Innovation in the Japanese Garden

A liberal, permissive spirit prevails in Japanese garden design today. Does that imply a severing of connections to the aesthetic tastes and values of the past, or a recalibration?

Is it feasible to completely reject the past, to dispense with the mooring blocks of tradition? Can fresh traditions stem from modernity? These are some of the questions I have been asking myself while researching a book for a British publisher on the contemporary Japanese garden.

Although I have visited over 500 gardens in Japan, there have been plenty of surprises in store. One discovery was that some of the primary differences between traditional designs and modern landscape arrangements are in location, the innovative use of materials, and the people involved in creating them.

Designers of Diverse Backgrounds

Traditional interest in the interplay between right angles and natural forms is replaced by an almost entirely sculptured landscape in many contemporary gardens. This may be attributed to the fact that today's designers include town planners, sculptors, interior arrangers, former students with degrees in landscape design, and architects.

Among the latter is a less easily defined group of new professionals. They are people in possession of draftsmanship skills but not formal training in garden design. Nevertheless, they find themselves attached to public and commercial projects, often working alongside local governments and general contractors.

*Mirei Shigemorii's innovative 1958 garden at Kishiwada Castle.*

Gardens as Public Space

We have been in a postwar era characterized by economic growth, industrialization, and expanding urban zones. Within this, gardens have been created for public plazas, the courtyards of government offices, Western-style hotels, concert halls, museums, art galleries, department store rooftops, corporate spaces, and even service station shopping zones.

Private gardens were once highly valued as status symbols. However, these days it is more common to find large residential plots sold to developers. They then construct apartment blocks, shopping complexes, or tiny private homes with enough frontage for a carport, but no garden. Landscapes found in public spots like restaurants, cafes, hot springs, and within the atriums of corporate buildings, are increasingly serving as surrogates for gardens that were once privately owned.

*Colored sand used in Mirei Shigemori's garden at Fukuchi-in, a Mount Koya temple.*

Contemporary Independence

Less subservient to the demands of landscape contouring, contemporary designers work from a desire to be independent of nature. Designers are no longer exclusively in the service of gardens. Instead, they seek to craft a personal vision free of the site-specific or geomantic imperatives of traditional gardens.

They are not mere facilitators for the transition of ideas from natural settings into gardens. Instead, contemporary designers aspire to be masters of their own schemes and conceptions. The modern age has, accordingly, witnessed a shift from the spiritual to the cerebral. Designers project their own intellects, aesthetic preferences, and layouts onto natural land formations and stone arrangements.

This more contemporary garden reflects the post-war adoption of the Western-inspired dualism of man and nature. Its prototype witnessed the transformation of gardens conceived as land-scapes, into designs that might be called mind-scapes. Rather than seeking to mirror nature, such gardens increasingly function as mediums for self-expression.

*Itsuko Hasegawa's Shonandai Cultural Center largely dispenses with organic matter.*

Unconventional Materials and Sites

Being up-to-date in an age self-consciously declaring itself to be modern, meant designers could avail themselves of unconventional materials and sites. Garden specialist, Syuichi Oguni's assertion that "One does not create a new garden from completely new materials" no longer holds true. Dressed stone, split granite, geometrically patterned stepping stones, and lighter, synthetic materials have been introduced. At its most radical, the geometry of the modern garden completely excludes natural elements like trees and plants. Its only concession to nature is the occasional inclusion of biomorphic rock forms.

In some instances, nature itself has been rejected in favor of manufactured or synthetic substitutes. Architect, Itsuko Hasegawa's 1990 design for the Shonandai Cultural Center confirms this point: A modern meta-garden may dispense entirely with natural materials. The center is an example of an entirely invented garden design, whose only natural component is water.

*Tadao Ando's very organic Wall of Hope in Osaka.*

Contemporary gardens read like message boards for the near future. Substituting for hills and mountains, high-rise buildings are already treated as borrowed scenery. Rooftop garden designers, conscious of weight issues, are resorting to hollowing out natural rocks or replacing them with fiberglass equivalents. The existence of roof and graduated gardens prefigures the construction of more vertical gardens in space-squeezed Japanese cities with high structural replacement levels.

Inspired by Mirei Shigemori

It is not possible to talk about the contemporary Japanese garden without invoking the name Mirei Shigemori (1896-1975). He played a key role in how gardens evolved to this extraordinary stage. By the standards of the day, his designs were uncompromisingly radical. He liberally included unorthodox materials like tiles, concrete, and colored pebbles.

