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Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art
Abstract
Japanese gardens are fascinating expressions of landscape art. Their beauty speaks to everyone. What is behind this beauty? Why do the gardens of Japan speak to us so strongly? This volume delves into questions of beauty and ideas of nature expressed in the visual and literary arts of Japan as well as notions of taste and creativity in garden making. It goes beyond the popular understanding of Japanese gardens and locates them in a larger social and cultural context, revealing not only how gardeners conceived their works, but also how gardens functioned during key periods in classical, medieval, and early modern Japanese history. Revised and thoroughly updated, Themes in the History of Japanese Garden Art presents new, thought-provoking interpretations of the evolution of Japanese garden art. Its depth and much-needed emphasis on a practical context for garden creation will appeal to art and literary historians as well as scholars, students, practitioners, and appreciators of garden and landscape art, Asian and Western.
Supplementary resources (4)
Nowadays, four-and-a-half centuries after this Portuguese Jesuits described the ancient capital, Nara is a modern touristic city with a noteworthy number of historic temples, landmarks and national monuments. A sightseer in Nara today will inevitably visit four of the existing temples that the Portuguese Jesuits described: Kofuku-ji Temple, Tamukeyama Hachimangu Shrine, Kasuga Taisha Shrine, and finally Todai-ji. One of those early Portuguese descriptions refers to an as-yet unnamed temple that we tried to identify, and the last one describes the Tamon Castle that, sadly, no longer exists. This chapter provides a historical account of these national treasures, comparing the present state of the temples and/or surrounding landscapes with their 450-year-old descriptions.
It may have only lasted a mere 100 years (1543–1639), but the Portuguese presence on a formerly unfamiliar archipelago of islands that we know as Japan was characterized by intense and lucrative trade, resonant cultural interchanges, and surprising ethnological cross-pollination. As deliverers of enticing goods and extraordinary information about the external world, the Portuguese who ventured well beyond European shores during the Age of Discovery, who opened the East seaway to the rest of the known world, were the first to establish themselves in the Land of the Rising Sun and, despite a relatively brief sojourn there, left an enduring mark still perceptible nowadays.
Like the contemporary visitor to Kyoto, Frois in 1565 was enthralled with the physical surroundings of his new home. In his 2500 pages of Historia de Japam we are given many details of daily life in Kyoto, as well as descriptions of 23 temples, gardens and landscapes around Kyoto as far as Lake Biwa and Azuchi Mountain where, in 1581, he travelled to meet Oda Nobunaga. He was particularly struck by the Japanese cultural tradition, in fact, the Portuguese traders and Jesuits were witnesses (if not in part the cause) of this short but dynamic period of 30 years sandwiched between the Muromachi and the Edo periods, known as the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1568–1603), that led to the unification of Japan.
The concept of geometry may evoke a world of pure platonic shapes, such as spheres and cubes, but a deeper understanding of visual experience demands insight into the perceptual organization of naturalistic form. Japanese gardens excel as designed environments where the complex fractal geometry of nature has been simplified to a structural core that retains the essential properties of the natural landscape, thereby presenting an ideal opportunity for investigating the geometry and perceptual significance of such naturalistic characteristics. Here, fronto-parallel perspective, asymmetrical structuring of the ground plane, spatial arrangement of garden elements, tuning of textural qualities and choice of naturalistic form, are presented as a set of physical features that facilitate a systematic analysis of Japanese garden design per se, as well as the geometry of the particular naturalistic features that it aims to enhance. Comparison with Western landscape design before and after contact between Western and Eastern hemispheres illustrates the degree of naturalness achieved in the Japanese garden, and suggests how classical Western landscape design generally differs in this regard. It further reveals how modern Western gardens culminate in a different naturalistic geometry, thus also a distinctly different vision of the natural landscape, even if these designs were greatly influenced by the gardens of China and Japan.
At the origin of a voluminous discourse on picturesque taste in eighteenth
century England stands an essay by Sir William William Temple (1628–99) that contains the word sharawadgi, which he claims is Chinese. As a result of his introducing this concept, Temple is considered the originator of the English landscape garden movement. In extended academic debates on urban planning or contemporary art, the term has played an ever-increasing role since the mid twentieth century. Several attempts have been made to decipher the word and grasp its meaning. Nonetheless, sharawadgi cannot be apprehended in terms of sound and meaning only. It needs to be understood from a functional and historic context in the lands of its origin—Japan as we will see—as well as a practice of landscape design in Europe where it inspired new creative ideas. Imported art works, strikingly with their Japanese aesthetics, were re-interpreted to fit a European understanding. This reconstruction in turn was framed within the complex world of European tastes for landscape and other applied arts. Men of letters, widely learned and erudite like Temple, maintained their networks by writing letters and exchanging books and other gifts, eager for the most recent news on developments in the world of learning. In northern Europe these savants communicated in French, English, Dutch, German, or Latin; conceptual ideas were sometimes expressed in Greek. Temple's world was this cosmopolitan Europe, receptive to the beauty of Asian art and concepts like his enigmatic sharawadgi. This paper intends to unravel the meaning and context of the word in Japan; to show the context in which it traveled to Europe and entered the circles of Temple; and to make clear how he placed it in a slightly different setting to serve his purpose. It concludes that " literary picturesque taste " is a proper translation for sharawadgi.
This chapter examines the evolution of gardens in China divided into five major historical periods. It first deals with the shift in the ontological significance of gardens from the Bronze Age to the Han period, followed by a discussion on the transformation of gardens as emblems of eremitism from the Six Dynasties period through the Tang dynasty (third through tenth centuries CE). Next, the chapter describes the development of the landscape garden from the Song period through the Ming dynasty (tenth through sixteenth centuries). Then, the formation of an independent art of garden and its demise under the pressure of conspicuous consumption from the late Ming to early Qing (seventeenth through mid-eighteenth centuries) is discussed. Finally, the impact of popular anxieties and dreams upon garden design and practices during the later Qing dynasty (nineteenth century) is examined.
This essay examines the obscured history of Zen as an ideology of Japanese imperialism in Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists. It contends that the novel silently draws on this history as a narrative device to subvert readings that overlook both its mobilization of Zen and the fact that Zen, as it is popularly understood today by a majority of scholars and theologians, has been distorted by Western orientalists and Japanese apologists since the turn of the twentieth century. The essay makes a case for the need for readers to account for this obscured history precisely because it exerts overdetermining force on the protagonist's understanding of her experiences of the historical events that shaped her.
This paper introduces current acoustic theories relating to the phenomenology of sound as a framework for interrogating concepts relating to the ecologies of acoustic and landscape phenomena in a Japanese stroll garden. By applying the technique of Formal Concept Analysis, a partially ordered lattice of garden objects and attributes is visualized as a means to investigate the relationship between elements of the taxonomy.
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