. Another manual from 1992 similarly argues that the fence was part of the original plans and follows Japanese traditions and customs. It can be assumed that many tour guides for the BBG understood this to be true and explained the garden to visitors accordingly. The fence, however, was not part of the BBG’s Japanese garden when it opened to the public in 1915; it was erected fourteen years later. This excerpt from the BBG’s annual report from 1929 explains why it was added:

Figure 34. The Japanese garden at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts extends on one side of the main building. It is enclosed by a fence that prohibits glances inside. But it can be seen from the inside of the first floor. Photograph by the author.

1. Woven wood fence to enclose the Japanese Garden. Perhaps no more urgent need has been met than this. No part of the Botanical Garden has suffered more than the Japanese Garden by the tendency of certain elements of the public to use it as a picnic or playground.7 The Japanese garden was partly destroyed by the carelessness of visitors, and fencing it off was a necessary and practical response to the damage. The phrase “certain elements” gives a clear indication of how the garden’s commission perceived some visitors. They were improper citizens, unable to cherish the Japanese garden in an orderly manner. Measures had to be taken against their unruly demeanor or the Japanese garden would suffer more. As the garden’s commission could not hope to instill proper behavior into those “elements,” excluding them was the most efficient solution. But the reason for the garden commission’s concerns was visitors’ behavior, which in the context of a public park seems natural: picnicking and playing. The report goes on to explain the purpose of the wooden fence: “A Japanese Garden is above all things, intended to be a place of quiet, where one would go, as to an art gallery, to enjoy the beauty of the place, or to a temple or shrine for meditation and quiet. This purpose, of course, is completely defeated if the garden is dominated by boys playing tug-of-war or by adults behaving in an equally non-sensual manner. The only way to prevent this is by being able to control entrance to the Japanese Garden apart from entrance of the Botanic Garden as a whole.”8 We don’t know whether the Japanese garden had really suffered more than other parts of the BBG or whether children created a greater disturbance here than elsewhere. The actual events that preceded the erection of the fence have fallen into oblivion, but the inclination to preserve the garden for meditation has persisted. George Avery, the director of the BBG from 1944 to 1969, stressed this aspect of the Japanese garden in the 1970s: “Above and beyond the visual experience, the objectives are to stimulate contemplation and meditation, joining the essence of nature with everyday living.”9 The Brooklyn garden is not the only case in which a fence was erected to safeguard an atmosphere of quiet meditation against ignorant visitors from the surrounding areas. Twin-city Hiroshima donated a little teahouse to Hanover, Germany, which was set up in 1988 in the Stadtpark. Only six years later, a conflict arose “between Far-Eastern contemplation during tea ceremonies and scantily dressed sun worshippers,” as Ronald Clark, the director of the city’s garden department, remarked in an article on the history of the Stadtpark.10 It appears that passersby disturbed some of the tea ceremonies held at the house for demonstration, which led to a reconsideration of the layout. In front of the teahouse, a four-hundred-square-meter Japanese garden was built. It was fenced off and the calm atmosphere was restored.11 Another reason that a Japanese garden is sometimes fenced off, which has nothing to do with meditation, is to distinguish it from a larger garden. The Japanese garden of the arboretum at Georgian Court University in Lakewood, New Jersey, is a good example. Georgian Court was originally the winter estate of George Jay Gould I, the son of a railroad tycoon. His wife, Edith, commissioned the Japanese garden from Takeo Shiota as a birthday present for Gould in 1909–10. Unlike other attractions of the current arboretum and campus—such as the Italian-

style garden—the Japanese garden is set apart from its surroundings in two ways. First, it has a traditional-looking gate and some meters of fence that were part of the original layout.12 These were not fully enclosing but helped structure the estate and prevent guests of Georgian Court from carelessly wandering out of the Japanese garden to other parts of the estate. Second, a low hedge has recently been planted around the Japanese garden, not around the other gardens. Although it is openly accessible as part of both the campus and the arboretum, the Japanese garden is symbolically closed off from the rest of it. Hedges are quite often planted in this way as delimiting markers of space for Japanese gardens in the West. Fences, hedges, and gates are features of many Japanese gardens worldwide—whether part of the original plans or not. They serve to conserve the precious and sometimes very sensitive gardens, but they also work to create a space separate from other parts of parks, gardens, and arboretums. This technique of setting Japanese spaces and gardens off from their surroundings through enclosures had captivated visitors to the world’s fairs, and it is still used today.13 Entrance gates in particular create a sense of liminality for visitors, who have to pass through these wooden constructions in order to get into a Japanese garden. Often the view does not open immediately upon entering. Rather, an in-between space pronounces the liminal situation, attributing an otherworldliness to Japanese gardens.

Rules It is not only enclosures that create a special place. Many parks and gardens introduce additional rules for Japanese gardens. Typically parks and gardens establish general sets of rules for their grounds. Lying on the grass is allowed in some parts and not in others; picking flowers is usually not allowed; and visitors have to keep in mind that they are not alone while they enjoy nature. However, at entrances to Japanese gardens, or even inside them, information boards and plaques post additional rules. Some warn of slippery steps or ask for care with regard to sensitive plants. But some of these additional rules are, just like the enclosures, based on a specific perception of Japanese-garden tradition. One of the most important objectives of the rules is to ensure a meditative atmosphere. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s rules do not allow children to enter the Japanese garden without being “accompanied by a parent, counselor or adult.” It could be argued that the pond poses a danger to children but that doesn’t explain why no such warning is posted on the other side of the pond, because it can be accessed without passing through the Japanese garden. In addition, no similar warnings can be found in any other part of the park. It is only the Japanese garden’s atmosphere that has to be protected from unmonitored children. In the Kyoto Garden of London’s Holland Park the warnings are similar but much more direct. The Kyoto Garden was constructed in 1991 to celebrate the centenary of the Japanese Society in Britain. Kyoto’s chamber of commerce and various companies donated money for its realization. At its entrance, a warning panel informs visitors what they should refrain from doing:

Please do not sit or walk on the grass. Please do not allow children to play here. Please do not bring your dog into the garden. Please do not feed the fish. Once again, children are targeted. There is always a danger that children will use a Japanese garden as a playground. The garden’s commission seems to assume that only persons of a certain age have the ability to grasp the complex concepts of meditation and silence that constitute a Japanese garden in addition to the plants and buildings. Meditation and silence are the ultimate rationale behind setting up rules for the Kyoto Garden. The warning panel begins by saying, “Please respect this area as one set aside for quiet and contemplation.” After the interdictions, the panel again reminds the visitors of the objective of the garden: “Please do enjoy the peace and tranquility.” However, the general atmosphere of the Holland Park garden does not lend itself to immersing oneself in “peace and tranquility.” Just one path with a short side path, strictly protected by ropes, leads around a pond. In addition, small signs tell visitors not to step on the grass. Only an exceptionally rude visitor would step on the grass under such circumstances. The garden feels crowded even if only a dozen visitors are there. Since Holland Park is a popular place to visit in the affluent district of Kensington, a quiet atmosphere is rare, except perhaps in the early morning hours. Information panels at entrances also use indirect hints to convey the message to visitors that the garden is a singular place with a special code of conduct.14 They often use the history of the garden or of Japanese gardens in general to impart Oriental wisdom and authenticity to visitors. Take the example of Düsseldorf’s Japanese garden in the Nordpark. The garden was set up in the early 1970s with the support of Japanese companies that have their European headquarters in Düsseldorf. The city has been one of the major Japanese centers for foreign trade in Europe since the 1960s, and thousands of Japanese live there. At the entrance, a sign explains Japanese gardens and culture and the atmosphere to be found within: “The Japanese garden reflects the mentality, tradition and feeling for nature of the Japanese people. While design of European gardens and parks symbolizes the struggle of man with nature and its eventual domination, Japanese gardens try to instill in man the sentiment that he is part of and immersed in nature. . . . Visitors who experience the Japanese garden unprejudiced will quickly understand the Japanese approach, which often prefers the aesthetic symbolic to rational logic.” Who would dare to have a picnic at the garden after reading such words? The sign is placed at the two entrances to the garden. By delaying the view onto the garden, it creates a liminal moment. More than anything else, it reflects the need of the Japanese in Düsseldorf for self-representation.15 Information boards are unsurprising at a botanic garden or other gardening institution with a pedagogical mission. They are found throughout. In the case of Japanese gardens, however, subtle differences can be found. The information boards for Japanese gardens often include an allusion to the garden’s Japanese architect, while other sections of a botanic garden usually do not need to be authenticated as prominently. At the BBG’s garden, the information board reads:

“The Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Japanese Hill-and-Pond Garden is considered the masterpiece of Japanese landscape designer Takeo Shiota.” The complicated background of Shiota’s biography, discussed in Chapter 6, is here left out. Though he surely can be described as “Japanese,” the sign obscures his diasporic background, which would in fact explain the Japanese garden in Brooklyn much better. A few lines later, the board explains, “The Hill-andPond Garden is one of the oldest Japanese Garden styles.” Using the technical term “Hill-andPond Garden” also adds authenticity to the garden. In some gardens, culturalist rules have softened. In North America in particular, the expense of maintaining gardens has led directors to open them up to new uses. Japanese gardens in Southern California, for example, have become popular places for wedding celebrations.16 With such new practices, gardens both collect fees and attract more visitors, which has led to debate among specialists.17 Even though culturalist rules are suspended when rituals like weddings are staged in them, the garden rules are not profoundly challenged. After all, it is the decision of the directors and boards to allow such usage. Even though Brown sees a hybridization of Japanese gardens when they host events such as weddings, control remains with the garden authorities.

Figure 35. Young cosplayers gather regularly on weekends at the Japanese garden in Düsseldorf. They use the garden as a playground and stage for posing in their costumes. Photograph by the author.

Some uses of gardens, however, go far beyond what designers and authorities had in mind. In Düsseldorf teenage fans of Japanese popular culture actively appropriated the Japanese

garden each weekend in spring and summer. Cosplayers—fans who dress up as characters from their favorite TV show, movie, or comic book—meet there and hang out, transforming the Japanese garden into a stage (Figure 35). The garden’s Japaneseness plays a major role in this event, but the young fans do not stick to the rules of proper behavior. This is the general “problem” with all planning and intentions: real life interferes. In the end, as Henri Lefebvre has shown, space is not only planned and discussed but also lived.18 Yet in everyday circumstances, a combination of enclosures, liminality, education, and other techniques can effectively limit the use of a garden.

Routes The routes that visitors to Japanese gardens can take are also limiting. Most Japanese gardens feature circumscribed paths for visitors to walk along. Most Western Japanese gardens follow the hill-and-pond scheme and offer one main path around the pond. Sometimes one or two other paths offer a diversion, which may lead to a small waterfall, but, after a few meters, these alternate choices head back to the main path. The size of the garden has little to do with the number of alternative paths. With larger gardens, the size of the pond changes while the number of paths remains more or less the same. On one side, the pond itself prevents straying off the main path, and on the other side carefully planted vegetation, ropes, enclosures, or small markers of boundaries do the same. But Japanese gardens not of the hill-and-pond style strictly confine visitors as well. Viewing routes and paths through the gardens as an element of authoritarian control over space might seem an exaggeration. Since the hill-and-pond type and the stone garden are typical layouts, one cannot fault the designers for confining visitors. And many experts have argued that Japanese gardens are more about enjoying surprising vistas than they are about touching or dominating the grounds. Yet it is important to keep in mind that paths are relatively new additions to Japanese gardens.19 Only since the Meiji era have they become common features. Harigaya Shōkichi has pointed out that, after the Meiji Restoration, when paths started to replace stepping-stones, Japanese gardens became eclectic.20 The park at the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, one of the most revered national monuments, is a famous example of this new eclecticism. When it opened in 1920, access was granted to visitors but it was limited. Visitors were not encouraged to interact with the garden—which stepping-stones would have promoted. Instead they were encouraged to enjoy the garden from well-defined paths that, with their ropes and other restrictions, keep them outside the garden itself. Nonetheless, some Japanese gardens offer more than the usual paths. Exceptions include gardens designed by Western garden architects with a superficial knowledge of Japanese gardens. Maymont in Richmond, Virginia, is such a case. This Japanese garden, redesigned in the 1970s by Barry Starke, a local architect, offers many more paths and possibilities than other hill-and-pond gardens. The resulting atmosphere is more open than that in other gardens, though it has some of the more typical elements we have been discussing, such as the traditional gate that prompts feelings of liminality. Even so, Maymont’s Japanese garden can be

entered from multiple points, completely bypassing both of the gates. Furthermore, children are not viewed as a threat but as a positive addition to the atmosphere. Because Maymont’s budget was limited and could not accommodate constant repair, Starke tried to limit some public activities such as picnicking and recreational sports. But he also understood that the Japanese garden was part of a public park.21 But most planners and custodians of Japanese gardens adopt a more traditionalist outlook and try to limit use. The lack of open space as well as restrictive paths help protect the gardens from frowned-upon behavior, such as picnics. Visitors have little choice but to circle the pond. Informational panels at the entrances remind them not to block the paths with camera tripods, otherwise the paths will quickly become crowded and thus unsuited for peaceful meditation. Western Japanese gardens have to be seen in their spatial context. Placed within parks and gardens, which allow for much freer use of grounds, the Japanese gardens are islands of additional restrictions. Justifying these restrictions by culture and tradition at the entrance has an additional impact. If these gardens are to be contemplated instead of being actively used, they place Japan and its culture on a special, exotic plane. However, sometimes visitors simply ignore rules, create their own paths, and turn Japanese gardens once again into “lived space,” as the Düsseldorf example proves (Figure 36).

Cultural Hubs Because Japanese gardens signify Japan, they can easily serve as a hub for a variety of practices deemed to be part of traditional Japanese culture. At the same time, these practices reinforce the claim that the gardens represent Japan. The most obvious example of such cultural practices is the tea ceremony. Gardens structured around a Japanese house (or, even more appropriately, a teahouse) offer lessons in tea ceremonies quite regularly. As discussed in Chapter 5, Zen is a large part of the tea ceremonies, which demand a quiet and meditative atmosphere and give the impression that something exotic is happening. The Japanese garden in Hanover was built for the purpose of protecting the teahouse—and its ceremonies—from any loud and unruly surroundings.

Figure 36. Visitors have created three paths at the Japanese garden in Düsseldorf. The park commission has decided to leave these paths intact because countermeasures have been futile as the paths were re-created. One of these paths is even officially sanctioned by the Japanese-garden designer. Courtesy of Andreas Steinbrecher.

The Japanese garden in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park also is a site for traditional Japanese culture. It actively hosts tea ceremonies and other Japanese practices, such as ikebana, in order to lend a japonesque atmosphere to the garden. The Japanese garden was originally built around the turn of the century. An original Japanese temple gate was the highlight and was a beloved sight for citizens until it accidentally burned down shortly after World War II.22 Replacement was swift, and the garden was also restored shortly thereafter. As part of the restoration, Philadelphia was able to obtain the Japanese exhibition house, which had been set up during 1952–54 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (see Chapter 5). The house’s Japanese name, Shofuso, was used in Philadelphia to advertise it to the public. By being brought to Fairmount Park, the house became completely disconnected from notions of modernity and became regarded more or less as a perfect example of a traditional Japanese house surrounded by a Japanese garden (Figure 37). Garden and house amplified each other’s traditional flair. From the arrival of the MoMA house in 1958, the president of the Fairmount Park Commission proposed the idea of serving tea at the house, but the commission did not take up this idea until 1972 when four Japanese exchange students started serving tea and acting as guides.

Figure 37. The Japanese house at Fairmount Park once stood for Japan’s ancient modernity at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After its move to Philadelphia it was recontextualized by a traditionalist Japanese garden and now serves as a location for cultural activities. Photograph by the author.

The house served as a showcase for Japanese culture, especially for visiting schoolchildren—although, according to documents in its archive, some of the guides complained that the younger children had no interest in Japanese culture and disturbed other visitors with their behavior. The house started to fall into disrepair during the 1970s, and, after fire devastated parts of it, the Fairmount Park Commission restored the house with the help of the Japanese consulate. Upon the occasion of reopening the house and its “tradition” to the public after renovations in the mid-1980s, Fairmount Park commissioner Frank G. Binswanger stressed in his opening address that the house “is a place not just for a visit but where people can come for contemplation and reflection.”23 The Friends of the Japanese House and Garden, a voluntary association, took over the tasks of caring for the house and organizing cultural events. In the beginning, this association had a strong diasporic influence because one-third of its members were of Japanese descent. Over the years the role of the diaspora diminished. The Friends tried to raise funds for the care of the house by offering guided tours and informational material that made claims such as “the House (Shofuso) is an authentic shoin style palatial home and is the only one of its style in the United States.”24 It also held tea ceremonies regularly in cooperation with the Philadelphia chapter of Urasenke. In July 2016 the Friends merged with the Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia (JASGP).25 This merger emphasizes the importance of Shofuso for

representing Japanese culture. During a weekend visit in 2008, I had the opportunity to interview the tea master in charge, an elderly Caucasian man. Wearing a blue kimono, he told me that the tea ceremony had been his hobby for about fifteen years. He now gave lessons and staged tea ceremonies for interested visitors to Shofuso on weekends. According to him, three tea masters took turns performing tea ceremonies at Shofuso. Ceremonies took place in one of the minimally furnished rooms with a view of the garden, while other visitors of the house passed by the veranda or through adjacent rooms. By displaying Okakura Kakuzō’s famous early twentiethcentury Book of Tea at the entrance, the Friends supported their claim that Shofuso was an authentic spot for tea ceremonies. Approximately twenty copies of three different editions were for sale, along with teacups and other souvenirs. Tea ceremonies are performed at Shofuso throughout the year, and non-Japanese people can perform them without risking inauthenticity. This authenticity is strongly validated through the cooperation with Urasenke, because Urasenke is one of the leading Japanese schools for tea ceremony and thus its involvement clearly indicates the “authenticity” of the ceremonies.26 In addition to tea ceremonies, the program of the JASGP mentions courses on bonsai or shiatsu, but, judging by their frequency, tea ceremonies seemed to have been the most popular. All in all this is a good example of the activities that take place in Japanese gardens throughout the year. Kept alive first by the Friends and now by the JASGP, who, through these activities, raise some of the money needed for sustaining the house, the program for Shofuso is rich overall. Other gardens also offer a variety of activities, some organized by Japanese friendship societies and others by the garden commissions. Japanese gardens have long functioned as a locus for activities judged to be traditional. The classic canon of Japanese high culture—the tea ceremony, ikebana, or festivities like hanami (watching cherry blossoms in the spring)—are often on display in gardens and their buildings. Japanese gardens rarely offer activities not linked to this classic canon. The shiatsu lessons cited earlier are one of these occasions when a rather new practice has been integrated into the garden’s setup. In the West shiatsu might be mistaken as part of the classic Japanese canon, but it is actually an invention of the early twentieth century that gained popularity only in the last couple of decades.27 The Japanese gardens do not lend themselves to more innovative performances such as concerts of modern music. Non-Japanese activities are not part of the programs, though a small classical concert or a play might fit well in some Japanese gardens. As is the case with the spatial regimes, the forces of alleged tradition control the garden’s cultural activities. Creative experiments are not encouraged, though there are some exceptions. Recently, North American gardens have started to engage in diverse cultural activities a bit more, such as a youth workshop on manga at Shofuso, but most events remain of a traditional sort.

