page_title: Japanese garden
section_title: Edo period (1615–1867)
hierarchical_section_title: Japanese garden / History / Edo period (1615–1867)
caption_attribution_description: Geppa-ro tea pavillion
context_page_description: Japanese gardens are traditional gardens whose designs are accompanied by Japanese aesthetics and philosophical ideas, avoid artificial ornamentation, and highlight the natural landscape. Plants and worn, aged materials are generally used by Japanese garden designers to suggest an ancient and faraway natural landscape, and to express the fragility of existence as well as time's unstoppable advance.
  Ancient Japanese art inspired past garden designers. By the Edo period, the Japanese garden had its own distinct appearance.
context_section_description: During the Edo period, power was won and consolidated by the Tokugawa clan, who became the Shoguns, and moved the capital to Edo, which became Tokyo. During this time, Japan, except for the port of Nagasaki, was virtually closed to foreigners, and Japanese were not allowed to travel to any country except China or the Netherlands. The Emperor remained in Kyoto as a figurehead leader, with authority only over cultural and religious affairs. While the political center of Japan was now Tokyo, Kyoto remained the cultural capital, the center for religion and art. The Shoguns provided the Emperors with little power, but with generous subsidies for building gardens.
  The Edo period saw the widespread use of a new kind of Japanese architecture, called Sukiya-zukuri, which means literally "building according to chosen taste". The term first appeared at the end of the 16th century referring to isolated tea houses. It originally applied to the simple country houses of samurai warriors and Buddhist monks, but in the Edo period it was used in every kind of building, from houses to palaces.
  The Sukiya style was used in the most famous garden of the period, the Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. The buildings were built in a very simple, undecorated style, a prototype for future Japanese architecture. They opened up onto the garden, so that the garden seemed entirely part of the building. Whether the visitor was inside or outside of the building, he always had a feeling he was in the center of nature. The garden buildings were arranged so that were always seen from a diagonal, rather than straight on. This arrangement had the poetic name ganko, which meant literally "a formation of wild geese in flight".
  Most of the gardens of the Edo period were either promenade gardens or dry rock zen gardens, and they were usually much larger than earlier gardens. The promenade gardens of the period made extensive use of borrowing of scenery ("shakkei"). Vistas of distant mountains are integrated in the design of the garden; or, even better, building the garden on the side of a mountain and using the different elevations to attain views over landscapes outside the garden. Edo promenade gardens were often composed of a series of meisho, or "famous views", similar to postcards. These could be imitations of famous natural landscapes, like Mount Fuji, or scenes from Taoist or Buddhist legends, or landscapes illustrating verses of poetry. Unlike zen gardens, they were designed to portray nature as it appeared, not the internal rules of nature.
  Shugakuin Imperial Villa
  Shisen-dō (1641)
  Suizen-ji
  Hama Rikyu
  Kōraku-en (Okayama)
  Ritsurin Garden (Takamatsu)
  Koishikawa Kōraku-en (Tokyo) (1629)
  Ninna-ji, Kyoto
  Enman-in, Otsu
  Sanzen-in, north of Kyoto
  Sengan-en, Kagoshima (1658)
  Chishaku-in, southeast of Kyoto
  Jōju-in, in the temple of Kiyomizu, southeast of Kyoto (1688–1703)
  Manshu-in, northeast of Kyoto (1656)
  Nanzen-ji, east of Kyoto (1688–1703)
caption: The interior of the Geppa Pavilion of the Katsura Imperial Villa, perfectly integrated into the garden
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