A meizanologist's diary (129)

15 March: after feeding the rat a bit yesterday, it’s time to give meizanology a break. Or so I think. Instead we’ll take in a garden on the way home. Takamatsu’s Ritsurin should fit the bill. Although, as a cheapskate, I’m desolated to find that I’m making my visit a day too early for the annual celebration of the garden’s first opening to the public in 1875 – when entrance would be free of charge. 

So, parting with 500 yen to a faceless vending machine, I find myself contemplating a “no drones” sign. Well, there’s no need for such contrivances: a colourful map gives me the lay of the land quite well enough. 

As I’m starting at the northern gate, I will saunter southwards and back through time, from the more recent, park-like grounds to the original “stroll gardens” laid out by the local daimyo and his successors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Compared with yesterday’s mountainside, it looks as if biodiversity will be limited. Although “Ritsurin” means “chestnut grove”, the park looks to pine trees, more than a thousand of them variously trained and manicured, for most of its greenery.

This handsome stand of conifers, a sign tells me, was planted by “members of the British royal family” on a state visit in 1922, tactfully omitting that one of them was the future Edward VIIII and Duke of Windsor.

The southward stroll is interrupted at a small stream by the antics of an egret. Unabashed by the presence of its fans, it seems to be actively soliciting our attention as it flies across the stream and poses for photos on the bank.

After so many pine trees, it’s quite a relief to find a grove of tropical cycad trees, presented by a southern daimyo centuries ago.

On this Sunday morning, the garden has settled into a genial groove. Families with children wander here and there. Couples sip tea in rustic pavilions. Nobody is wielding selfie sticks, shooting video of themselves, or – heaven forfend – flying drones.

Of course, there’s nothing here for the influencer types. You see, Ritsurin is not one of the “Three Great Gardens of Japan”. Loraine Kuck, the author of my favourite book on Japan’s gardens, doesn’t mention it; another authority, Itoh Teiji, consigns it to an appendix where it’s damned with faint praise:

Once a villa of the Matsudaira lords, the Ritsurin is now a park. The Kikugetsu-tei pavilion adjacent to the Nanko pond is well cared for, and the park in general is a fully equipped public facility…

And hardly less dismissive is Donald Richie in his picaresque parade around The Inland Sea:

I could imagine an antiquarian daimyo having built this [pavilion] for himself. He purposely chose the architecture of another, earlier, better age, that of Heian-kyo, with its T’ang influenced roofs, its elegant verandas stretching into the waters. Like the Ashikaga shogun, Yoshimasa, he was sick of his own times, of the wars, and the police-state government. Like Beckford or Horace Walpole, he built this anachronistic pavilion, surrounded by acres of woodland and high walls with guards on them, and created the kind of life he thought he ought to have.

Richie’s intuitions were right on the money. It was Ikoma Takatoshi (1611–1659), Takamatsu’s daimyo, who set out the garden’s key features. This was in 1625. Fifteen years later, the shogunal authorities attaindered him on charges of misrule – it seems his wife weighed in too, irked by his taste in “male favourites”. Or so Grokipedia insinuates. Ikoma did get to keep his head – not a given in those days – but had to accept a transfer to a smaller, chillier province up north, where no cycads grow.

None of this unfortunate history seems to be troubling the folk who are enjoying shaved ice and possibly even less salubrious refreshments on Lord Ikoma’s lakeshore. 

Sampans with straw-hatted passengers ply the waters as if they've drifted out of a Hokusai print. 

From the bank, children ogle the carp, who in turn ogle the children – alas, carp fodder is sold out for today, a sign says, for the sake of the fishes’ “helth”.

I stroll onwards up an artificial hill that, a sign tells me, resembles Mt. Fuji. Be that as it may, its summit provides the perfect perspective for viewing Lord Ikoma’s handiwork. 

In the background is a real mountain, Shiun, whose granite cliffs bound the garden on its western side. The “borrowed scenery” melds harmoniously with the garden. Surely this is more than a “fully equipped public facility”.

So why didn’t the Ritsurin make it to the top three gardens list, I wonder. Was it the shady characters in the backstory? Or is Takamatsu simply too far away from the arbiters of taste ? 

As if to counterpoint these musings, I happen on one of those neat wooden signs, which points out (in English) that the Michelin Green Guide has awarded the garden its "highest rating" of three stars. And, it adds, almost plaintively but in Japanese only, a Meiji-era primary school textbook opined that, for its arrangements of stones and trees, the Ritsurin surpasses even the top three…

While pondering this appeal, I stroll up another eminence only to find, to my mild astonishment, that this one too is supposed to resemble Mt. Fuji. To underline the message, the second hill even goes by the name of Fuyō, a poetic name for the top mountain. Now, finally, I'm starting to get it. As a garden with two Mt. Fujis side by side, instead of a paltry one like all the rest, the Ritsurin is in a class of its own. Meizanologically speaking, at least, it would be unthinkable to lump it in with the other three...

On the way out, a spray of white petals is glimpsed hanging over another tea-green pool. Just a hint of spring, of course, like the most refined display of ikebana. The cherry blossom front has arrived in Takamatsu, and now it really is time to go home…