“Other” Places As this chapter has shown, Japanese gardens in the West remain untouchable and out of reach,

even when people walk right through them. Signs and signifiers emphasize a distance between the visitor and the representational space, which is due not to the inaccessibility of faraway Japan or Japanese culture but to the spatial arrangements of the actual garden itself. In this respect, the gardens redouble the positioning of the Japanese garden at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (see Chapter 3), where the garden resided on a small island and thus underscored the exotic and unique nature of the Japanese pavilion. Though not placed on literal islands, these gardens are symbolic islands themselves, often surrounded by larger Western-style gardens. Certainly not all Japanese gardens match this characterization of inaccessible islands. Some, such as the little Japanese garden at the Morris Arboretum in Philadelphia (see Chapter 3), fit in with their surrounding parks and feel immersed in their context. Moreover, each and every garden surely does not share all of the aforementioned characteristics. Some are not enclosed; some offer many more routes than just one or two around a pond; some have no informational boards at all; and some do not have strict rules. Finally, not all are a hub for traditionalist cultural activities; in fact, many do not host any activities whatsoever. Nevertheless, nearly all gardens share at least some of these characteristics or have done so at some point in their history. Some of the most prestigious gardens are built around a spatial paradigm in which garden architects and garden commissions give the impression to visitors that Japanese gardens are special and not to be mixed in with more common types of gardens. Thus Japanese gardens are staged as an “Other” garden: in essence, being different and difficult to understand. Strategies that describe people, customs, rituals, or ways of living as standing apart from the “norm” turn these spaces into an “Other.” “Othering” is a process and not a fact. The term was first used in the context of the “writing culture” and postcolonial debates of the 1980s.28 There it was mainly a textual strategy. By setting up binaries between the West and the rest, such as rational versus irrational, or Gesellschaft versus Gemeinschaft in the famous dichotomy of Ferdinand Tönnies,29 the anthropological object of study is created as an Other in ethnographic texts. Othering was more common in earlier cultural anthropology but it continues as an influential textual trope. Descriptions of Others define not only those being studied but also the West itself. Othering also establishes an author’s authority, as he or she is the only one capable of understanding the Other. Neither the readers, who have not been where the author has been, nor the objects of description, who lack the rational capacities of the author, could have produced the ethnographic text. Othering is a hegemonic practice as it establishes subjects and objects. The spatial politics of Japanese gardens work very much like the Othering within ethnographic descriptions. Textual strategies play only a small role, in the form of informational boards, guided tours, or leaflets. But enclosures, entrance gates, routes, and other architectural devices help “Other” the space of the gardens as effectively as the texts describing them. Through these other strategies, the famous phrase from Rudyard Kipling, “Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet,”30 is transformed into a spatial practice. Indeed, East and West cannot meet, as they are strictly fenced off from each other. These strategies that set Japanese gardens apart from any Western environment are even more efficient than texts, as they work through the senses. They script how the garden is to be

used and what will be experienced through the scripted use. All gardens, especially public ones, have ideas and ideologies inscribed in them, especially about how one should behave. But Japanese gardens have an additional cultural script that tells visitors Japanese gardens are Other places. By entering the garden, visitors are forced into a subtle liminal experience as they pass through the gate. A vista then opens up, but the garden is not to be explored fully because its routes are predefined and maintain a distance between the visitor and the garden itself. Unfamiliar surroundings do not easily lend themselves to interpretation. Unless visitors come with a deep understanding of Japanese gardens, they are disoriented, and yet they can easily sense the very Otherness of their surroundings. The script thus works on multiple levels. As in the case of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, some of the garden visitors did not act in accordance with the script; they did not subscribe to it, which bothered those who were charged with administering the garden. The translation of Japan into a garden no longer worked when visitors were picnicking on the grounds instead of experiencing its Otherness. So a new enclosure was set up to ensure that visitors of the garden conformed to the notions of the garden’s commission. The Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s commission was able to exert its power to make sure that its own interpretation became authoritarian once again. Its interpretation of Japanese culture was enforced with a simple spatial device. By setting up the enclosure and by adding guards to the garden, a meditative atmosphere could be ensured. The script was forced on visitors. The question of power regarding Japanese gardens is much more complicated than in the case of “writing culture.” Who is the author wielding power over the interpretations and inscriptions of a foreign culture? Garden designers are often Japanese as a means of authentication. Employing a Western garden designer would raise doubts about a garden’s authenticity. But the garden designers are entangled in webs of power themselves, since they rarely have the means to build the gardens they envision all by themselves. Institutions and individuals financing the gardens have their own ideas as to what the gardens should look like. Sometimes these institutions are Western, as is the case for the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Sometimes they are Japanese, as when twin cities in Japan donate gardens and control all but the garden’s location.31 In addition, the “text”—the garden itself—is anything but stable. It can be at least partially rewritten at any time. If the garden commission sets up an informational board or offers a guided tour with information contradicting the ideas of the original garden designer, the original inscription is altered.32 When this happens, few visitors will notice that the story of the garden has changed. Thus the power relations created by Othering through garden design are much more complicated than in the case of ethnographies. This is especially true because the classic power relations of Othering no longer hold true. The Japanese are not primitives subject to description, and they certainly can write back. They, too, have been actively trying to control the representation of their country since the late nineteenth century. By using a spatial arrangement to dictate how gardens are used, Japanese gardens at world’s fairs displayed their own translation of Japanese culture.33 But there is no one, unified Japanese agent, even if the gardens would like to create the impression that there is some essential Japan. A diasporic migrant like Shiota Takeo, a Meiji official like Okakura Kakuzō, or an intellectual like Suzuki Daisetsu all followed their own agendas in promoting

Japanese gardens.

Chapter 8

Connecting Spaces, Disconnecting Spaces

Garden Stroll VIII: Krasznahorkai’s Imaginary Japanese Garden Perhaps fittingly, this theoretical chapter begins with an imaginary Japanese garden found in László Krasznahorkai’s short novel From North a Hill, from South a Lake, from West Roads, from East a River (2003).1 Yet to be translated into English, it provides an especially rich opportunity for thinking about Japanese gardens between East and West.2 As I move between the original Hungarian, the German translation, and this English text, my discussion in this chapter will also enact the very problem of translation. In parallel narratives, the novel juxtaposes medieval Japan with modern Japan. It begins with its protagonist wandering in the outskirts of Kyoto. Later, the reader will learn that this character is Prince Genji, who is looking for the perfect Japanese garden. Prince Genji is, of course, the main character of The Tale of Genji, a classic of Japanese literature that some consider the world’s first novel. Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji in the Heian period (794–1192) around the year 1000, when court life was at its height and Japanese-garden culture was thriving in Kyoto. The canonical text on gardens, the Sakuteiki, was written just a few decades after The Tale of Genji. Clad in period court clothing, the yet-to-be identified prince ambles through a vast, abandoned Buddhist monastery in contemporary Kyoto, while his drunken bodyguards stumble through the city frantically searching for him. The prince believes that the perfect garden is somewhere in this area of Kyoto, most likely in the monastery. We are told that “he had read about the perfect garden in the last decades of the Tokugawa period, when he happened upon the famous illustrated work One Hundred Beautiful Gardens. After paging through ninety-nine gardens of great interest, it was the hundredth, the so-called hidden garden, that most captured his attention.”3 If the prince is a Heian person who has read a book “in the last decades” of the Tokugawa times (i.e., the mid-nineteenth century) and he is now wandering through Kyoto, that means he has lived in different centuries and for many decades since he first learned about the “hidden garden.” Long, winding sentences, some extending over several pages, reinforce this surreal atmosphere. Although the prince gets close to its garden, he does not find it. He wanders by, unaware that he is only a few meters away. Unable to fulfill his wish to see the perfect garden, the prince is left wondering whether the garden still exists or whether it ever existed at all. After centuries of searching, the protagonist misses the garden and is left uncertain about its existence, and yet the narrator informs the reader that the garden is in fact in good order. It is a small strip of land: “A carpet of moss with eight hinoki cypresses.” The

narrator also has no doubt about its perfection: “To see it and speak about it, to view it and find words for it afterwards, to choose the right expressions, to invoke the essence, that was harder than everything else.”4 Small and inconspicuous as it is, he tells us that the garden leaves viewers speechless. This description puzzles the reader, since there doesn’t seem to be much special about this garden. At the end of the book, the bodyguards have yet to find the prince. He returns to the train station to go into the city. The train stops, the doors open. Nobody gets off the train, nobody gets on, and nobody is left on the platform. The reader is left to wonder not only about the existence of the perfect Japanese garden but also about the very existence of the prince himself. In an interview about the book from 2005, Eve-Marie Kallen asked Krasznahorkai why the prince does not find the garden. Krasznahorkai answered: “How he could not find what he sought is much more important than the fact that he did not find it! How we do not know some things is the most important matter.”5 In the interview, Krasznahorkai adheres to some stereotypes of Japanese gardens, such as Zen, being their major cultural influence since the Heian period and Japan being more tradition-bound than Europe.6 Nonetheless, his novel unravels the myth of Japanese gardens just enough to open up new possible interpretations.

IN CHAPTERS 4 and 5, I put forward a theoretical framework to explain how Japanese gardens were turned into a metonym for Japan. Only by representing Japan did the gardens become fully Japanese. In Chapters 6 and 7 I examined the specific practices through which this was accomplished. Now it is time to ask how these explanations can be integrated into a broader theoretical framework.

Spaces of the Nation The ambiguity of Krasznahorkai’s novel is due in no small part to his understanding of Japan as a cultural container. Although Krasznahorkai is subtle in his approach to time, he still sees Japan, at least in the Kallen interview, as a holistic expression of a cultural essence. This notion of Japan is, of course, not limited to Krasznahorkai, and nearly all who write about Japanese gardens share this idea of Japan. They assume Japan is a culture neatly differentiated from others by language, ethnicity, habits, and so on, as if it were a container adjacent to but clearly delineated from others. Everybody inhabits exactly one container with one’s compatriots. People who somehow belong to two containers are routinely described as torn between two cultures that cannot be reconciled. As they model Japan in miniature, Japanese gardens are literal cultural containers. As discussed in Chapter 7, informational boards at an entrance alert visitors that something strange and different is awaiting them. Authoritarian guidelines then instruct them on how to understand the garden. The gardens educate visitors in Japaneseness as if they were a crash

course in intercultural communication so that visitors know how to behave. Following the paradigm of cultural containers, it is important that garden features and the gardeners themselves be authentically Japanese. Only Japanese people have the correct cultural programming to build a Japanese garden.7 Proper technique cannot be learned because it is part of a holistic formation acquired throughout one’s life and is only partly transferable. Outsiders who come to Japan might learn the necessary techniques and, to a certain degree, the wisdom behind them, but they can never fully escape their own container culture. The notion of cultural containers has enabled the Japanese garden to function as a space of national representation and intercultural exchange for the last 150 years. Within the context of colonialism, Japanese gardens offered a strategic space for the Japanese.8 As an expression of Japanese culture that was hard for outsiders to understand, gardens puzzled the West and defended against Western appropriation. Japanese intellectuals dismissed Western interpretations such as those of Josiah Conder as being rationalistic9 (even though one of the classic Japanese texts argued much the same10). They denounced copies, such as the one made for San Francisco’s Midwinter Exposition of 1894, as fake. The Japanese garden was one attempt to secure a space that eluded the grasp of colonialist modes of representation. By stressing the Japanese garden as a riddle, Japanese authors tried to enclose the space against the West. Over the course of the early twentieth century, however, the Japanese government and Japanese intellectuals lost their control over the meaning of the Japanese garden. The Japanese garden was partly appropriated and incorporated into Western modes of representation. And yet, as a constant enigma, it could not become fully integrated into an imperialist body of knowledge, and many still found them hard to comprehend. Authoritative books and articles on this topic continued to be translated for Western audiences, and they continually challenged Western certainties. The “modernity” of Japanese gardens also complicated the relations between Japan and the West. Transcending imperialistic inequality, Japanese gardens ceased being objects of exoticism and became works of art on a level equal to those in the West. But then after World War II, when they became linked so closely to Zen, Japanese gardens were once again transformed into spaces illegible to most Westerners. According to Suzuki Daisetsu, Zen transcended Western rationality as well as the non-Western primitive love of nature, and the gardens expressed this synthesis of modernity and naturalism. Because history is linked to the actual “owners” of the container, the Japanese could claim gardens in Japan fully for themselves—at least after the Meiji government linked the past and present. It was their history. Benedict Anderson provides an example of the uses of history in the newly forming nation-state of Indonesia.11 The Borobudur temple complex had been a neglected ruin in a hinterland, but it became a symbol of the Indonesian nation as a result of government efforts to establish a worthy past for the nation. In using history in this way, Indonesia followed the example of European colonial powers, which had excavated Indonesia’s past in order to form a coherent identity for the colony. Thus the idea of creating a national past by referring to old ruins is not an anticolonial strategy per se but a technique learned from the former colonial powers. For Japan, different gardens could do the same sort of work. Around 1900 the Kinkakuji in

Kyoto and its gardens had been the favorite both of Western tourists and of the commissions that planned Japanese pavilions at world’s fairs. Three decades later, the Ryōanji’s stone garden rose to prominence as an example of Japan’s ancient modernity. After World War II, it would serve as the main reference point for Japanese gardens. New Japanese gardens were being built all the time with a strong traditionalist appearance. As in the case of the Indonesian Borobudur, constant re-presentation through new examples avoided the pitfalls of the past. These gardens could be carried to the West to represent Japan as a nation that had not declined but rather had a healthy link to its past. Nonetheless, the continuity between Japanese gardens of the past and the gardens of the present remains puzzling. From the Meiji era until today, Japanese intellectuals have had an advantage over Westerners when reading historical sources on Japanese gardening. Also, certain families, who have operated garden businesses for centuries and who claim to transfer the knowledge from one generation, continue to exercise influence. Japanese artisanry has long claimed to uphold such family traditions. But, at the same time, these gardeners rarely built Japanese gardens at the world’s fairs alone. Rather, they did so but alongside Japanese intellectuals trained in the Western style. However, the art of gardening in Japan has obviously evolved since the medieval Heian period. Machines have replaced shovels for preparing the ground for a garden. Trucks transport massive rocks, and cranes help to move them. Modes of perceiving gardens also have changed. Instead of places where noble festivities unfold, Japanese gardens are tourist spots for Westerners and Japanese alike. Gardens have been disconnected from history in both construction and perception, and yet Japanese experts argue that, because of their special comprehension of history, only the Japanese had a special right to build and interpret them. Orientalists have tended to deny modernity to non-Western countries and to see them as in stasis, but Japanese experts have themselves done the same to Japan. Although Japan may have joined the rank of the “modern” countries, Japanese intellectuals and politicians have portrayed the core of its culture as mostly unchanged over the centuries in order to forge a national identity. One way to stabilize its cultural heritage was to index all Japanese gardens. In the late nineteenth century, Ozawa’s cataloging of the old daimyō gardens was meant to fend off the modernization of city landscapes, which often led to the gardens’ destruction. The most ambitious garden-cataloging project was Shigemori Mirei’s Nihon teienshi zukan (1936–39), an illustrated encyclopedia that sought to forge continuity between the history and modernity of Japanese gardens. Shigemori was a successful gardener whose designs have often been credited for modernizing the Japanese garden.12 Nihon teienshi zukan, published in twenty-six volumes, recorded about 250 gardens and served as the basis for his designs. Visiting old gardens all over Japan, he gathered photographs and plans and described the gardens within a set of categories. Shigemori may have reduced the gardens to index cards in a large filing cabinet but he also established the historical canon of Japanese gardens, which would support the new designs of gardeners in Japan as well as in the West. The encyclopedia included numerous then-contemporary Japanese gardens, but it did not include any Japanese gardens abroad. The encyclopedia was to canonize only Japanese gardens located in Japan. Shigemori strongly linked the history and modernity of Japanese gardens again in 1971

with an essay entitled “Shin-sakuteiki” (The new Sakuteiki).13 With the title, he both affirmed the Sakuteiki as the bible of Japanese gardening and made it clear that it needed a modern translator such as himself to adapt it to modern garden-design practices. As Christian Tschumi has shown, Shigemori argued for a modern approach to the classical rules, neither sacrificing them completely nor succumbing to their strictness.14 While modern gardens still needed to adhere to established rules, the rules required contemporary understanding. By employing cultural essentialism, Shigemori and others like him trivialize the task of translation. Recall from Chapter 5 Benjamin’s challenge to the translator not only to translate into his own language but also to instill a sense in the reader that the text is not fully translatable. Instead of acknowledging that gardens in earlier periods had completely different functions and meanings, and were not even seen as national symbols for Japan, Shigemori attempts to close the gap between now and then. He does so by using his authority as a Japanese garden expert. He assumes that Japanese visitors understand historical gardens despite the fact that they belong to different historical contexts. With this assumption, he strengthens the problematic notion that there is a Japanese essence that transcends historical change. Encyclopedias and new versions of the Sakuteiki, however, cannot fully overcome the distance between then and now.