*Shigemori Mirei used four different colors of gravel for his design at Sekizo-ji.*

Shigemori's singularly muscular stone arrangements, erupting from the earth in powerfully assertive clusters, add a fresh, soaring quality, and virility to his gardens. Shigemori rejected their degeneration into mannerism and over-ornamentation. He believed that, in common with other art forms, gardens needed to evolve. This was his reaction to what he considered the stale formalism and duplication ad infinitum of garden forms.

It was with the advent of Shigemori that garden designs entered an age of visible modernity. He was a leading proponent in the reinvigoration of the Japanese garden. Shigemori wrote, "A garden should have a timeless modernity." That manifesto has been taken up with zest by today's landscape designers.

Post-Shigemori designers enjoy more freedom to explore the autonomous structure of gardens. With the rules of composition and framing, and the complex symbolic and narrative allusions implicit in older designs, gardens are far less circumscribed. Such ultra-modern gardens, however, run the risk of falling prey to the snares of stylistic obsolescence. Jean Cocteau warned of this with his adage: "To be up-to-date is to be quickly out-of-date."

*A bed of quarried rocks at the Shinsho-ji Zen Museum and Gardens near Fukuyama.*

Post-Modern Gardens

The identification of gardens with Post-Modernism implies shared values with advanced architecture. Therefore, it is no coincidence that many recent garden designs are paired with daring new structural forms. Such gardens represent a shift from a formal adherence to rules of perspective dictated by the art of painting to the ever-evolving principles of urban landscaping and architecture.

Like architecture and sculpture, gardens are inherently spatial, temporal, and four-dimensional. Of the innovative visual arts, Cubism, perhaps, comes closest in its interacting geometric forms and angularity to modern garden design.

*Mirei Shigemori's Yurin-no-niwa design was dismantled in Kyoto and rebuilt in Kibi-cho in Okayama Prefecture.*

In the context of Japan's perpetually mutating cities, landscape designers are rethinking ways in which gardens can exist in contemporary urban contexts. Pay a visit to contemporary gardens located in these intensely developed urban settings. You will be tempted to ask, "What sense does it make to construct gardens at the foot of reinforced steel office towers in the center of pullulating urban metropolis?"

In an essay dating from the early 1960s called "The Secret of the Rock," Pritzker prize-winning Japanese architect Kenzo Tange set forth his views. He preferred cut and incised rock over natural forms, writing that it reflected "the will of the carver." Neither natural rocks nor their placement in the traditional garden, he asserted, "reflect any trace of human personality, or any urge to create something beautiful."

Tange's convictions were corroborated in a 1989 interview with the Japanese-American sculptor and garden designer, Isamu Noguchi. Referring to traditional gardens, Noguchi stated: "Man's hands are hidden by time and by many effects of nature, moss and so forth, so you are hidden. I want to show, therefore, I am modern."

*Mirei Shigemorii's inner garden at Fukuchi-in, a temple on Mount Koya.*

Connections to a Japanese Sensibility

The modern garden rarely exists entirely independently from the past. The contemporary designer mediates allusions to the Japanese garden. Meanwhile, he insists on a personal vision potentially at odds with tradition, but often incorporating its aspects, consciously or otherwise.

One of the foremost landscape designers practicing today, Shunmyo Masuno, is both a curator of tradition and an astonishing innovator. He is also a practicing Soto Zen priest, landscape artist, and mindful living authority.

Masuno aims to create gardens as a respite, or antidote, to the aleatory pressures of daily life. "The garden," he has written, "is a special spiritual place where the mind dwells."

Favoring rock, the most determinate and primal material, Masuno designs gardens that are expressive of a keen intelligence and profound knowledge of Japanese culture. Still, they are yoked with an artist's perspective on landscape. His work draws the viewer into the production process itself. Visible on many of his rocks are cracks and drill marks, indicating quarry work. They make a statement on the combined power of nature and creative human intervention.

It may not be possible in the contemporary context to experience the same supernal calm afforded by an old temple or tea garden. However, Masuno's experiments prove that even in today's landscape designs, the principles deeply embedded within modern gardens may still connect us to the greater natural world.

*Concrete and tile are liberally used at Matsuo Taisha, a Mirei Shigemori garden in Kyoto.*

British writer and photographer, Stephen Mansfield’s work has appeared in over 70 magazines, newspapers, and journals worldwide.. He is currently working on his twenty-first book on modern Japanese garden design, for the British publisher Thames & Hudson, and a screenplay called Obdurate Darkness, set exclusively in Tokyo.