The Chain of Translation: From Gardens to Love of Nature In his book Pandora’s Hope, Bruno Latour has developed the notion of a “chain of translation.”15 Although Latour developed the concept in the context of science studies, it is useful in the case of Japanese gardens as well. During his participant observation with geographers and botanists in South America, Latour noticed that scientists used various tools and abstractions to translate what they found on the spot into scientific findings.16 They measured small pieces of earth with a color scale to find out what they were composed of, and they translated the composition of the earth into models of changing soil. These translation practices ultimately gave rise to a theory of landscape change for the region. The chain of translations from the soil and other parts of the landscape to the theory, however, is much longer. Small steps of translation connect the research on the ground to the grand theory. The color of the soil signifies the existence of certain grains and elements, and the presence of these grains and elements signifies that certain geological processes took place in the soil. Each signified turns into a signifier in the next step, constituting another link in the chain of translation. The translational links are straightforward and logical. Checking the color of soil using a scale yields more or less unquestionable results, and so the chain seems fully discernible and well constructed. But of course the step from the researcher’s ground to the grand theory is a big one, and yet the chain of translation, if well constructed, bridges it. Latour’s chain of translation generalizes the notion of translation and takes it beyond the narrow confines of language into the realm of signs. This semiotic approach can help us think about Japanese gardens in the West. Gardens are not language, but they certainly are signs or arrangements of signs. These signs include the physical appearance of gardens with their

plants, stones, fences, lakes, lanterns, paths, and gates as well as the less visible parts of the gardens such as gardeners or institutional sponsors. All these signs work as starting points in chains of translation. During the first vogue of Japanese gardens, the typical chain of translation would start from the planning of the garden.17 Looking at the plants, stones, lanterns, and so forth, pundits conclude that this layout signifies a landscape in miniature. They see the layout as naturalistic, and since a Japanese person planned it, it signifies the Japanese love of nature. This short chain of translation differs from Latour’s. Latour’s chain is straight—it links one starting point with many links in between to an end result. It is a long way from a sample of earth to a theory of changing landscapes in the Amazon. Similarly, it is a long way from placing stones in a certain manner to a “love of nature.” However, in the case of the Japanese garden, observers link together various starting points—the layout, its naturalistic appearance, the gardener’s nationality—in order to reach the resulting interpretation of a “Japanese love of nature.” Those starting points were established one hundred years ago when a discourse arose that required that linkage. In the beginning, Westerners had difficulty categorizing and translating Japanese gardens. Japanese gardens were unexplored “third spaces.”18 For Homi Bhabha, third spaces are realms of creativity that open up where cultures overlap. Clear definitions are not yet set up, and thus limitations of meaning do not exist. Liberal thinkers such as diasporic novelists unfold their ideas within a third space. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese gardens were similar. On the Japanese side in the 1870s, there was yet no canonical form of “Japanese garden,” and Western problems in finding precise words to describe them confirmed this ambiguity. Interpretations of the gardens were still evolving and not as fixed as they would later become. Floating somewhere in between, a third space was open to alternative readings beyond simply either “West” or “East.” However, the rules showing how links in the chain of translation were to be joined slowly emerged and increasingly established themselves as canonical. Rules about what gardens could mean quickly inscribed themselves into interpretations, and the discourse went into either/or mode. The other came to serve as an intellectual stimulation without independent power of its own, and Japanese gardens were put forth as a different but still vague means for coming to terms with nature and rationality. The results of this closure of discourse can be seen in the gardening career of Isamu Noguchi, the artistic mind behind the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Japanese garden (see Chapter 4). Noguchi might be seen as an artist who avoids the politics of either/or. As an American with a Japanese father, he seems ideally suited to the task. Noguchi, however, was never really able to escape the question of whether he was Japanese or American; he was never really in-between or neither/nor.19 The same is true for his works of art, including the Japanese garden in Paris. Commentators either saw his work as artificially Asian—a reproach more often heard in Japan but also in the United States —or saw Noguchi himself as not American enough. Protests about his involvement in the building of a new bank in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1960–61 caused waves of protest against the “Jap.”20 Noguchi found no solace in his third-space position. Rather, he conceded that he would never be fully Japanese and thus would never be capable of producing Japanese culture.

He saw himself as little more than a tourist in his father’s country.21 Even in cases where Bhabha’s third spaces seem to open up, circumstances often close discourses off once again. In this regard, Naruse Hiroshi’s comment on the UNESCO website’s homepage (discussed in Chapter 4) is most telling. Unable to see the motives behind Noguchi’s garden layout, Naruse implicitly dismisses him as another Westerner trying to take up Japanese gardening as a fad. The chain of translation has worked so well because Orientalist interpretations and Japanese self-description converge. It was just as crucial for the Japanese to maintain control over the links as it was for Westerners to create the Orientalist links. The “Japanese love of nature” was not just an Orientalist interpretation from without but also an Orientalist selfdescription from within. After all, the motive behind using gardens as national representations was to create a strong image that would become generally accepted. Had gardens not fulfilled this task, the Japanese government would have stopped using them at world’s fairs. By bringing Latour’s “chain of translation” concept from science studies to the realm of cultural artifacts, I have altered its meaning somewhat, but it is nevertheless a helpful tool for examining the complex issue of translation. Concepts and ideas are not translated in toto; they are often broken down into links. Compared to Latour’s example of the scientific research process, the links involved in Orientalism and in Japanese self-description are more ambiguous. The single links in their chain of translation do not succeed each other as logically and stringently as do the translational changes in natural sciences. In exchange the chain extends into something more like a web of interlocked signification, each working to stabilize the other. Japanese gardens were interpreted using more than one signifier as starting points. The notion of a translational web helps to overcome the constructivist stasis that was analyzed in Chapter 4. The web adds a dynamic component. Links in the chain are constantly updated or even slightly altered through new texts and interpretations of Japanese gardens. While the starting points and the endpoints of the translational web are basically stable, the web is dynamic because its connections are. Instead of pointing out moments and processes of construction, we can shift the focus to recurring moments of translation, which update the links and create new connections. We can also see how chains and webs of translation work in two directions: they represent a nation still in the making, and they help the Western Orientalist come to terms with himself. I consider the more complex consequences of this shift in what follows.

Japanese Gardens as Non-Places Japanese gardens are not literally third spaces. The rules that form their chain of translation do not allow them to escape either/or notions. Gardens are either Japanese and authentic, or they are not. What kinds of places do Japanese gardens become as a result? Are they places at all? The French anthropologist Marc Augé offers the term “non-places” to differentiate between places and spaces: “If a place can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity will be a non-place.”22 Typical non-places are supermarkets or airports, while the old

central market of a city would be a place. Neither category ever exists in a pure form, as all places and spaces share some characteristics. Augé’s concept is drawn from the sense of alienation that hypermodern spaces bring with them, and there is some romanticism embedded in the dichotomy. Places create the “organic social” while non-places are associated with “solitary contractility.” That is, they are based on formal agreements and contracts and not natural bonds, and formal rules and laws, instead of organic needs and emotions, govern them.23 Bringing to mind Walter Benjamin’s book Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction), Augé’s places resemble art before the age of photography, but with a twist.24 Augé’s places correspond to modernity, and non-places correspond to hypermodernity, and Augé thus takes Benjamin’s dichotomy between premodernity from modernity forward in time. Bruno Taut’s and Christopher Tunnard’s descriptions of Japanese gardens as “modern” from the 1930s approximate the meaning of Augé’s “hypermodern.” Although some view Augé’s concept of the non-place as simplistic, it is helpful for understanding space and the meaning it introduces into chains of translation. Augé understands that places are crucial to social life. His theory of places and non-places builds on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of a “lived space.”25 In his classic work on spaces as social entities, The Production of Space, Lefebvre proposed three types of spaces: conceived, perceived, and lived. Lived spaces recover the direct connections to places that have been submerged through rational planning and bureaucratic administration. Thus lived spaces are about overcoming alienation and resemble the immediacy of nature. When people start to use spaces in their own way, not caring anymore for bureaucratic rules, lived space emerges. So, is a Japanese garden a place or a non-place? In the Japanese garden, all the criteria of Augé’s “places” and Lefebvre’s “lived space” appear to be met. They are anything but contractual; they express identity and history, and they are relational. Japanese gardens are obviously not like supermarkets or airports. However, Augé introduces other types of nonplaces, such as those that exist much more as images than as real places.26 People know these non-places through travel catalogs before they visit them. Consequently, once seen in actuality, non-places—he gives the example of Tahiti—cannot match their own images. The perfection of their images outdoes reality by far, and tourists make up for the discrepancy between image and reality by taking photographs of themselves. Texts on Japanese gardens, such as informational boards or leaflets for tourists, often describe Japanese gardens in general while referring only cursorily to the actual garden at hand. In doing so, the informational boards act like perfect images of Tahiti. They undermine the effect of the physical garden and turn it into an imperfect representation of “real” Japanese gardens, which are in Japan. As in the example of Tahiti, the actual place is semiotically overdetermined and cannot live up to what the text says about Japanese gardens. However, the discrepancy between an overdetermined description of a garden and the actual garden is often resolved on the spot. The description on the informational boards forces visitors to accept the actual garden as an authentic example of the “Japanese garden.” They stress the foreignness of the garden at hand and Japanese gardens in general. Visitors who might have had doubts whether the actual garden is indeed a worthy example of the general

concept are told that they—as Westerners—cannot understand Japanese gardens anyway and thus are not competent enough to assess the actual garden. The authoritarian gestus—special rules, enclosures, informational boards, and an intrusive exoticism—reinforces the informational board’s message in stressing the authenticity of a garden. At the same time, it also raises doubts about whether Japanese gardens are real and authentic. Why would an informational board have to stress the garden’s authenticity unless it was in doubt? Informational boards will sometimes refer to famous examples of gardens in Japan, opening an immediate gap between here and there, between copy and original. Because the gardens are strongly Othered, they do not really relate to their visitors. The garden cannot and will not fit fully into its surrounding context. Because it signifies Japan’s Otherness, it stays alien and is meant to stay so. The enforced strangeness of the gardens adds another layer to Augé’s explanations of places and non-places. Japanese gardens are not non-places by accident but because they are meant to be. The underlying message is that whereas in Japan gardens are places, in the West they never can be. Japanese people can relate to them and find their history and identity embedded in them, but they tell Westerners something else: that they have lost their connection to nature and are alienated modern beings. What’s worse is that the ideology behind Japanese gardens reproduces this alienation. But matters are not so tidy. Alienation rules in Japan, too. Yamada Shōji has naïvely asked why anybody would think that the famous Ryōanji is beautiful.27 He admits to seeing no beauty in the garden. His question resembles Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes. The emperor is naked but nobody dares acknowledge it. Similarly, Ryōanji is not intuitively beautiful, but nobody admits to not seeing its beauty. If so, Ryōanji is not as relational and expressive as it is often characterized. For many, like a photograph of Tahiti, it functions as an icon of Japaneseness. Yet the actual spot does not fully meet expectations. Because so many intellectuals advocate for the beauty and Japaneseness of Ryōanji, it is hard to admit that the garden appears naked. Japanese gardens in the West function as non-places— as signs of the “real thing” in Japan—but the gardens in Kyoto do the same thing. The signifying process overwhelms visitors, and the gardens, through their authoritarian gestus, become non-places.

Semantic Gardens Japanese gardens are semantic complexes embedded in a discourse where Japan and Japaneseness are negotiated. Kendall H. Brown has remarked that the gardens are not symbols of the relations between the West and Japan but that they actively form these relations.28 Japan is a script written and rewritten through gardens. Brown’s point can be extended further. Since their first appearance in the West, Japanese gardens have spilled over to other areas semantically. The “Japanese garden” stood for a way of life, a philosophy, a religion, splendor, and much more. Many qualities and essential traits were attributed to the gardens or seen as emanating from them. As stages or backgrounds, gardens added to the formation of the semantic

complex and its meanings. The actual gardens were only partly able to encompass all of these identifications. The gap between here and there—between the actual garden and the image of Japanese gardens in general—was all too obvious. Augé’s distinction between places and nonplaces helps us to see the overdetermination of the gardens, and by categorizing the gardens as non-places their signifying potential becomes clearer. As semantic fields, Japanese gardens offer starting points for translational chains. These chains extend not into a straight line but into a web. The gardens become a myth in the sense that Roland Barthes gave the word in Mythologies.29 As Barthes explained, certain cultural practices or entities develop meanings beyond their immediate evidence. While a Japanese garden can be simply described as a certain arrangement of lanterns, bridges, and plants, it also evokes mythical qualities such as Japan’s perfect aestheticization of nature. This gap between the garden that can be seen and sensed and the much more expansive thoughts and ideas that it brings to mind constitute the myth of Barthes. As signs then, gardens are overdetermined, but their excessive signification cannot be forced to match the actual garden. Barthes’s myths oscillate: at one moment an overdetermination can be felt, outdoing the materiality of the sign. In the next moment, this overdetermination collapses and the sign regains its integrity. Advertisers use this oscillation to mythically charge their products and yet stay true to them. The mythical quality of Japanese gardens in the modern context affects the original and the translation at the same time. Following Benjamin and the postmodernists, it is safe to say that the original and the translation do not really differ in terms of originality. Translated gardens are able to unleash the potential of the “originals” in Japan, but these potentials are mythical in the sense Barthes put forth. Latour’s chain of translation explains how meanings unfold from the materiality of the garden to lofty assumptions about Japan, and then how they wander here and there. Latour’s semiotic understanding adds another perspective to the question of original and translation. It helps explain the feelings of cultural difference that prevail when Westerners muse about Japanese gardens. Westerners claim they cannot understand Japanese gardens, but this strategic move is not founded on some essential quality. They do not find Japanese gardens a riddle because they express an essential quality of Japaneseness. Rather, they are difficult to decipher because links in the chain of translation are bound together in different ways. Since gardens are seen as a symbol for many things, rules for joining the links differ. In the context of culture, the chains turn into webs expanding far and wide. It is the multiple connections between these webs, not an essential cleavage, that evoke cultural difference. The strategic moves of intellectuals are the major cause of the differences that the chains of translations produce. Only non-places, which are not bound by relations or history, allow for such deliberate linking of translational chains. Non-places have to be freed of historical links to act as starting points for webs of translational chains. History is one among many sources of meanings that can be attached to gardens. It is not by chance that Prince Genji was not able to find the perfect garden. In the case of non-places, the past and the present are not “naturally” bound together but linked only through volatile chains of translation. Like the Japanese garden, Krasznahorkai’s wandering Prince Genji cannot be captured or guarded in a safe place. He wanders through East and West, acting as a messenger of Japan,

hoping to transform Japan into something imaginable. The prince has left his own time. His bodyguards are not able to safeguard him. Drunk, they lose him. Various people and institutions have tried to take the prince hostage and enslave him. Japanese governments, Japanese gardeners, Japanese Buddhist Zen adepts, and Japanese writers have all been able to raise their profiles by relying on the prince. But none of them has had the power to keep the prince from wandering. The same is true for all the others who tried to prove to the prince that they were able to understand and interpret something as foreign as Japan. He has read all the important treatments of Japanese gardens. Was it a text from the Edo era or was it Loraine Kuck who gave him the hope of finding the perfect Japanese garden? The semantic field of the Japanese garden has had something for everybody. Its myth no longer oscillates but is constantly being overdetermined. Even though the prince can’t find the garden, Krasznahorkai assures us that the perfect garden indeed exists in a decayed monastery somewhere in Kyoto— and that no one will ever find it.

Gardens and Nongardens What do the theoretical notions I have developed here for thinking about Japanese gardens offer more generally? The question of translation is not new to East Asian studies. Scholars have thoroughly scrutinized translation and its role in the constitution of Japan after the Meiji Restoration.30 Many Western concepts such as “individuum,” “state,” and “love” and personal pronouns like “he” or “she” had to be newly translated in order to be able to bring many Western works into Japanese. The accomplishment of intellectuals such as Fukuzawa Yukichi has been acknowledged.31 The consequences of these translations in forming a new national identity have also been considered. But these discussions of translation differ from my case of Japanese gardens. They follow a path from the center to the periphery, at least in colonial terms. They ignore the repercussions of these translations on the West itself. Translation has been seen as essentially a one-way transfer. Japan, however, is an interesting case for examining translations “the other way round.” Developing imperialist politics of its own early on, Japanese culture began to draw Western attention. From the end of the nineteenth century, Japanese gardens have been but one area of Japanese imprint on the West. What lies beyond garden art is important. The influence of woodprints on European artists has been acknowledged, but until the translational logic there, too, is uncovered, the discussion will remain at a standstill. With the popularity of recent cultural exports such as manga and anime, the question of Japan in the West has become increasingly scrutinized. But, beyond them, little has been said about the effects of translation on both sides, including the question of how these transfers continually constitute the “West” and “Japan.” A similar story can be told for the many cases where Asian culture has left an imprint on European discourses. Esoterics is one prominent term under which many of these cases, such as Feng shui or yoga, have been categorized. In order to protect their authority, adepts essentialized these “Asianisms” and Asia itself. With the balanced approach I offer here,

backed by the theoretical notion of translation, it would be much easier to reveal the process of back and forth that preceded these cultural practices becoming essentially “Asian.” The field could be opened up further, and this chapter has provided some of the necessary analytical tools do to so. Translational studies of this kind have to be treated in a case-by-case matter. What is true for Japanese gardens might be applicable to yoga, but yoga has its own history of translation—with its own consequences.32 So, while some of the theoretical insights here might be used to look at a case like yoga, it will have its own charm. Many historical characters like Prince Genji populate the gaps between East and West and between past and present. Through their constant wandering back and forth, they both bring the poles to life and constitute them as binaries. Prince Genji joins Patanjali, the mythic founder of yoga, and other ghosts. We see them waiting for the train that will take them from the outskirts of Kyoto to the city’s center. The train approaches, the doors open, nobody gets in, and nobody is left waiting on the platform. We are left to wonder if these ghosts are alive only in our imagination.

Chapter 9

Postmodernizing Japanese Gardens

Garden Stroll IX: Marthashof Since German reunification, Berlin has once again become a vibrant, cosmopolitan metropolis. Major changes to both its urban and social architectures have reanimated areas that had lain fallow during its division into East and West. Formerly neglected border areas now find themselves at the center of town. One such district is the Prenzlauer Berg, a formerly decaying area in the East now adjacent to Berlin’s center. Its splendid apartment houses from the turn of the twentieth century have been restored and their huge apartments sold to the rich, while the former residents have been pushed out by rising rents. Fashionable natural-food stores, trendy boutiques, and restaurants have replaced the older and more affordable supermarkets and shops. A recent development project there, Marthashof (in English, Martha’s Court), typifies the area’s gentrification. This luxury condominium complex stands on the site of a former East German barracks, which had fallen into disrepair after 1989. The state owned the property and, after proposals for a public park were put forward and rejected, it sold the area to the investment company Stofanel. Stofanel built a vast complex of expensive apartments and houses, which they describe as an “urban village” in its local advertising (using the English term). However, since the vast patios and gardens of Marthashof are not open to the public, the urban “village” presents itself more as a gated community. Local residents protested against Marthashof, but to no avail as its apartments and houses quickly sold out. Until 2011, the complex’s showroom was housed in a mobile office space near Marthashof, at a busy intersection just a few meters from where the Berlin Wall had stood. Several boulders, reminiscent of a Zen garden, stood in front of the showroom. As the atmosphere was anything but quiet, no one was tempted to meditate in front of the showroom while traffic noisily passed by. Inside the showroom’s spacious interior, interested customers discussed apartment designs. Furnished rooms showed how the apartments and houses would look. Here again design elements evoked Zen gardens. One of the rooms displayed a sideboard in black wood with white pebbles neatly arranged on it. In a second sample room, a sofa was literally placed on white pebbles in front of a canvas full of Chinese characters. In another room, a textured carpet brought to mind raked gray sand. Two boulder-shaped stools complemented it, and a wall-sized replica of Hokusai’s famous ukiyoe, “Mount Fuji off Kanagawa,” dominated the room (Figure 38). Finally, a sketch of the vast patio of Marthashof showed a stone garden with pebbles and boulders that was strongly reminiscent of Ryōanji and other Japanese Zen gardens. Although neither Zen nor Buddhism was explicitly acknowledged in the showroom,

the informational material spoke of Marthashof as a “city centre living with freedom, space and peace.”1 Target groups for the apartments and houses were “city lovers,” “cosmopolitans,” and “families.” Keywords in the brochures were “dynamic,” “green,” “safe,” and “vibrant.” Marthashof was billed as being a safe haven in the middle of a creative urban area, a shelter to all. Buyers got the best of both worlds: a vibrant city and a secluded courtyard. In the context of the recession and financial crisis, creating a positive image was crucial for the success of Stofanel. Given a cost of €3,000 per square meter, high even for Prenzlauer Berg, only the rich were expected to buy a house or an apartment. Prenzlauer Berg has teemed with social tensions over gentrification, and the advertising campaign sought to overcome these well-known problems by focusing on peace, nature, and creativity. Allusions to Zen, conveyed through a touch of Oriental interior design, helped to convince target groups that the place was created for wholesome living.

WELL GUARDED BY rules, informational boards, and confinements, Japanese gardens in the West have tended to occupy corners of a public park or a world’s fair (see Chapter 7). Stepping into them meant being educated about the East and its spirituality. But in the last two or three decades, as the Marthashof example shows, they appear to have escaped their confines. Japanese gardens, or allusions to them, now often pop up in surprising places, such as in a luxury apartment building in central Berlin—or in miniature Zen gardens sold for interior design. One can buy these stone gardens and rake their sand at home or at work whether for distraction or meditation. On the Internet, you can use your mouse to drag a rake through a “virtual Zen garden.”2 A computer game features a Zen monk raking the sand in contemplation. The game’s task is to rake the entire garden without stepping on already-raked areas. Otherwise the monk will himself disintegrate into sand. Tosa Naoko and Matsuoka Seigo won second place in the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Nabi Digital Storytelling Competition of Intangible Heritage by using Japanese gardens as a technique for user input, what they called “Zennetic computing.”3 These varied examples show that Japanese gardens have been commodified for a global economy. Westerners do not necessarily step into them anymore but acquire them whole, for their homes, workplaces, or computer screens.

Figure 38. An exemplary room of an apartment in an advertisement by Stofanel for Marthashof shows the Zen touch of the campaign. A showroom with a carpet resembling pebbles as well as chairs like stone boulders bring a stone garden to mind. Courtesy of Stofanel Investment AG.

The borders between Eastern gardens and Western surroundings have begun to blur. Contemporary architecture and interior design have appropriated certain elements of Japanese gardens. Stone lanterns and stone arrangements can be found out of context in stylish Asian restaurants, and Japanese gardens are often used to convey a certain image for a shop or a company. Marthashof in Berlin is a good example of this. It associates Zen gardens with a certain style of living, good taste, openness to other cultures, as well as qualities associated with the East such as nature, peace, and tranquility. Stofanel has cleverly used these connotations to sell as many apartments as possible at the best price. Its example leads us to some questions: Why have Japanese gardens left behind their “traditional” boundaries? How have these transgressions affected their appreciation? How have ideas about Japanese gardens changed? And, just as important to ask, how new are these appropriations?

Japanese Gardens Beyond Their Boundaries Before 1945 Recent trends around Japanese gardens are not without precedent. In the first vogue of

Japanese gardens—especially in the American context—advertisements, shows, theaters, and interior-design shops used the image of Japanese gardens quite freely. During this time, Japanese gardens often acted as a stage for spectacles not directly related to Japan (see Chapter 3). Newspaper articles and advertisements used Japanese gardens to entice customers to buy various products both “Japanese” and not. Many restaurants and teahouses added Japanese-garden scenes to their interior, but even steaks and chicken were served in Japanese surroundings, as one restaurant in Boston proudly proclaimed in an advertisement.4 Perhaps more surprising, car salesmen used Japanese gardens as scenery to sell their goods. In the years around World War I many automobile shows were staged among Japanese gardens. On February 12, 1912, the Kansas City Star reported on a motor show in the local convention hall that featured the “most pretentious decorative scheme” to date. A Japanese garden was designed “gay with blossoms of the Flowery Kingdom,” even including roses.5 Even if Japanese gardens at that time were imagined as flowery oases, roses were surely out of place, but the roses appealed to American customers. Three years later the Fort Worth Star Telegram reported that the National Automobile Show in Chicago had produced the most expansive “scenic setting ever.” It continued, “Such a garden has not been seen outside the wealthiest estates in the Mikado’s realm.”6 In a similar story about a display at a local automobile dealership, the Boston Globe noted that “many people complimented the company on its decorative scheme, the effect of which is a Japanese garden, the posts being covered with bamboo lattice work, from which wisteria vine and blossoms entwined in lattice work reach to the ceiling, there branching out all around the posts. Unique Japanese lanterns, made especially for this display, give a most attractive illuminating effect to the whole.”7 Novelty and exotic stylishness made the Japanese garden attractive to car dealers.8 Newspaper reports praised the splendor of the displays. Because the car industry was just taking off at the beginning of the twentieth century, car shows were rather large events.9 It was fitting for such events to stage displays that were regularly applauded for being the most expensive or elaborate to date. As with the luxury apartments in Berlin, Japanese gardens mostly appealed to the upper class, and at first these elaborate shows targeted them. Japanese gardens communicated an image of wealth and style, and their exclusiveness and their grandeur enhanced the image of cars. However, cars gradually had become affordable for the middle classes, too, and it is not by chance that promotions using Japanese gardens started at a time when Japanese gardens were becoming popular with the masses. Otherwise the image might have targeted a group of buyers too exclusive for a quickly expanding market. Over time, the many promotional events diminished the very image of exclusiveness. Once garden displays had become too commonplace in automobile promotions to arouse any further interest, they disappeared from car shows. During that same decade, miniature versions of Japanese gardens started to appear. One type, as reported in the New York Times in July 1914, was featured in florist window displays. Even if only tiny replicas, these “gardens” were affordable for many more people. Still, according to the Times, they were not exactly cheap: “Their price seems prohibitive for such a plaything.” As an alternative, it provided detailed instructions on how to build one’s own

miniature garden using moss, pebbles, small plants, miniature bridges, stones, cottages, fences, and pagodas. Small geishas and samurai puppets provided a finishing touch.10 A picture from the Boston Globe in 1922 hints at the wide range of other purposes that miniature gardens might have served (Figure 39). The miniature Japanese garden could be placed in a goldfish bowl as a sort of background decoration for the fish. The garden image serves to advertise an “invisible” coloring book. The caption instructs readers to wet a brush with water and to sweep it over the picture, after which “Japanese ladies appear in the garden showing the many colors of their gowns.” Here, Japanese gardens have become an amusement for children. During their first vogue, Japanese gardens—whether as advertisements, as stage sets for entertainment, or as miniature versions for mass consumption—escaped the “traditional” definitional boundary. Still, these transgressions did not question the basic notion of the Japanese garden. The advertising images, stage sets, and miniaturized versions continued to allude to the special aesthetics of Japan and its assumed close relation to nature. Each permutation used actual, conventional Japanese gardens as a reference but added further stereotyped Japonica like geisha and samurai. Without these references the gardens would not have been as interesting for advertisement or miniaturization. The transgressions neither outlived nor outdid the actual Japanese gardens of the first vogue in any aspect beyond borrowing their image in order to start a life of their own.

Japanese Miniature Gardens Beyond Japan After 1945 Over the past couple of decades, a new market for miniature Japanese gardens has appeared. Against the examples from the 1910s, we can differentiate a fresh way to deal with these miniature gardens today. Most of all, they are rarely called Japanese gardens; rather, they are usually termed “Zen gardens.” “Zen” brings to mind the images of sand and stones much better than “Japanese.” Other names are used for the miniature gardens, too, opening up the context further. Some are promoted as “Asian Japanese Feng Shui Sand Zen Gardens.” This catchall title covers a variety of recent trends that might help sell the gardens. Feng shui, or Chinese geomantic knowledge, has become very popular in the last two decades in the West. Myriad books now exist on this topic, and Feng shui counselors help customers adjust the interior design of their homes in accordance with its principles. Japanese gardening has been influenced by Chinese geomantics since the thirteenth century,11 but not directly, and to call miniature Japanese stone gardens “Feng shui gardens” overstates the relation. Employing the concept of Feng shui for the miniature gardens is yet another marketing strategy. Still, some companies make a genuine attempt to explain Zen gardens in terms of Feng shui. By adding the Chinese system as an explanation for the gardens, they claim an even longer history. One website explains: “According to Zen and Feng Shui beliefs, every corner of one’s environment is important and deserves respect. Your Zen garden can be the beginning of a lifelong adventure of seeing things in a new way. This garden may enable you to enter into a tradition that goes as far back as 3000 B.C. and is as near to you in time as your next thought or your next

perception. In the inner appreciation of the simplicity of a miniature garden one has the ability to reduce all complexities to a matter of sand and rocks.”12 The “gardens” consist of small wooden frames from six to twelve inches square or more, a bag of fine sand (usually white but specialized sellers offer other colors), a few dark stones, and a small rake (Figure 40).13 Each garden usually costs less than $20. A miniature garden fits perfectly on a desk as a decoration as well as a distraction. Someone fills the frame with sand, places stones on it, and rakes the sand to create patterns. These basic elements can be supplemented by other, fancier items. One garden offers an additional ikebana flower bowl and costs around $50. Another has a tiny deckchair, a sunshade, and some shells packaged with it, mimicking a beach. Its tiny rake is the only remaining reference to a stone garden, and, even though the set looks like a beach, it is sold on Amazon as an “Asian Japanese Feng Shui Sand Zen Garden.” Many other variations exist. Ad copy focuses on the use of the little gardens for relaxation. They praise the organization and raking of the gardens’ stones as a means of finding inner peace in the middle of a chaotic workday. One miniature garden comes along with a general booklet on meditation. The gardens are presented as momentary refuges. They offer instant transport from the stress of modern working conditions to faraway, ideal(ized) realms of exotic wisdom.

Figure 39. An advertisement for an “Invisible Color Book” features a Japanese garden in a China bowl. Geishas and carp populate the garden. Stones, drum bridges, and willows add to the exotic atmosphere to the delight of the young boy looking into the bowl. Boston Daily Globe, July 30, 1922.

Two books, or, I should say, booklets, about miniature Zen gardens have been published in the West.14 While neither has been especially influential, they embody the spirit in which miniature Zen gardens are bought and sold. Abd Al-hayy Moore’s Zen Rock Gardening is sold as part of a mini “Zen Garden Kit,” and Matta Horn’s Der kleine Zen-Garten (The little Zen garden) is sold as a stand-alone book. Both achieve a book length through clever typesetting only. Each rehearses typical stereotypes about Japan’s special relation to nature and the value of Zen as a refuge from modern Western society.15 Moore stresses the role of “Zen” for Japanese gardens by presenting its Chinese character three times in the tiny book.16 The authors regard each miniature garden as real and authentic and not as a toy or amusing gadget. They also illustrate well Japan’s diminishing role in explanations of miniature gardens and Zen gardens in general. Both Moore and Horn emphasize Taoism and Feng shui as important influences.17 By introducing Zen as the main philosophical background—which is as much Chinese in its origins as it is Japanese—Moore and Horn avoid the rubric “Japanese” throughout their book. Although they do not fully deny the Japaneseness of the Zen garden, they turn it into an Asian token. Horn quotes Lao-Tse and other Chinese sages at length, and both he and Moore make the point that new Western owners of a miniature garden need not become adherents of Buddhism: “We may not become Zen adepts, but anything we do with skill may serve us as well.”18 This open attitude helps sell the gardens as a tool for meditation and relaxation for everyone.

Figure 40. Everybody can own a stone garden. These miniature gardens come with tiny garden tools and various items, such as a small statue of a woman in this example. Photograph by the author.

How do the contemporary miniature gardens differ from those some decades ago? In the first decades of the twentieth century, miniature Japanese gardens were still tied closely to Japan. They were neatly elaborated and contained many more elements than did their actual counterparts. As noted above, they contained, beyond basic ground coverage with sand, moss, and tiny plants, little bridges, pagodas, and even samurai and geisha puppets. Stone gardens were not yet fashionable. Compared with this love for detail, today’s miniature gardens are, for the most part, austere. But the catchall names for these miniature gardens prove that they are not solely about Japan anymore. The miniatures are still based on Japanese examples but assert a relation to Asia in general and allow for playful uses not connected to Asia at all. The books do not go as far as that—there is no advice to put a tiny deckchair in the garden—but both authors treat the gardens as Asian rather than as Japanese.

Now and Zen The proliferation of Japanese-garden images—especially those of stone gardens—is part of the abundance of Zen images in Western culture. This abundance leads people to believe that Zen Buddhism has directly inspired Japanese gardens. Moore’s book, for instance, contains pictures of lanterns and the torii (the gate) in the Japanese garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, implying that it is a Zen garden.19 Indeed, many, even the Brooklyn Botanic Garden itself, have interpreted Shiota Takeo’s garden as a Zen garden. As we saw in Chapter 5, however, the garden was built well before Zen became popular in the West. Since the 1960s, Zen has figured prominently in the analysis of Japanese gardens and even Japan itself. General books on Zen regularly include images of Japanese gardens. Despite Yamada Shōji’s work that has shown it was never directly related to Zen, the Ryōanji’s stone garden appears often.20 We can take a little English-language booklet on Zen as an example: Yoshioka Toichi’s Zen, first published in 1978 as part of the Colour Book Series, which disseminates English-language information about Japan.21 The booklet, sold in Japan as an introduction to Zen for the noninitiated, is not the best introduction but is now in its tenth printing and has been widely read. The author packages Zen for Westerners using the typical ingredients, with illustrations showing practicing Zen monks and laypersons along with photographs of the Ryōanji and other Zen gardens.22 One short chapter is dedicated solely to “Zen-inspired gardens.”23 David Scott’s Easy-to-Use Zen (2002) is a postmodern introduction to Zen, and it demonstrates the effect of linking Zen and gardens.24 Classic books on Zen, such as those by Suzuki Daisetsu, Eugen Herrigel, or Alan Watts, always underscore the Japanese character of Zen and its seriousness.25 Zen was something mystical and hard for outsiders to understand. These authors usually set themselves apart from Western readers, claiming that, because they were initiated, they knew much more than their readers. In contrast, Scott, a prolific writer about all things Zen, fulfills the promise of his title and introduces Zen as an accessible style of

living. His book is part of a trend toward opening Zen up to broader audiences and use, which involves its de-Japanization. In a chapter entitled “Where Does Zen Come From?” Scott states, “Japanese Zen has its origins in China, where the first Zen masters taught and the first recognizable Zen monasteries were founded. However, the deepest roots of Zen lie in India, where Siddhartha Gautama was born . . ., attained enlightenment, and—as Buddha—founded the Buddhist religion.”26 Scott also asserts that Chinese Ch’an Buddhism “became the most powerful influence in the development of Chinese culture” before spreading quickly further to Korea, Vietnam, and Japan.27 In other words, Zen has an Asian heritage well beyond Japan. These classic authors on Zen do not deny its Chinese origins but usually claim that it was in Japan that Zen fully acquired its spiritual power. In contrast, Scott removes the boundaries that enclose Zen as part of Japan’s national heritage. In Scott’s treatment of basic teachings and practices, Japan plays a rather minor role. But when it comes to interior design and gardens, he can no longer deny the Japanese influence on Zen. After having played only a minor role in the first part of the book, the noun “Japan” and the adjective “Japanese” start to appear frequently. He gathers all types of Japanese gardens under the rubric Zen—with the Ryōanji, of course, as a prominent example.28 But he also includes other Japanese gardens that are not recognizable as specifically Zen from the outside (keeping in mind my discussion in Chapter 5 that not even stone gardens can properly be called Zen gardens). Even though Scott does not de-Japanize gardens and interiors completely, the overall impression of his Easy-to-Use Zen yields interesting results. In Scott’s book, Zen is more accessible but less Japanese. He links gardens not just to China but to Asia broadly—to India, Korea, and Vietnam. Like the authors of the books on miniature gardens, Scott introduces concepts such as Taoism29 to explain Zen and to dismantle the Japanese cultural container that holds the old Zen image in place. The spread of Zen throughout current popular culture reinforces this tendency. Zen is deployed widely, in various contexts, especially in marketing and advertising. Zen is so ubiquitous that you could sell bubble bath with it. But this stripped-down Zen is even more emptied of philosophical or religious content than Scott’s Easy-to-Use Zen. It is completely disconnected from Japan and becomes only a vague metaphor for some kind of spirituality that is lacking in the modern Western world. The advertising value of Zen finds its basis in this vague spirituality combined with a design aesthetic of stark simplicity that translates into understatement as luxury. Within this marketing context, Zen and Zen gardens can take on nearly any meaning. A global resource for Web design calls itself “CSS Zen Garden.” This name communicates an approach to web design that avoids clutter. Garr Reynolds offers a similar approach in his book Zen Presentation, which advocates uncluttered PowerPoint presentations. Each chapter opens with a picture of a “Zen garden” to emphasize its argument. Apparently, Reynolds has hit a nerve; his book is a perpetual best-seller on Amazon. Although these uses of the image are in line with the aesthetics with which Zen gardens are associated, other examples are more surprising. Take, for instance, a Chinese restaurant in Paris’s eighth arrondissement, a luxurious quarter and the political center of Paris, that has the name Zen Garden.30 It offers caviar with tofu on white rice as a starter for €75. Neither the aesthetics of the restaurant nor anything else about it follows Zen too closely. There are many

other such examples, but one deserves attention as the most creative appropriation of the Zen image I have come across. Recently Esther Williams Swimwear, named after the famous swimmer and actress of the 1950s, gave one of its upscale 1950s-style two-piece swimsuits the name “Zen Garden.” This brief sampling shows that the term has left the enclosures of strict definition. It can be Chinese again, as it once was, or it can be combined with state-of-the-art programming or floral patterns on a swimsuit.

Japanese Gardens in Recent Decades Since the 1970s, Japanese gardens have indeed jumped their boundaries as they have become miniaturized and sometimes virtual, as on the Internet. At the same time, many “conventional” Japanese gardens have been built worldwide and more are being planned (Figure 41). In Japan, newly built gardens have become integrated into the global flow of ideas about Japanese gardens. The garden built for the Osaka Expo ’70 in 1970 is one such example.

Figure 41. The Jardín Japonés in Buenos Aires is one of many Japanese gardens in South America. Photograph by Wolfram Manzenreiter.

After the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, the Expo was the second global event that signaled that Japan had shed its dark past to rejoin modern, peaceful nations.31 In addition, the Expo

restored the balance between eastern Japan (with Tokyo at its center) and western Japan with Osaka, which had been in favor of Tokyo and the eastern part of the country since the Olympics.32 The Expo opened its gates in March 1970 under the motto “Progress and Harmony for Mankind.” The first world’s fair to be held in Asia, it celebrated Japan’s ascendancy as the world’s second largest economy. World’s fairs had always been showcases for Japanese gardens, and the Expo was no exception. The Japanese garden made up roughly one-fifth of the Expo’s central grounds and was thus the largest ever presented at a world’s fair (Figure 42). Situated in the northeast section of the Expo, it sought to codify Japanese-garden history for visitors. A stream flowed from the west to the east of the garden and symbolized “progress,” while the whole garden was meant to symbolize “harmony.” In the westernmost part of the display, an ancient garden represented the beginnings of Japanese gardens. Next came the medieval garden, then the modern garden, and finally the contemporary garden (Figure 43). Interestingly, the Edo period (1600–1868) was labeled as modern, which indicates Japan’s confidence in the existence of the indigenous roots of modernity in Japan.33 The classification of Japanese gardens by eras had become popular and had, by the 1970s, partially replaced the systems of Honda Kinkichirō and Josiah Conder. The era scheme stresses the dynamism of Japanese gardens and at first glance seems to undermine essentialism. However, this classification by era also creates a national garden history and thus reessentializes gardens again as Japanese by integrating them into one continuous timeline. Osaka’s classification by era recalls another modern classification system that classified gardens by their social context: imperial, daimyō, and monastic gardens.34

Figure 42. The plan of the Osaka Expo ’70 shows the massive dimensions of the Japanese garden. The garden expands on the

northern edge of the Expo area. Courtesy of Andreas Steinbrecher.

Nakane Kinsaku planned the garden at the Osaka Expo. As discussed in Chapter 5, Nakane had pointed out that the Ryōanji’s garden wall once was covered by wabi-sabi kaki shingles, and he had helped formulate Urasenke’s garden philosophy in the journal Chanoyu Quarterly.35 In the 1950s and 1960s Nakane had built many traditional gardens in Kyoto.36 In the late 1960s, the Japanese government commissioned him to build gardens in foreign places, such as Kuwait and Singapore, so that by 1970 Nakane was well versed in planning gardens for cultural diplomatic ends.37 Nakane also became an important figure for Japanese gardens in the West. He was a sensei (teacher of garden art) for American garden designers like David A. Slawson and Julie Messervy. He designed gardens in the United States, such as the Japanese garden at the Carter Center in Atlanta, finished in 1986; and the Tenshin-en, in commemoration of Okakura Kakuzō, at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art, completed in 1988.38 In an interview in 1995 Nakane said that his American students had acquired a deep understanding of Japanese gardens. Nakane’s gardens and the arc of his career encapsulate the accelerating transnationalization of the art.

Figure 43. An American visitor’s photo shows that the garden was not very inspiring in 1970. Photograph by David Gunn.

The Osaka Expo ’70 is an example of what Marc Augé calls “spaces” (see Chapter 8). It has become commonplace in Japan to build gardens as essentially sterile copies that represent a universal Japanese-garden history without any attempt to relate them to the specific places where they are built and, as a result, they do not add meaningfully to these places. Another example is the garden at the center of the Prince hotel complex in Shinagawa, an affluent district of Tokyo. The Prince is the largest hotel in Japan, with more than 3,500 rooms.

Surrounded by the hotel’s towers, a large Japanese garden offers tranquility to guests, who can stroll around inside it or look at it from their rooms or from various cafés and restaurants (Figure 44). At Narita Airport, a Japanese stone garden can be found in an even more sterile spot. In front of Terminal 2, under a bridge and next to traffic lanes for buses and cars, a raked plane of pebbles, stones, some lanterns, and a few meters of fence form a garden (Figure 45). These gardens prove that commodification and recontextualization are not the monopoly of the Western adaptation of Japanese gardens. Japanese gardens in Japan have experienced the same development.

Figure 44. The Prince hotel complex in Shinagawa, Tokyo, encloses a magnificent Japanese garden to greet Japanese and international guests alike and offer them a Japanese experience. Photograph by the author.

In the meantime, Japanese gardens in North America and Europe continue to flourish. Two basic routes have been taken. On the one hand, traditional Japanese gardens have been planned and built, such as in Bonn at the Bundesgartenschau 1979 (Chapter 7) and the Japanese Landscape in the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, completed in 1996 (Chapter 1). Others have been restored along these lines or carefully developed and enlarged, such as Maymont in Virginia (Chapter 7) or the Huntington in California (Chapter 5). On the other hand, very creative approaches to Japanese gardens have sprung up, more in line with the trends discussed in this chapter.

Figure 45. A somewhat depressing stone garden under a road bridge greets visitors at the international arrival gate of Narita Airport, Tokyo. Photograph by Johannes Harumi Wilhelm.

One of the most impressive examples for a new approach to the genre of Japanese gardens is the Jardin Japonais at the Albert Kahn Museum and Gardens at Boulogne-Billancourt (Figure 46). The city of nearly 120,000 is in fact a suburb of Paris and most famous as the headquarters of the automobile manufacturer Renault. Kahn was a rich banker but also a humanitarian with broad interests and extensive connections in the intellectual circles of the late nineteenth century. He built an estate in Boulogne-Billancourt. With an interest in gardens, he established the Jardins du Monde in 1895. A Japanese village was added two years later, made up of some houses and a garden. As a consequence of the global financial crisis of 1929, Kahn went bankrupt, but his gardens and his estate were preserved and turned into a public park.

Figure 46. Team Zō created a postmodern version of a Japanese garden at Boulogne-Billancourt near Paris. The drum bridge, painted red, is a reminder of the japonaiserie background of Albert Kahn’s first Japanese garden at his estate. Photograph by the author.

In the late 1980s the Département des Hauts-de-Seine, which owns the museum and the gardens, decided to have the Japanese village restored and to add a new contemporary Japanese garden to the Jardins du Monde. The garden designer Takano Fumiki planned the new garden together with the landscape planning company Team Zō. (The company name, “Team Zoo” in English, is derived from the Japanese character for “elephant.”) Neither Takano nor Team Zō specializes in Japanese gardens, but they have executed a broad range of landscape and architectural projects in Japan and abroad. The resulting garden is exceptionally playful and fascinating. It has its share of typical Japanese-garden elements, such as lanterns, a koi pond, and a traditional-looking entrance gate. But among these are almost ironic elements like the red drum bridge, which looks very japonesque, as if built in the primetime of Japonism around 1900. In addition, the garden disrupts conventions. Stones are molded into artistic structures and patterns, thus defying traditional expectations while adding lightness to the overall design. As a result the garden looks both Japanese and not Japanese at all. It confronts visitors with the question of what exactly a Japanese garden is. The garden thereby brings the meta-narrations that have so long undergirded the idea of Japanese gardens to an end.

The End of Meta-Narrations and the Japanese Garden

Over the past few decades, appreciating Japanese gardens has been complicated. The very category “Japanese garden” has been destabilized. The early uses of the name “Zen garden” did not contradict the broader category of “Japanese garden,” but recently the relation between them has loosened. Zen has become something broader and does not necessarily refer to Japan. Japanese gardens have become less Japanese and they no longer represent Japan to the degree they once did. Japanese gardens have lost some but not all of their metonymic status. Zen gardens now represent an Asian legacy and a much broader field of cultural reference than before, but they also continue to be seen as Japan in miniature. Other images of Japan—for example, manga and anime, Japanese comics and animations—have grown more widespread. These aspects of popular culture have not fully replaced Japanese gardens, but it is now much easier to imagine that Japan is a multifaceted country with more to offer than a mystified spirituality—and even that spirituality is now a mixture of Taoism, Zen, and Feng shui. And yet, even if Japanese gardens are less burdened symbolically, the all-encompassing metonymic model is still not totally out of fashion. The opinion that Japanese gardens contain everything that is worth knowing about Japan has not died out; it is just not as dominant as it was before the 1990s. This change in the image of the Japanese garden has repercussions for some of the roles the gardens have played. As seen in numerous examples throughout this book, the Japanese government has used Japanese gardens very successfully as part of its cultural diplomacy. Starting from the first official appearance of a Japanese pavilion at the world’s fair in Vienna in 1873, gardens have been the backbone of national displays. This held true through the 1939 world’s fair in New York, just before the outbreak of World War II. After the war, the Japanese government once again relied on Japanese gardens to present the country as nature-loving and peaceful, even if the garden styles changed. Promoting the stone garden as the archetypical Japanese garden, the government sponsored Isamu Noguchi’s expensive garden at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, but it also arranged its own projects, such as the stone garden at the Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C. Stone gardens became a regular part of national displays, such as the one in Seattle in 1962. However, in the last decade or so, Japanese gardens at international events have changed. Consider Japan’s display at the 2003 International Garden Festival in Rostock, Germany, which still forms part of the IGA Park. At the former Bundesgartenschau in Bonn in 1979 (Chapter 6), Japan was the only Asian nation to present a garden, but at Rostock, an Indonesian garden and, most prominently, a Chinese garden nearly overshadow the Japanese one. In addition, the Japanese garden follows a different logic. It does not represent Japan in toto, but rather finds its inspiration in a fairy tale. Informational boards—still much more prominent here than in the other gardens—explain that an old fairy tale was used as a guide in planning the garden. Its pebbled space is moon-shaped because the moon plays an important role in the fairy tale, and other elements of the garden are also placed or shaped in accordance to this story. Some aspects of authoritarian Japanese gardens remain: the garden is fenced off and constitutes a sphere of its own, whereas, in contrast, both the Chinese and the Indonesian gardens are much more open. In addition, an extensive cultural explanation is offered to visitors. Nonetheless, the boards do not offer a meta-narrative on Japan. There is only a romantic story being told, which, even if presented as typically Japanese, is, by far, less

Othering than the garden texts from previous decades. The strong narrative and representational role of the Japanese garden has diminished in the last few decades. There are various possible explanations. One may be competition from China, which lately has utilized gardens in similar ways to those of Japan. Even if Japanese officials claim that their gardens are unique, this is harder to prove at garden fairs and other occasions where competing Asian models are on display. Chinese and other Asian gardens tend to look just as exotic as Japanese ones do, and so for naïve visitors these gardens fall into the same category of Asian exotica. Sophisticated visitors will notice structural and aesthetic similarities among the gardens. The new Gärten der Welt (Gardens of the World) recently opened in Marzahn, a former East German satellite city with a bad reputation that is now a district within Berlin. The first garden to open was the Chinese garden. Beijing, the twin city of Berlin since 1994, invested heavily in the garden, and city officials now claim that it is the largest Chinese garden in Europe. Two years later a Japanese garden opened, followed by Balinese, Korean, Oriental, and Italian gardens. However, the Chinese garden easily dominates the Gardens of the World at 290,000 square feet while the Japanese garden has only 29,000 square feet. The other five gardens combined are still considerably smaller than the Chinese one. In North America, many Chinese gardens have been built: one in 1981 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; one in 1986 in Vancouver; one in 1991 in Montreal, following a twin-city agreement with Shanghai; and another in 2000 in Portland, also as part of a twin-city arrangement (with Suzhou). There are plans to build Chinese gardens in Seattle and in the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. The latter will be more than 520,000 square feet. The Chinese Academy of Forestry is responsible for its planning and layout, as official Chinese institutions work hard to catch up with the expansion of Japanese gardens over the last 150 years. Another important factor is surely that the very success of Japanese gardens has led to new and sometimes unexpected uses of them. The image of Japanese gardens proved so popular that it was taken up in other very different contexts, such as in consumer markets and in advertising and marketing. Expensive restaurants or swimsuits marketed under the label “Zen garden” eventually change the meaning of the referent, and this image transfer changes the Japanese gardens themselves.

Conclusion

Our garden strolls have come to an end. We explored gardens in France, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and even an imaginary one in Kyoto, the cradle of this global complex. These examples prove my introductory claim that Japanese gardens are a global phenomenon. They also concretize the two historical waves of Japanese gardens in the West: one that began in the 1870s and lasted until World War II; and another that began in the early 1950s and continues to the present. When Japan first represented itself in gardens at world’s fairs in Vienna (1873) and Philadelphia (1876), Western commentators had difficulty describing and categorizing Japanese gardens. Nonetheless, after a decade, this garden type had become fairly common in the West. Three analyses of Japanese gardens—Edward Morse’s Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1885), Josiah Conder’s Landscape Gardening in Japan (1893), and Lafcadio Hearn’s “In a Japanese Garden” (1892)—formed an influential body of knowledge. Among authors and garden designers, a shared sense of how a Japanese garden should look evolved and, as a result, Japanese gardens began to take on a uniform appearance. The Japanese government and gardeners also worked in concert to ensure authenticity. Some Western gardeners even followed Conder’s instructions literally, such as we saw in the example of the garden in Düsseldorf. Rules on what Japanese gardens had to look like can be thought of as an ensemble, which has changed over the decades. In the first vogue, Japanese gardens were mostly green oases featuring particular plants, such as wisteria. In the second vogue, stone gardens came to dominate. Nevertheless, some basic assumptions remain surprisingly stable over time. First, Japanese gardens have stood in for Japan. Putting Japan within reach after a short trip to a park, the gardens replace an actual journey to the Far East. Second, Japanese gardens have been built as authoritarian spaces that educated visitors about Japaneseness from the moment they entered the gardens. Fences close off gardens to set them apart, and strict rules insist on a meditative function for the gardens. As a consequence, the gardens are strongly Othered, and, as metonyms for Japan, they Other Japan, too. The new understanding of Zen Buddhism played a strong role in this Orientalist leaning in Japanese gardens. From the 1920s, Suzuki Daisetsu sought to establish Zen Buddhism at the center of any understanding of Japanese culture. Starting in the 1930s, Western intellectuals, such as the German philosopher Eugen Herrigel and the British philosopher Alan Watts, popularized Suzuki’s writings in their own accounts of Zen Buddhism. With regard to Japanese gardens, Loraine Kuck’s One Hundred Kyoto Gardens (1935) demonstrates Suzuki’s influence the most. Publishing her book on the occasion of the Garden Club of America’s visit to Japan, Kuck was the first to advocate the term “Zen garden,” and her account made the stone garden of the Ryōanji into an icon. The turn to Zen Buddhism to explain Japanese gardens, however, became a standard only later, in the 1950s. The replica of the Ryōanji’s stone garden in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

helped popularize the Zen garden, as did others. Even gardens that had not been conceived as “Zen gardens” were reinterpreted as such, as in the case of Shiota’s earlier 1915 Japanese garden in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. By the 1960s and 1970s, the notion of Zen gardens became pervasive, and stone gardens in Japan benefited from this trend. Tourists overran the Ryōanji, and it became anything but a quiet place for meditation. Stone gardens have since become so familiar in Western popular culture that gardens show up in computer games and as desktop images that allow anyone to rake through the sand. Japanese gardens in the West cannot disguise a certain emptiness, which is not the muchpraised Buddhist emptiness but an emptiness that “non-places” often emit. As Marc Augé argues in his book on places and non-places, the sign of the Japanese garden has exceeded its referent to such an extent that the place itself has become shallow. Japanese gardens are not about identity but representation, not about history but about image. Essentialists assume a stable artifact that can be transferred from one discrete culture to another, and, in contrast, constructivists assume there is no empirical referent. However, both approaches lead to stasis. My sympathies obviously lean toward constructivism, but once constructivism unveils the moment of construction and reveals an artifact’s artificiality, it is hard to move forward. In the hope of unlocking the constructivist stasis, I have looked to translational metaphors. In preference to Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “third space,” I took up Latour’s concept of the “translational chain” to capture the complex webs of signification that occur in the exchange of meaning across both space and time. Developed in the context of science practice, the chain of translation is not perfectly applicable to Japanese gardens between East and West, but it has helped me to show that Japanese gardens are a product of neither the East nor the West but rather came to be in a constant back and forth over the past 150 years. And yet it is dangerous to stop here. If we suggest that “East” and “West” provide stable ground for anchoring chains of translation, we once again run the risk of essentializing them. Rather, we must also recognize that it is the very act of translation that produces the two discrete entities—East and West—as dichotomous. In the Introduction I stated that I like Japanese gardens but that the constant “admonishing finger”—the authoritarian gestus of the gardens—puts me off. How can Japanese gardens be freed of this authoritarian character and be transformed into nonauthoritarian places? How can they attain meaning beyond binaristic mystifications? These questions are not just my own. During my research, I was asked more than once what I would propose for the future of the Japanese gardens I visited. In these questions, I sensed that the questioners shared my uneasiness. One way to address these problems would be for the popular literature, and not just the academic literature, to point out how Japanese gardens have been constructed or invented. As it stands, popular literature on Japanese gardens is highly essentialist and reproduces a mystified, esoteric Orient. It highlights the most austere gardens, such as the Ryōanji. These books sell well and, to a large degree, shape the expectations of garden visitors. In addition, their presuppositions find their way into more serious analyses of gardens worldwide. Even academic garden specialists can find it difficult to make their way through a labyrinth of stereotypes and Orientalisms when mixed with insightful analyses and descriptions. Another way to deal with Japanese gardens going forward might be the scandalizing

power of deconstruction. Yamada Shōji’s Shots in the Dark, which I discussed in the Introduction, is an admittedly brilliant analysis of the Ryōanji’s stone garden. At the same time, it has little to offer for the future of Japanese gardens. Yamada shows incontrovertibly that the reputation of the Ryōanji’s stone garden is based on a deliberate misunderstanding. But it is unlikely that his book will cause the Ryōanji to be excluded from the list of historic sites in Kyoto, which, together, form a UNESCO world heritage site. That said, Yamada’s book might still encourage its managers to consider giving alternative forms of access and different types of information to tourists. Yamada’s book and Wybe Kuitert’s Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art are helpful in that they demystify Japanese gardens and provide a counterpoint to the popular books. There are indications that such scholarship is beginning to influence prevailing notions, as evidenced by a Wikipedia article on the “Japanese Rock Garden.” Beyond these examples, however, deconstruction has not provided an answer to the question of what to do about Japanese gardens in the West. The art historian Kendall H. Brown has proposed one way to take a different look at Japanese gardens in the United States. He advocates seeing early Japanese gardens in the United States as historical sites that should not be appreciated for their authenticity but for what makes them valuable. They are important, he argues, not for what they reveal about Japan but for what they reveal about American history. Japanese gardens on the West Coast are expressions of a Western garden style that outpaced the original Japanese garden to take its place. Lately, other gardens in North America and even in Europe—for example, Clingendael in the Netherlands—have done the same. In Brown’s eyes, an Orientalist imagination influenced the American gardens of the first vogue and he recommends that, instead of replacing them with more “authentic” versions, as was the case with Maymont in Richmond, Virginia, they should be valued precisely for what they are: Orientalist fantasies about Japan. Brown makes the important point that what is authentic about Japanese gardens in the West is the Orientalist frame of mind of both their gardeners and their owners, and that if anything is to be conserved it should be that. Still, Brown’s analysis presumes that there was an original authentic Japanese garden prior to the Western innovations that replaced it. How might we go beyond Brown’s recommendation so as to not only eliminate the essentialist notions on which Japanese gardens are so often based but also enrich the experience of visiting them? The question is not trivial, and its answer might apply well beyond Japanese gardens. How can we appreciate compelling cultural artifacts, concepts, and ideas without essentializing them? The theoretical approach of translation hints at an answer. During the process of “Japanizing” the gardens in Kyoto and elsewhere, one Japanese intellectual, Ozawa Keijirō, spoke up and voiced a critique. Ozawa had been actively involved in translating Western sources on gardening into Japanese as well as revitalizing gardening history in his own country. Using New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park as examples, he argued that parks serve the people living nearby as spaces of the “common public”—a new concept that was linked to liberal democratic ideas. Ozawa, however, only partially extended these thoughts to the Japanese gardens he built. His contribution to the Japan-British Exhibition in 1910, for example, was less about finding opportunities for visitors and more about representing Japan. Nonetheless, that 1910 project

took an approach slightly different from other representational projects. Ozawa had argued for a Japanese garden appropriate to its British visitors. The garden did not have to be fully authentic or in line with Japanese-garden tradition. It merely needed to offer the British visitors a glimpse into a foreign land. Setting aside the self-Orientalism, his pragmatic approach holds a promising kernel. Ozawa wanted the garden to be built for a certain public to enjoy, and he thus offers a starting point for opening up Japanese gardens so that they might become more welcoming and less authoritarian. There’s more to be done, however. Before the fence was built around the Japanese garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, a Japanese garden that permitted picnicking had been a positive thing. Reappropriations of some gardens have actually occurred, as in the example of the Japanese garden in Düsseldorf’s Nordpark. Rather authoritarian in its layout, the garden is screened off from the surrounding Nordpark, but young cosplayers disregard the rules and have transformed it into a stage for their weekend fun. To me, this appropriation is positive because it disrupts the austere atmosphere. But it would be even better if the gardens could sustain some of Walter Benjamin’s demands for good translation. Benjamin asked that a translation enrich a language with the strangeness of another. We do not need to see a dichotomous Other in Japanese gardens in order for them to touch us. Removing the nationalist element from these gardens is an important starting point. After all, the “originals” were laid out long before the nation came into being and only later were declared national treasures. As Benjamin pointed out, mere readership is not the measure of a good translation. Rather, a good translation is determined by how well it unleashes the potential of the original in a new language. This is where Benjamin and Ozawa come together to help lower admonishing fingers and to tear down fences. It is not easy to reconcile a notion of gardens as places full of potential with a notion of gardens as places that are of interest only for their foreignness. It is even more difficult if we rule out simplistic dichotomizing and Othering. After having explained the problems and stakes involved, I refrain from presenting an easy solution, but I think that removing a few fences and some informational boards would be a good place to begin.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Will. 2. Akasaka and Suzuki, 191. 3. Kano, 199–201. Japanese names throughout the book are given in the Japanese form, with the family name (Kano) preceding the given name (Yoko). However, some Japanese names in this book will be treated differently. For example, Isamu (given name) Noguchi (family name) is an American artist with a Japanese father. It would be confusing to use his name in the Japanese form, because he is famous as Isamu Noguchi and is an American artist. The gardener Takeo (given name) Shiota (family name) is an even more complex case. Shiota migrated to the United States in his twenties. I will use the common form Takeo Shiota because I want to highlight his diasporic background and because Takeo Shiota worked in North America. 4. Analytic: Conder, Landscape Gardening; Morse. Romantic: Hearn, “In a Japanese Garden.” 5. Lancaster, “Ideologic Subsoils”; Lancaster, “Japanese Buildings”; Lancaster, Japanese Influence. 6. Brown, “Fair Japan”; Brown, “Japanese Garden at Hillwood”; Brown, Japanese-Style Gardens; Brown, Quiet Beauty; Brown, “Rashomon”; Kuitert, “Japonaiserie”; Kuitert, Themes. 7. Inoue, Ise jingu; Inoue, Tsukurareta katsura rikyū shinwa; Yamada, “Rock Gardens”; Yamada, Shots. 8. Yamada, Shots, 5. 9. See, for example, Brown, Japanese-Style Gardens; Brown, “Rashomon”; and Colleran and McCracken for a garden in Ireland, and, among many others, Tachibana et al. for Japanese gardens in Edwardian Britain. 10. Augé; Lefebvre; Soja. 11. Hall, 279. 12. Hunt, Afterlife, 172.

CHAPTER 1 1. Quaintance, 31. 2. Raggett, 184–85. 3. Guy. 4. Kozyreff, 93. 5. Guy, 39; Liu, Seeds, 44. 6. Liu, Seeds, 21–22. 7. Temple, 54–55. 8. Liu, “Importance,” 75–76; Liu, Seeds. 9. Liu, Seeds, 21. 10. Attiret, 8–9. 11. Quoted in Nys, 8. 12. Attiret, 9–10. 13. Clunas, 23. 14. Hunt, Picturesque Garden, 56. 15. Milam. 16. For an extensive list of Chinese-style gardens in Europe, see Lancaster, Japanese Influence, 10. 17. Schaarschmidt-Richter, “Gartenkunst,” 768; Schaarschmidt-Richter, Japanische Gartenkunst, 16. Liu recently has tried anew to show that a knowledge of Chinese gardens was all important for English-garden theory in the eighteenth century. Even though his approach is astute, his arguments are often slightly formalistic. See Liu, Seeds. For a good summary of the discussion on Chinese gardens and the English landscape garden, see Bartos, 249–50. 18. Hunt, Picturesque Garden. Bartos also comes to this conclusion. See Bartos, 250–51. 19. The Jesuits wanted to convert the Chinese with a top-down strategy. Because of that, Confucian teachings that were most influential at the Chinese court became the focus of their efforts to understand Chinese culture. By defining these Confucian teachings as philosophy rather than religion, the Jesuits were able to reconcile Catholicism with the thought of Chinese leaders. Confucius was, thus, praised in Jesuit writings, with the suggestion that as the Chinese were reasonable people they could therefore be converted easily. See Guy, 87.

20. Quaintance, 33. 21. Vogel, 194. 22. Junod, 31. 23. Milam, 128. The gardens in Kew actually offered this experience to everyone; once a week the gardens were opened to the public, offering sensation and enlightenment to them as well. See Quaintance, 38. 24. Cereghini, 59, 62. 25. Ibid., 71. 26. Guy, 414. 27. Kippenberg, 51. 28. Schlegel, 51–52. 29. Clunas, 25. 30. See, for example, the discussion of the garden theorist Christian Cajus Lorenz Hirschfeld in his Theory of Garden Art in five volumes from 1779 to 1785. Hirschfeld saw “public gardens” as an independent category among those gardens “whose character depends on special circumstances.” See Hirschfeld, 61, 406–9. 31. Koval, 198. 32. Goldstein, 49. 33. Niagara Falls Info. 34. Mitenbuler. 35. However, Hunt has pointed out that these books were “ridiculous in their concoctions of architectural insertions.” Thus the plans probably had only limited value for planning actual gardens. See Hunt, Afterlife, 82. 36. Clunas, 25–27. 37. Lenore Metrick-Chen discusses the shifting attitudes toward China and Japan in the realm of art during the second half of the nineteenth century; she concludes that Chinese art and culture became unfashionable while Japonism conquered the West. Within the United States, in addition to typical Orientalist discourses, Chinese immigration and the increasing xenophobia on the West Coast aggravated the situation. Metrick-Chen, 13–71. 38. Clunas, 28–29. 39. Metrick-Chen, 59. 40. See Haddad’s description of comparisons of both countries at the centennial world’s fair in Philadelphia in 1876 as an example. Haddad, 260. 41. Del Tredici, 14. 42. Elias, 30. 43. Griffis, 387. 44. Elias, 19. 45. Rinaldi, 267–68.

CHAPTER 2 1. Kuitert, “Japonaiserie.” 2. Ibid., 229. 3. Du Cane and Du Cane, vi. 4. Kuitert, “Japonaiserie,” 230. 5. Ibid., 233. 6. Ibid., 235. 7. Auslin. 8. Hearn, “In a Japanese Garden.” 9. See, for example, Du Cane and Du Cane; Farrer, Garden of Asia; Piggott and East. 10. Conder is more commonly quoted in English-language books on Japanese gardens, and his book has been reprinted many times by Dover Publications, last in 2001, as well as by the huge Japanese publisher Kōdansha a year later in 2002, among other reprints. Garden specialists quote Conder only as a historical source but sometimes he is used quite innocently as still authoritative. See, for example, Carlson’s “On the Aesthetic Appreciation of Japanese Gardens” from 1997 or Heyd’s “Nature Restoration Without Dissimulation: Learning from Japanese Gardens and Earthworks” from 2012. Carlson introduces Conder’s book uncritically as “his classic study of the subject” (49) and follows his conclusions on Japanese gardens throughout his paper while Heyd quotes Conder to prove that different types of Japanese gardens exist.

In contrast to Conder’s popularity in the English-speaking world, Hearn’s essay is very popular in its German translation. The essay has been turned into a small book by the Swiss publisher Manesse Verlag in 1990 in its bibliophile series Manesse Bücherei. The fourth edition was published in 2006, proving Hearn’s continuing popularity. 11. Kyōto daigaku zōengaku kenkyūshitsu. 12. Siebold, 144. 13. Kajinishi, “Gaikokujin,” 1. 14. Benfey, 65. 15. Oguma, 3–4. 16. Morse, 46. 17. Ibid., 302. 18. Tseng. 19. Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 34. 20. Conder, Flowers of Japan. 21. Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 24–26; Wieser Benedetti. 22. Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 28. 23. Ibid., 28–29. 24. Conder, Landscape Gardening, 23. 25. Imperial Japanese Commission to the International Exhibition at Philadelphia, 114–16. 26. Conder, Landscape Gardening, 108. 27. Ibid., 63–68. 28. Ibid. 54–60. 29. Ibid., 72–74. 30. Conder, “Art of Landscape Gardening,” 142–50. 31. Conder, Landscape Gardening, 123–46. 32. Ibid., 146–48. 33. Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 25; Wieser Benedetti. 34. Kuitert, “Japonaiserie,” 221. 35. Foucault, Order of Things. 36. Hearn, “In a Japanese Garden.” 37. Ibid., 15. 38. Tachibana, Daniels, and Watkins, 370. 39. Fukuhara, “Kokusai kōryū,” 5. 40. Tachibana, Daniels, and Watkins, 365. 41. Gröning, 242. 42. Internationale Kunst-Ausstellung und Große Gartenbau-Ausstellung, 47. 43. Tachibana, Daniels, and Watkins, 381. 44. Ibid., 378–81. 45. Ibid., 370, 381. 46. Benfey, 65. 47. Hearn, Glimpses. 48. Conder, “Japanese Landscape Gardening.” 49. Holland, 197. 50. Commission Impériale Japonaise, 187. 51. Conder, Landscape Gardening, 23; Du Cane and Du Cane, 175; Hearn, “In a Japanese Garden,” 15. 52. Thomas, 159. 53. Niekisch, 12. 54. Shimada, Grenzgänge, 199–207. 55. Chamberlain, 261. 56. Fabian. 57. Todorova. 58. Japan by the Japanese, edited by Alfred Stead (1904), is such a volume. Published shortly before the war against Russia broke out, most eminent members of the Japanese government explained their “fatherland,” as the title of the German edition suggested. 59. Minami, 27.

60. Ibid., 37–38. 61. Ibid., 50. 62. Auslin and Reischauer, 23. 63. Harada; Shiga, Hashimoto, and Tatsui; T. Tamura; Tatsui; Yoshida. 64. Pendleton. 65. J. Reynolds, 320. 66. Yanagida, 67. 67. Inoue, Tsukurareta katsura rikyū shinwa, 91. 68. Kuitert, Themes, 48–50; Yamada, Shots. 69. Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 79; Katahira, “Ōbei ni okeru,” 187. 70. Katahira, “Ōbei ni okeru,” 181–83. 71. Hallmann, 6; Harada, 38; Kuitert, Themes, 233. 72. Ibid., 107–8. 73. Katahira, “Ōbei ni okeru,” 185; Okakura, Book of Tea, 47–69. 74. The book was published as a revised edition in 1959 under the title Zen and Japanese Culture. Suzuki removed all the parts that could seem problematic after the end of World War II. In its new edition the book quickly became a classic of Japanese studies. 75. Suzuki Daisetsu, Zen Buddhism, 26, 101. 76. Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 109–10; Yamada, “Rock Gardens,” 3. 77. Katahira, “History of the Perception,” 129–31; Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 188. 78. Kuck, World, 387. 79. Kuck, One Hundred, 1. 80. Pratt, 37. 81. Kuck, One Hundred, 111. 82. Ibid., 112. 83. Tschumi, Mirei Shigemori: Modernizing, 18. 84. Takashima. 85. Niwa. 86. Kuck, One Hundred, 8. 87. Tatsui, 4. 88. Yamada, “Rock Gardens”; Yamada, Shots. 89. Taut, Houses and People, 261. 90. Inoue, Tsukurareta katsura rikyū shinwa, 62. 91. Taut, Fundamentals, 6. 92. Taut, Houses and People, 147. 93. Jacques and Woudstra, 1. 94. Tunnard, Gardens, 68. 95. Jacques and Woudstra, 191–94. 96. Tatsui, 8. 97. Craig, 15–16. 98. Tunnard, Gardens, 87. 99. Jacques and Woudstra, 101; Tunnard, Gardens, 95–97. 100. Tunnard, Gardens, 91. 101. Tunnard, “Influence of Japan,” 49. 102. Jacques and Woudstra, 236.

CHAPTER 3 1. Binns, 37. 2. Ibid., 39; Binns and Tan; Tan, 27. 3. Tan, 32. 4. Satō, “Gaikoku ni okeru.” 5. Lockyer, “Japan at the Exhibition.”

6. Ōnuki, 202. 7. Kajinishi, “Kaigai bankoku,” 4; Lockyer, “Japan at the Exhibition,” 66. 8. Commission Impériale Japonaise, 63. 9. Yoshimi. 10. Quoted in Fux, 21. 11. Ibid., 23. 12. Ketelaar. 13. Hardacre, 27–39. 14. Commission Impériale Japonaise, 75. 15. Hanley, 18. 16. Harris, 32; Maloney, 22. 17. Earle, Splendors, 33. 18. Imperial Japanese Commission to the International Exhibition at Philadelphia. 19. Ibid., 116. 20. Westcott, Building 50. 21. Lancaster, Japanese Influence. 22. Fux, 25; Lancaster, Japanese Influence, 48; Sakamoto, 475. 23. Hotta-Lister, 209–10. 24. Earle, Flower Bronzes, 134–37; Earle, Splendors, 240. Huge bronze vases and other artifacts were sent to Vienna and Philadelphia and earned the craft the respect of visitors. 25. Commission Impériale Japonaise. 26. Ibid., 187–88. 27. Guide du visiteur, 98. 28. Lancaster, Japanese Influence, 190. 29. Ōnuki, 203. 30. Brown, “Fair Japan,” 15. 31. Snodgrass, 34. 32. Harris, 42; Kalfus, 305; Maloney, 63–64. 33. For details of the deal, see Snodgrass, 34. 34. Rydell, 65. 35. Conant, 260. 36. Rydell, 43–44, 55. 37. It is quite a complex task to locate the Japanese teahouse on the grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Historical sources as well as secondary descriptions have offered various spots where the teahouse might have been. The Official Directory of the World’s Columbian Exposition places the teahouse on Wooded Island; several have followed this source—such as Bolotin and Laing, with the latest example being Maloney. See Bolotin and Laing, 107; Handy, 133; Maloney, 69. Conant writes that the Japanese Commission received three thousand square feet for the teahouse on the Midway Plaisance but does not clarify whether the teahouse finally was erected there or not. Following various photographs that clearly show the Fisheries building in the background and two plans of the fairgrounds, I have located the teahouse on the other side of the lagoon and not on Wooded Island (see Figure 18). The National Diet Library of Japan has also come to this conclusion on its website’s homepage. 38. Handy, 195. The teahouse earned $23,000 during the fair. See Harris, 46. It was thereby one of the few profitable Japanese ventures at the world’s fair. See Conant, 262–63. 39. Brown, “Rashomon,” 96. 40. Ibid. 41. Baschet, 202. 42. Kozyreff. 43. Tagsold, “Orte.” 44. Unger, 594. 45. Zahn, 142. 46. Lieb, 445. 47. Tutenberg, 360. 48. Hoshi, 115; Lancaster, Japanese Influence, 142; Goto and Naka, 123–26. 49. Christ, “Japan’s Seven Acres,” 11–12.

50. Ōnuki, 203. 51. Christ, “Sole Guardian.” 52. Raggett. 53. Coaldrake, xi. 54. Mutsu, 28. 55. Ibid., 38. 56. Ibid., 56. 57. McLaughlin, 18. 58. Slawson, 16. 59. Lockyer, “Japan at the Exhibition,” 153–54. 60. Hotta-Lister, 64. 61. Kuitert, Themes, 225. 62. Kiralfy, 36–40. 63. Oide, 32. 64. Kajinishi, “Kaigai bankoku,” 5–6. 65. Nishiha, 198. 66. Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 125–26. 67. Inada, 82. 68. Ozawa, 1. 69. Ibid., 2. 70. Kobayashi, 246. 71. M. Suzuki, “Afterword,” 99. 72. Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 24–29; Wieser Benedetti. 73. Wieser Benedetti, however, fails to mention that Akisato probably learned about the new perspectives he used to depict the gardens through rangaku, which helped introduce new drawing conventions to Japan. 74. Honda, Zukai teizōhō, 20. 75. Honda, “Japanese Landscape Gardening.” 76. Ibid., 137–39, 153. 77. Shinji, 32. 78. Kuitert, “Japonaiserie,” 225. 79. Amaro. 80. Koitabashi and Shinji. 81. Tachibana, Daniels, and Watkins, 369. 82. Yoshimi, 41–46. 83. Ibid., 116, 122. 84. Mitchell. 85. Ibid. 86. Lockyer, “Japans in Paris,” 135. 87. Sand, “Meiji Taste,” 650. 88. Christ, “Sole Guardian.” 89. Breitbart, 38. 90. Satō, “Gaikoku ni okeru,” 167. 91. Henning, 112. 92. Kim, 387. 93. Fukuhara, “Kokusai kōryū.” 94. Ibid., 8. 95. Tamura, “Gardens Below.” 96. Times, “Control of Pests and Disease”; Times, “Exhibits at the Chelsea Flower Show”; Times, “Treatment of Diseases.” 97. Times, “Sales for the Year 1884.” 98. Times, “Estate Market.” 99. Conder, “Japanese Landscape Gardening.” 100. Suzuki, “Kaigai ni tsukurareta,” 193. 101. Veblen, 133. 102. Breitbart, 38.

103. Kajinishi, “Kaigai bankoku,” 7. 104. Suzuki, “Kaigai ni,” 195. 105. Kim, 387. 106. Hotta-Lister, 124. 107. Mitchell, 298. 108. Boston Globe, “All Records Broken.” 109. Sand, “Meiji Taste,” 605.

CHAPTER 4 1. Treib has called the garden modern, but Hunt has rejected this argument as superficial. The garden defies easy classification as modern or Japanese and has created an atmosphere of its own; see Hunt, World, 290. 2. Naruse. 3. Duus and Duus, 171. 4. A. Tamura. 5. Noguchi came to Japan in early May 1950 and left again in September of the same year. He gave lectures, was invited as a U.S. art celebrity to various receptions, visited the grave of his father, studied gardens, and worked on new pottery pieces. Noguchi once again went to Japan in March 1951 to design the garden of the Tokyo branch of Reader’s Digest. After returning once more to New York he traveled back to Japan to marry Otaka Yoshiko, with whom he settled in Kamakura for the next year, after which he returned to New York again. See Duus and Duus, 208–59. 6. Hunt, World, 290; Treib, 50. 7. Hladik. 8. Ashton, 146. 9. Ibid. 10. Naruse. 11. Ibid. 12. Brown, “Fair Japan”; Brown, “Hillwood”; Brown, Japanese-Style Gardens; Brown, Quiet Beauty; Brown, “Rashomon.” 13. Brown, Japanese-Style Gardens. 14. Brown, Quiet Beauty. 15. Schaarschmidt-Richter, Gärten der Stille; Schaarschmidt-Richter, “Gartenkunst”; Schaarschmidt-Richter, Gartenkunst in Japan; Schaarschmidt-Richter, Japanische Gärten; Schaarschmidt-Richter, Der japanische Garten; SchaarschmidtRichter, Japanische Gartenkunst. 16. Schaarschmidt-Richter, “Gartenkunst.” 17. Itō and Iwamiya; Itō and Kuzunishi; Newsom, Japanese Garden Construction; Newsom, Thousand Years. For an account of Newsom’s role in the discourse, see Hunt, World, 291–92. 18. Hartnauer, 3. 19. Schaarschmidt-Richter, Japanische Gartenkunst, 174. 20. Ibid., 22. 21. Ibid., 101. 22. Kajinishi, “Gaikokujin”; Kajinishi, “Kaigai bankoku.” 23. Kajinishi, “Kaigai bankoku,” 8. 24. Kajinishi, “Gaikokujin”; Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 35–34. 25. Kajinishi, “Gaikokujin,” 4. 26. Satō, “Gaikokujin mitaru”; Satō, “Gaikoku ni okeru.” 27. Kajinishi, “Gaikokujin,” 4. 28. Brown, Japanese-Style Gardens, 10. 29. Ibid., 9. 30. Brown, Quiet Beauty, 9. 31. Hacking, 1. 32. Trevor-Roper. 33. Vlastos. 34. Gluck. 35. Sand, “At Home.”

36. Vlastos, 12. 37. Brown, Quiet Beauty, 9; Brown, “Rashomon.” 38. Said. 39. Brown, “Tradition of Transformation,” 27. 40. Ibid., 27–37. 41. Brown, Japanese-Style Gardens, 9. 42. Ibid., 171. 43. Shimada, Erfindung Japans. 44. On simulacra, see Baudrillard. 45. Sahlins. 46. Thompson. 47. Sahlins, 408–10. 48. Brown, Japanese-Style Gardens, 9. 49. Hacking, 36–37. 50. Ibid., 28. 51. Inoue, Tsukurareta katsura rikyū shinwa. 52. Yamada, Shots, 110–13. 53. Ibid., 142–43. 54. Katahira, Nihon teienzō. 55. Hacking, 12. 56. Ibid., 103–9. 57. Ibid. 58. Treib, 64.

CHAPTER 5 1. Hamilton, 14. Tono Takuma had initially planned to use the Antique Gate as the entrance for the Flat Garden. In 1976 it was set up as an entrance coming from the parking area. In 1990–91, walls were added. See Hamilton, 13–14. 2. Brown, Japanese-Style Gardens, 112. 3. Hamilton, 16. 4. Ibid., 20. 5. Brown gives 1922 as the year of Tono’s graduation; see Brown, Quiet Beauty, 71. Suzuki and others mention 1921; see M. Suzuki, “Tono Takuma,” 291. Brown may have simply miscalculated the Japanese denotation of the year (Taishō 10) into the Common Era. 6. M. Suzuki, “Tono Takuma,” 292. Tono also built a garden for Herbert Dow in Midland, Michigan; see Brown, JapaneseStyle Gardens, 109. 7. M. Suzuki, “Tono Takuma,” 293. 8. Hamilton, 68. 9. Ibid., 69. 10. Donuma and Suzuki probably slightly overemphasize Tono’s role in establishing a volunteer program at Portland. Hamilton stresses the role of the Japanese Garden Society of Oregon and the strong efforts of the City of Portland. See Hamilton, 105. 11. Conder, Landscape Gardening, 123–48. 12. Sharf. Prohl even speaks of “Suzuki-Zen” for his interpretation of Buddhism; see Prohl, 122–32. 13. Halbfass. 14. Snodgrass. 15. D. Suzuki, Zen Buddhism. 16. Victoria. 17. Herrigel, “Ritterliche Kunst.” 18. Herrigel, Zen (1948); Herrigel, Zen (1953). 19. Max Weber’s theory of religion has been influential for this interpretation. Weber has been very popular in Japan because his theory easily sets up such binaries. See Schwentker. 20. Harootunian. 21. On Japanese postwar cultural diplomacy, see Sakai, “ ‘You Asians,’ ” 803–5, 808.

22. Newsom, Thousand Years, 9. 23. Brown, Quiet Beauty, 13. Brown borrowed this term from Christina Klein. 24. Arai and Hirasaki, 146. 25. Initially, the idea for a Japanese house as part of the series had been forwarded by Honda Chikako, the head of one of Japan’s leading newspapers, Mainichi shinbun. See Taniguchi for a broad discussion of the early history of the exhibition house. 26. Drexler. 27. Ikegami, “Japanese Exhibition House,” 62. 28. Ibid., 57. 29. Kōyama, 4. 30. Drexler, 179. 31. Yanagida, 70. 32. Taniguchi. 33. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Annual Report 1939, 24. 34. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Annual Report 1963. 35. Ibid., 29. 36. Hiss, 28. 37. Hendry, 198. 38. Shiota, Japanese Gardens and Houses; Shiota, Miniature Japanese Landscape. 39. Shiota, Miniature Japanese Landscape, 4. 40. Ibid., 11. 41. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Manual; Kaplan. 42. Ōhira and Koide, 210; Okazaki. 43. Okazaki. 44. Tono, “Amerika ni,” 29. 45. Donuma and Suzuki. 46. Tono, “Amerika ni,” 27. 47. Satō, “Gaikoku ni okeru,” 182. 48. M. Suzuki, “Kaigai ni,” 193. 49. Okakura, Book of Tea. 50. Katahira has shown how tea and gardens were already strongly linked together in Japanese nationalist discourse in the 1930s. Shigemori Mirei published a history of the Japanese tea ceremony in 1934, and other authors also argued that gardens were rooted in the aesthetics of the tea ceremony. See Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 175–76. This discussion may have laid some ground for the bundling of Zen, tea, and gardens in the West during the postwar era. 51. See Surak for a rich and excellent account in Making Tea, Making Japan. 52. See ibid., 115–16. 53. Nakane, “Character and Development”; Nakane, “Character of Japanese Gardens”; Nakane, “Zen and Japanese Gardens.” 54. Urasenke donated the garden and the teahouse to the city of Munich because the 1972 Winter Olympics were hosted in Sapporo, Japan. 55. Hori. 56. Kuitert, Themes, 57. 57. Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 176. 58. Some experts in the field did not embrace wabi-sabi. In a 1936 paper delivered at the Peer’s Club in Tokyo, Bruno Taut strongly criticized wabi on the grounds that it contradicted Japan’s legal claim to an ancient modernity of its own. As proof, Taut referred to the Grand Shrine of Ise, which was for him the high point of Japanese architecture. Ise has been rebuilt every twenty years, so there is no wabi (an ancient appearance): “It is always new, and it is precisely this which seems to me to be a specifically Japanese thing. The oppressive musty smell of age is banished, and with it, all non-architectural accessories, all ornaments contradicting pure architecture.” Taut, Fundamentals, 16. 59. Koren, 26–29. 60. Kuitert, Themes, 49. 61. Nakane et al., 354. 62. Baudrillard. 63. Yamada, Shots, 20. 64. Geertz.

65. However, see also Hunt, Afterlife, 196–97, for some fundamental semiotic differences between texts and gardens. 66. Buden, 58–61. 67. Benjamin, “Aufgabe,” 18. 68. Yokota. 69. In his book Secret Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens, David A. Slawson has tried to establish Senzui narabi no yagyō no zu (Illustrations for designing mountains, water, and hillside field landscapes), another classical book on Japanese gardens from the fifteenth century, as a canonical source within the American discourse on Japanese-garden design. His attempt shows that the Sakuteiki is not completely unrivaled in its historical legitimation among Japanese-garden designers. However, Slawson simply adds one more historical source to the canon rather than questioning the deeper meaning that the canonization of such books has. 70. Takei and Keane, 121–24. 71. De Man, 22. 72. Derrida, 188. 73. Benjamin, “Aufgabe,” 12. 74. De Man, 24. 75. Foucault, Order of Things, 387. 76. Benjamin, “Aufgabe,” 9. 77. Ibid., 20.

CHAPTER 6 1. These Bundesgartenschauen are rooted in a tradition from the end of the nineteenth century that calls for state agencies to select the host cities and set the theme for the biennial event. Hamburg hosted the first in 1951. 2. Bonner Generalanzeiger, “Chronologie.” 3. Bonner Rundschau. 4. Bonner Generalanzeiger, “Gingko.” 5. Colleran and McCracken, 31. 6. Ibid. 7. Brown, Japanese-Style Gardens, 15. 8. Satō, “Gaikoku ni okeru.” 9. Nihon kokkai kaigiroku kensaku shisutemu. 10. Katahira, Nihon teienzō, 36. 11. Satō, Satō Akira. 12. Shiota, Miniature Japanese Landscape, 13. 13. Ibid.; Shiota, Japanese Gardens and Houses. 14. Lancaster, Japanese Influence, 198–205. 15. Yanagida, 73. 16. Shiota, Miniature Japanese Landscape, 13. 17. Martin. Emphasis added. 18. Hirahara, 56. 19. Du Cane and Du Cane, 36. 20. Tunnard, “Influence of Japan,” 50. 21. Brown, Quiet Beauty, 173; Singlemann, 8. 22. Brown, Quiet Beauty, 32–36. 23. Westcott, 50. 24. Boston Globe, “Open Japanese Garden.” 25. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Annual Report 1917, 33. 26. Avery, 81. 27. Hiss. 28. Yamada, Shots, 138–43. 29. David A. Slawson has translated Senzui narabi no yagyō no zu into English and has analyzed it for his doctoral thesis. 30. This German term has been in use for “primitive” religions that involve animism. Shintō is commonly subsumed under this category, which means both backwardness and a romantic connection to nature unhampered by reason. 31. Farrer, My Rock-Garden, 10.

32. Holland, 197. 33. It is not entirely clear whether some of the remaining stones were transported to Philadelphia along with the house. See Taniguchi for a discussion. 34. Berger, “Precious Japanese Rock.” 35. The stones symbolize the “female element in the cosmic scheme because by and by rocks disintegrate and are ground down to life-bearing soil.” 36. Marc P. Keane’s essay “The Art of Setting Stones” (in his book of the same title) stresses the importance of the stonesetting process. Keane and Takei Jirō have translated the Sakuteiki, which places setting stones at the center of gardening. 37. Hamburger Abendblatt. 38. Yamada, Shots, 169–83. 39. Conder, Landscape Gardening, 63–68. 40. Beard. 41. Harada, 33. 42. Tanso Ishihara and Gloria Wickham took this type of interpretation to an extreme when they described the Kasuga lantern in the Hakone Garden in Saratoga, California. Analyzing various parts of the lantern, they found both Buddhist and Shintōist motifs: “Ostensibly a shrine lantern reflecting the political myths of imperial Shintoism as well as an underlying cult of nature worship, the Kasuga also reveals, in its form and design, traditions of Taoist and Buddhist thought.” Summarizing all interpretations by Ishihara and Wickham on the Kasuga lantern, this single lantern seems to contain all aspects of Japanese culture. See Ishihara and Wickham, 140–41. This passage in their book is an example of the high regard authors have for lanterns as important elements of Japanese gardens. 43. Yokohama is Vancouver’s Japanese sister city. Nitobe died of pneumonia in 1934 in Victoria, British Columbia, after attending a conference. Victoria and Morioka became sister cities thereafter. His associates erected a lantern and a small garden on the campus of the University of British Columbia. The current Nitobe Memorial Garden was erected after the original memorial was torn down in order to build dormitories on the grounds. See Brown, Quiet Beauty, 58. 44. Bonner Generalanzeiger, “Volkswandertag.” 45. Folsom, 122. 46. M. Suzuki, “Kaigai ni,” 193. 47. There are some exceptions to this rule. When I visited the site in the autumn of 2008, one of three resident tea masters at the Japanese House of the Fairmount Park was indeed a non-Japanese man. 48. Kato. 49. New York Herald Tribune, January 1, 1939, quoted in Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Annual Report 1939, 24. 50. Emphasis added. 51. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Annual Report 1930, 197. 52. Shiota, Miniature Japanese Landscape, 4. 53. Wimmer.

CHAPTER 7 1. The BBG operates a library at the garden that holds archival records related to the garden’s history. 2. Foucault, Discipline. 3. Hansmann et al., 303. 4. Schiller and Young, 112. 5. Conder, Landscape Gardening, 75–87. 6. Kaplan. 7. Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Annual Report 1929, 15. 8. Ibid. 9. Avery, 83. 10. Clark. 11. Akasaka simply omits this practical reason when introducing Hanover as an example of Japanese gardens being donations from Japanese twin cities, compromising his discussion of the reasons for building such a garden. A general interest in Japanese culture was not the main idea behind building the Japanese garden in Hanover. 12. Lancaster, Japanese Influence, 201. 13. Lockyer, “Japan at the Exhibition,” 158. 14. In a paper entitled “Orienting Visitors,” Tracey Teran also discusses guided tours conducted by both actual guides and

cell phones. 15. The informational leaflet from the Japanese garden in Düsseldorf also heavily underscores the Japaneseness of the garden. Irmtraud Schaarschmidt-Richter was the author; she was able to secure a position as the interpreter of the diaspora’s symbol for the German public and thereby emphasize her status as a specialist on Japanese gardens. See SchaarschmidtRichter, Japanischer Garten am Rhein. 16. Brown, “Performing Hybridity.” 17. For example, the “Viewpoint” section of the Journal for Japanese Gardening in the November/December issue of 2002 included various essays by garden consultants, designers, administrators, and the art director of the journal regarding the question of “commercialism in Japanese gardens.” 18. Lefebvre. 19. Mori, 54. 20. Harigaya, 96. 21. Brown, Quiet Beauty, 34. 22. Eagleson, 29–33. 23. Binswanger. 24. Friends of the Japanese House and Garden. 25. Japan America Society of Greater Philadelphia. 26. See Surak for a discussion of Urasenke’s history and its role in the construction of Japanese national identity. 27. Adams. 28. Clifford and Marcus; see Ashcroft et al., 171–73, for Othering in postcolonial theory. 29. Tönnies. 30. Janusz Buda has argued convincingly that this first line from Kipling’s “The Ballad of the East and West” has been deeply misinterpreted, but in the context of Japanese gardens the naïve reading is appropriate. 31. Akasaka, 206–9; Fukuhara, “Chūgoku.” 32. Teran has also pointed out that loosely controlled programs for educating tour guides can have a similar effect. At the Japanese tea garden in San Francisco, guides are invited to use the official tour script freely, which leads to contradictory messages. See Teran, 51–52. 33. Brown, “Fair Japan,” 13–16.

CHAPTER 8 1. Krasznahorkai, Északról hegy. 2. Krasznahorkai’s website notes that his novel will appear in English as From North a Hill, from South a Lake, from West Roads, from East a River from New Directions in 2017 (http://www.krasznahorkai.hu/book_list_comingsoon.html). However, Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below has been translated into English, and some of its seventeen stories, especially the penultimate, involve Japanese gardens. 3. Krasznahorkai, Im Norden, 88. Translations are the author’s. Here, Loraine Kuck’s book One Hundred Kyoto Gardens (1935) immediately comes to mind. 4. Krasznahorkai, Im Norden, 125. 5. Kallen and Krasznahorkai, 7. 6. Ibid. 7. The idea of culture as “collective programming” is strongly advocated by Geert Hofstede, who developed his concept of four main cultural dimensions after conducting surveys with IBM employees from more than seventy countries during the 1970s. He explained differences between the employees by using their nationality and the respective “collective programming” as the main determinant. 8. Brown, “Fair Japan,” 15. 9. Kajinishi, “Gaikokujin,” 1–4; Katahira, “Ōkan suru.” 10. Honda, Zukai teizōhō. 11. Anderson, 179–85. 12. Hladik; Tschumi, Mirei Shigemori; Tschumi, Rebel. 13. Hladik; Tschumi, Mirei Shigemori, 57–59. 14. Tschumi, Mirei Shigemori, 58. 15. Latour. 16. Ibid., 24–79.

17. Hunt has pointed out that interpretations of gardens often start with an analysis of the intentions of patrons and designers; see Hunt, Afterlife, 204–5. 18. Bhabha, 36–39. 19. Ashton, 53, 178–79. 20. Ibid., 178–79; Winther-Tamaki, 161–62. 21. Ashton, 252. 22. Augé, 77. 23. Ibid., 94. 24. Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk, 17–18. 25. Lefebvre, 33. 26. Augé, 85. 27. Yamada, Shots, 5. 28. Brown, Japanese-Style Gardens, 12. 29. Barthes, 210–12. 30. Howland; Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity; Shimada, Erfindung Japans. 31. Howland; A. Uchiyama. 32. De Michelis.

CHAPTER 9 1. Stofanel, 2. 2. Interestingly enough, the virtual Zen garden is hosted at a website with the name “I am bored.” http://www.i-ambored.com/2005/02/virtual-zen-garden.html. 3. Tosa and Matsuoka. 4. Boston Globe, “Christmas Gifts.” 5. Kansas City Star. 6. Fort Worth Star Telegram. 7. Boston Globe, “Map Feature at Dodge Brothers.” 8. Tagsold, “Japanese Gardens Unleashed.” 9. Michael L. Berger, xviii–xx. 10. New York Times, “Japanese Garden.” 11. Takei and Keane, 61–87. 12. See http://www.traiteur-zengarden-paris.com (accessed September 29, 2016). 13. The Zen garden set I ordered on Amazon came with fourteen stones. The package had promised only five so this seemed to be a good deal. However, considering that the Ryōanji’s stone garden has its famous fifteen stones and that the number of stones should be uneven, fourteen is a very curious quantity. 14. Horn; Moore. 15. Horn, 20–21; Moore, 18. 16. Moore, 13, 47, 87. 17. Horn, 33–38; Moore, 36–39. 18. Moore, 84. 19. Ibid., 48–49. 20. Yamada, Shots. 21. Yoshioka. 22. Ibid., 25, 42–45, 89–91. 23. Ibid., 45. 24. Scott. 25. Herrigel, Zen; Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture; Watts, Spirit of Zen; Watts, Way of Zen. 26. Scott, 19. 27. Ibid., 20. 28. Ibid., 153. 29. Ibid., 24. 30. See http://www.traiteur-zengarden-paris.com (accessed September 29, 2016).

31. Tagsold, Inszenierung, 175–78. 32. Tagsold, “Tokyo Olympics.” 33. The Edo period has been alternately seen as the last part of the Middle Ages leading into the arrival of modernity through the agency of the West or as Japan’s own early modernity; Featherstone, 166–69. 34. Classification by eras and social contexts is somewhat related because the most famous daimyō gardens were built in the Edo period while many famous imperial and monastic gardens are from earlier periods of Japanese history. Contemporary public and corporate gardens form a category of their own. 35. One of the essays that Nakane published in the Chanoyu Quarterly retells the history of Japanese gardens very much in the way the garden at Osaka actualized it. In “Character of Japanese Gardens,” Nakane divides Japanese-garden history into ancient, medieval, and the Edo period, which he did not explicitly define as modern. 36. Brown, “Tradition of Transformation,” 36. 37. Nakane, “Character of Japanese Gardens,” 17. 38. The Japanese zipper manufacturer YKK donated the garden to the Carter Center. For the Tenshin-en, see Messervy, 4–6.

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Index

The index that appeared in the print version of this title was intentionally removed from the eBook. Please use the search function on your eReading device for terms of interest. For your reference, the terms that appear in the print index are listed below Addison, Joseph advertisement: Japanese gardens as for Japanese gardens world’s fair pavilions as Zen as aesthetics: China and Japanese gardens and nature and Japanese refined Japanese Zen and Ain, Gregory Ainu Akisato Ritō Alcock, Rutherford Alexandra Park (London) Alpine gardens Amaterasu Okami American Institute of Architects Anderson, Benedict anglo-chinois garden anime Araki Yoshikuni archery Art Nouveau Attiret, Jean-Denis Augé, Marc Augusta, Princess of Wales authenticity: gardener/garden master and houses and informational panels and Japanese authors on Japanese gardens and Japanese government and miniature gardens and popular literature on Western authors on world’s fairs and authoritarian space Avery, George S. Baroque garden Barthes, Roland Baudrillard, Jean Beijing Benjamin, Walter

Berlin Bettini, Francesco Bhabha, Homi Binswanger, Frank G. Bodhisattva bonsai Borobudur Boston Music Hall Brazil Breitbart, Eric Breslau Breuer, Marcel Brienen, Mary Baroness van bronze: cast pigs cast dragons cast storks Meiji government promoting Brooklyn Botanic Garden (New York): authoritorian rules at informational boards at Japanese garden replica of Ryōanji‘s stone garden Takeo Shiota as designer of Japanese garden at Brown, Kendall H.: demystification of Japanese gardens world’s fair San Francisco 1894 inventionism Brown, Peter Brussels Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama) Buddha statue Buddhism. See also Zen Buddhism Buden, Boris Buenos Aires Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultural Show of Germany) Bonn 1979 Cairo, world‘s fair representations of Cane, Percy Catherine the Great Catholicism Centennial Exposition Philadelphia 1876: authenticity of Japanese garden at Japanese garden at Japanese garden elements at Japanese pavilion at Japanese products at Western descriptions of Japanese garden at Central Park (New York) Central Tea Association Chanoyu Quarterly chain of translation Chamberlain, Basil Hall Chamber of Commerce Kyoto Chambers, William Champ de Mars Ch’an Buddhism Chelsea Flower Show. See Flower Show of the Royal Horticultural Society, Chelsea, London

cherry trees China art of William Chambers in Enlightenment intellectuals on gardens representing imperialism and Japan and world’s fairs and Chinese garden, concept of: ancient eighteenth-century European interest in Japanese gardens and Christopher Tunnard on Chinese garden at: Botanika (Bremen) Gardens of the World (Berlin) IGA Park (Rostock) Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) Montreal Botanic Garden National Arboretum (Washington) Portland Vancouver Chokushi-Mon Christie, Isabella classification of Japanese gardens Clark, Roland Clunas, Craig Cobb, David M. Colleran, John Conder, Josiah: cited by other authors classification of Japanese gardens early discourse on Japanese gardens and Honda Kinkichirō and Japanese critique of “Japanese Landscape Gardening” Landscape Gardening in Japan taxonomy of Japanese garden elements Confucianism constructivism Cooper, Anthony Ashley (third Earl of Shaftsbury) Corbusier, Charles le Cornell University Cosplayers Costa Mesa, Cal. Cowden Castle Cremorne Garden (Chelsea) Crystal Palace cultural container cultural diplomacy cultural essentialism. See essentialism daimyō daimyō gardens deconstruction Delaware Park (Buffalo, N.Y.)

De Man, Paul Derrida, Jacques Descartes, René desire paths Detached Palace (Kyoto). See Katsura Rikyū (Kyoto) detainment camps d’Harcourt, Duke François-Henri diaspora, Chinese diaspora, Japanese Diderot, Denis Dinn, Theodoor Johan discourse: Japanese Japanese love of nature in nation and Orientalist space and Western Zen in Drexler, Arthur drum bridges Du Cane, Florence and Ella Duisberg, Carl Duke of Cambridge Düsseldorf Dutch East Indian Company Duus, Masayo and Peter East-West dichotomy Egypt Eiffel Tower Elisabeth (Austrian empress) enclosures Encyclopédie (Diderot) Endō Ryūkichi Engel, David Englischer Garten (Munich) English landscape garden Enlightenment esoterics essentialism Farrer, Reginald fences: classification of enclosures as examples in gardens of Japanese gardens without typical garden element Feng Shui flat gardens (hira-niwa) flowerbeds flowers Flower Show of the Royal Horticultural Society, Chelsea, London Foucault, Michel Fairmount Park (Philadelphia)

Frederick, Prince of Wales French garden French Revolution Friedrich II, the Great Fukiage Garden (Tokyo) Fukuda Takao Fukuhara Masao Fukuzawa Yukichi Fumiki Takano Garden Club of America garden master (gardener) Gardens of the World (Gärten der Welt, Berlin) Geertz, Clifford geisha geisha puppets gender Georgian Court University German Romanticism Ghent Gilmour, Leonie Ginkakuji Golden Gate Park, San Francisco golf courses Gould, Edith Gould, George Jay, I Grand Shrine of Ise Great Depression Griffis, William Elliot Gropius, Walter Hacking, Ian Hagiwara Makoto Hall, Stuart Hamilton, Bruce Taylor Hammitzsch, Horst hanami [Cherry Blossom Viewing] Harada Jirō Harigaya Shōkichi Hartnauer, Rudolf Hearn, Lafcadio: books of cited by other authors cultural essentialism of early discourse on Japanese gardens and “In a Japanese Garden” Japanese authors on life history of Heian period Hendry, Joy Herrigel, Eugen Hibiya Park (Tokyo) hill gardens (tsukiyama-niwa) Hinduism Hirara, Naomi

Hiroshima Hobsbawm, Eric J. Hokkaidō Hokkaidō Imperial University Hokusai Katsushika Holland, Clive Honda Kinkichirō: classification of Japanese gardens by Japanese-British Exhibition 1910 Josiah Conder and life history of Horn, Matta Hozen Seki Hudnut, Joseph Humphreys, Christmas Hunt, John Dixon Ienaga Toyokichi ikebana Imperial Household Ministry India Indonesia Indonesian garden (Rostock) informational boards: authenticity and changes to historical background through Othering through problems of relation of gardens and rules given by Inoue Shōichi interactive kinds International Art and Great Garden Fair 1904, Düsseldorf invented traditions iris Italian garden Itō Teiji Izawa Hannosuke Jacques, David James, William Japan-America Trade Committee Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, London: fashion of Japanese gardens caused by Honda Kinkichirō at organization of Ozawa Keijirō at Japanese garden at: Atlanta, Carter Center Berlin, Gardens of the World Bonn, Freizeitpark Rheinaue Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Tenshinen Boulogne-Billancourt, Albert Kahn Musée & Jardins Bremen, Botanika, stone garden Clingendael (The Hague) Düsseldorf, Nordpark

Frankfurt am Main, Japanese garden Hamburg, Planten un Blomen Hanover, Stadtpark Huntington, botanical gardens Lakewood, N.J., Georgian Court University Leverkusen, Carl Duisberg Park London, Holland Park, Kyoto Garden London, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, Japanese Landscape Osaka, Expo Paris, UNESCO Japanese garden Philadelphia, Fairmount Park Philadelphia, Morris Arboretum Portland, Japanese garden Richmond, Maymont Rostock, IGA Park São Paulo, Ibirapuera-Parc Tokyo, Narita Airport Tokyo, Prince Hotel Vancouver, Nitobe Memorial Garden Washington, D.C., Japanese embassy. See also Brooklyn Botanic Garden; Royal Botanic Gardens Kew Japanese garden party Japanese Garden Society of Oregon Japanese house (Museum of Modern Art) Japanese Horticultural Society Japanese Institute of Landscape Architecture Japanese Society Britain Japanese Tea House, Munich Japanese village London 1885 Japonism Jesuits jizō Johns Hopkins University Kahn, Albert Kajinishi Sadao Kallen, Eva-Marie Kamakura Kano Yoko Kansas City Motor Show Katahira Miyuki Kato Etsuko Katō Takaaki Katsura Rikyū (Kyoto) Kim, Thomas W. kimono Kinkakuji, Kyoto Kipling, Rudyard Kiralfy, Imre kōan kokugaku Korea Korean garden (Gardens of the World Berlin) Koren, Leonard Krasznahorkai, László

Kuck, Loraine life history of modernism of Japanese gardens One Hundred Kyoto Gardens Ryōanji as Zen garden Suzuki Daisetsu and Kuitert, Wybe Kusumoto Seiemon Kyoto Japanese gardens in Kyoto school Lambourne House, Cambridge Lancaster, Clay lanterns: classification of commodification of examples in gardens of Josiah Condern on misinterpretation of outside Japanese gardens twin city donations of typical garden element Lao-Tse Latour, Bruno Le Corbusier. See Corbusier, Charles le Lefebvre, Henri Leopold II (king of Belgium) Le Rouge, Louis Leverkusen Japanese garden Linnaues’s taxonomy Loos, Alfred Manchuria manga Mannheim Marcel, Alexandre Marsh, George Turner Marthashof (Berlin) Matsuoka, Seigow McCracken, Eileen McGrath, Raymond Mechanics Fair Boston 1898 meditation: disturbance of gardens as place for miniature gardens for Ryōanji and replicas as place for Meiji Restoration (1868) Meiji Shrine (Tokyo) Meiji tennō Messervy, Julie metonymy, Japanese garden as miniature Japanese gardens Mitchell, Timothy Miyajima

Montreal Moore, Abd al-Hayy Morioka Mori Osamu Morris, John Morris, Lydia Morse, Edward: early discourse on Japanese gardens and Japanese critique of Japanese gardens explained by life history of Tsukiyama Teizōden cited by Motoori Norinaga Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Museum of Modern Art, New York Muto Y. Nagasaki Nagoya Nakanae Kinsaku Nara Naruse Hirose National Automobile Show, Chicago 1916 nature: Asian relation to Chinese gardens and discoursive framework for Enlightement definition of Western authors on Chinese love of nature, Japanese love of: chain of translation and informational boards and Japanese aesthetics and Japanese authors on Japanese gardener and Japanese government and Western authors on Western modernity vs. world’s fair pavilions and Nervi, Antonio Netherlands Ikebana Society Newsom, Samuel New York New York City Buddhist church Niagara Falls Nikkō Tōshōgū Niwa Teizō Nishikawa Issōtei Nitobe, Inazō Noguchi Isamu: life history of personal identity of projects in the United States UNESCO garden Paris Noguchi Yone non-places nudity

Okakura Tenshin (Kakuzō) Book of Tea Olmsted, Frederick Law Olympiapark, Munich Olympic Games 1972 Munich Ōnuki Seiji Oriental garden Orientalism Cold War inventionism and Said’s theory of original Osaka Othering Ozawa Keijirō: cataloging of gardens by interpretation of Sakuteiki by Ise shrine garden and Japan-British Exhibition 1910 and life history of Western gardens and pagodas: anglo-chinoise garden Chinese examples in gardens of typical garden element Parc Monceau (Paris) Paris passage gardens (roji-niwa) Patanjali Paxton, Joseph Peer’s Club (Tokyo) Perry, Matthew Calbraith plant hunters Pope, Alexander porcelain Pratt, Marie Louise primitive people Prince Genji Princeton Prospect Park (New York) Pückler-Muskau, Hermann von rangaku Ranger, Terence O. Reynolds, Garr Rockefeller, John D., III Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew) Russia Russo-Japanese War (1904–5) Ryōanji: Bruno Taut on Garden Club of America and Harada Jirō on modernism and

replicas of Loraine Kuck on Nakane Kinsaku and tourism to Yamada Shōji on Zen-interpretation of sabi. See wabi-sabi Sahlins, Marshall Said, Edward Sakuteiki: history of Ozawa Keijirō on popular literature on Shigemori Mirei and stones and samurai samurai puppets Sand, Jordan Sanō Toemon Sanssouci (Potsdam) Sao Paulo Sapporo Satō Akira Schaarschmidt-Richter, Irmtraud Schlegel, Friedrich Schlitz Park (Milwaukee) Schrunk, Terry Scott, David semiotic Sen Soshitsu XV Senzui narabi no yagyō no zu Shanghai Sharf, Robert shiatsu Shigemori Mirei Shigeru Yoshida Shikoku Shingo Shimada Shintō Shiota Takeo: garden theory of Japanese garden at BBG by Japanese garden at Georgian court migrational background of Shofuso (Japanese Exhibition House), Philalphia. See also Japanese house (Museum of Modern Art) Siebold, Philipp Franz von simulacra Singapore Sino-Japanese War Slawson, David A. social Darwinism Soja, Edward W. spatial turn spirituality Starke, Barry

stone garden (kare-sansui) stones: examples in gardens interactive kinds Honda Kinkijirō on Josiah Conder on Lafcadio Hearn on imported from Japan miniature gardens and placement of Ryōanji and typical garden element sumō Surak, Kristin Suzhou Suzuki Daisetsu: life history of Japanese gardens and Western authors and Zen Buddhism and Its Influence on Japanese Culture Zen Buddhism interpreted by Suzuki Jijō Suzuki Makoto symmetric garden layout Tachibana Setsu Tahiti Taiwan Takamatsu Takano Fumiki Tale of Genji Tan, Bian Taoism Tatsui Matsunosuke Tatton Egerton, Allen de Tatton Park Taut, Bruno tea ceremony tea gardens (cha-niwa) tea house Team Zoo Temple, Sir William tennis lawns tennō third space Thomas, Julia A. Thouin, Gabriel Tokugawa era (1600–1868) Tokugawa Ieyasu Tokugawa shogunate Tokyo gardens of Tokyo Imperial Museum Tokyo Imperial University Tokyo Metropolitan School of Horticulture Tokyo National Museum

Tokyo Olympics 1964 Tokyo University of Agriculture Tönnies, Ferdinand Tono Takuma torii Tosa Naoko tourism: authenticity and Kinkakuji and Nikkō Tōshōgū and Ryōanji and translation: cultural Japan and Japanese gardens in spatial theory of. See also chain of translation Trevor-Rope, Hugh Trianon de Porcellaine (Versailles) Trocadéro Tsarskoe Selo Tschumi, Christian Tsukiyama teizōden twin city agreement Berlin-Beijing Ghent-Morioka Hamburg-Osaka Hannover-Hiroshima Montreal-Shanghai New York–Tokyo Portland-Sapporo Portland-Shuzou Tunnard, Christopher Uchiyama Masao ukiyoe unequal treaties UNESCO Nabi Digital Storytelling Competition of Intangible Heritage University of British Columbia University of Chicago University of Pennsylvania Urasenke Vancouver vandalism vaudeville Veblen, Thorstein Victoria, Brian Victoria (queen of England) Vienna world’s fair 1873: authenticity of Japanese garden at Japanese garden at Japanese garden elements at Japanese pavilion at Japanese preparation for Japanese products at Western descriptions of Japanese garden and pavilion at

Vietnam virtual gardens Vivekananda Vlastos, Stephen Vogel, Gerd-Helge Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) wabi-sabi Wagener, Gottfried Watts, Alan wedding celebrations Westcott, Thomas White, Alfred T. Wieser Benedetti, Ursula Wilson, Ernest Henry Winters, Edward wisteria Wolff, Christian World Parliament of Religion, Chicago 1893 world’s fairs Chicago 1893 World Columbian Exposition London 1851 Great Exhibition London 1862, International Exhibition New York 1939 Osaka 1970, Expo ’70 Paris 1867, Exposition universelle d’Art et d’industrie Paris 1878, Exposition universelle de Paris 1889, Exposition universelle de Paris 1900, Exposition universelle de San Francisco 1894 California Midwinter International Exposition San Francisco 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition Seattle 1962 Century 21 Exposition St. Louis 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition. See also Centennial Exposition Philadelphia Vienna world’s fair Woudstra, Jan Wright, Frank Lloyd writing culture Yamada Shōji: beauty of Ryōanji cherry trees in Ryōanji deconstruction of Ryōanji-myth by Ryōanji and Zen Yanagita Kunio yoga Yokohama Yoshida Shigeru Yoshimura Junzō Yoshioka Toichi Yuanming Yuan Zen Buddhism: Japanese culture and marketing and Suzuki Daisetsu’s interpretation of tea ceremonies and

vogue after World War II Zen garden: gardens as invention of term marketing with miniature and virtual gardens as

Acknowledgments

This book would have never been possible without the constant help and encouragement of my mentor, Shingo Shimada. He provided invaluable advice and important comments over the years. Klaus Antoni and Annette Schad-Seifert both intensively examined the manuscript and gave me very important hints on how to revise it. Andreas Niehaus, Bianca Maria Rinaldi, Wybe Kuitert, Wolfram Manzenreiter, Katahira Miyuki, Ina Hein, Elisabeth Scherer, Angus Lockyer, Christian Uhl, Christof Baier, and many others contributed ideas and comments during discussions on these chapters at presentations. Also friends and colleagues like Johannes Harumi Wilhelm, Ume-san, Andreas-senpai, and many more pointed out important examples of Japanese gardens in the West that I had not yet come across. I would also like to heartfully thank the Foundation for the Promotion of Japanese German Relations in Science and Culture for awarding me the Jade Award in 2012. The Dr. Kurt and Lieselotte Werner Allowance short-term scholarship in 2012 helped tremendously in studying final important sources in Japan and finishing the manuscript. Submitting the manuscript to the University of Pennsylvania Press was like entering a pleasant Japanese garden. Jerry Singerman has been most encouraging and helpful, and the book certainly would not have been possible without him! The series editor John Dixon Hunt even offered to meet me in Dortmund for further important advice and encouragement. Don MacDonald, Jenn Baker, and especially Mary Murrell helped to straighten out my German English, which must have been an awful task at times but hopefully also made them laugh about strange misunderstandings and mistakes! Finally my wife, Heike, has been a most patient and enthusiastic reader and critic. She was also ever willing to visit still another Japanese garden with me even if more compelling attractions were available, and she added many valuable thoughts during those sightseeing trips.