Issue:
May 2024
Shigemori Mirei’s innovations thrive in the modern age
When people think of the Japanese garden, they tend to conjure a random set of over-simplified signifiers that largely fail to acknowledge the immense diversity of the form. A sub-division of the visual arts, Japanese gardens – especially of the stone variety – present a natural, even cosmic, order that is not immediately apparent to the casual visitor.
Japan’s pre-war era saw the creation of a garden that would establish its young creator, Shigemori Mirei, as a landscape designer revered by devotees as the foremost innovator in garden design of the last century, vilified by an establishment appalled at his transgressive use of materials such as tile, concrete, mortar, and colored gravel. That garden, located in the grounds of Tofuku-ji, a Rinzai sect temple in Kyoto, represented the revival of symbolism and abstraction in the form of a thoroughly contemporary landscape, an example of what Shigemori would call the “eternal modern”. Completed in 1939, his first major garden project would prove a key model for landscape designs in the post-war period.
Tofukuji’s Hasso-no-niwa (Garden of Eight Views) is actually a quartet of independent segments, beginning with the south garden, where four stone groupings symbolize the mythical Islands of the Immortals. The precisely clipped azaleas in the west garden mirror a geometrical form called seiden, which derives from a Chinese method for dividing land. Another design of great originality, the moss garden north of the hojo main hall is studded with an irregular grid of flat stones, a checkerboard pattern known as ichi-matsu. Suggestive of distant hills, banks of azalea bushes occupy the background, adding mass. The cosmic realm is inducted into the design of the east garden, the Garden of the Big Dipper, where recycled temple base columns are placed in cloud-shaped white sand, a form intended to replicate the configuration of Ursa Major, the Great Bear or Plough constellation. Each of these cardinally oriented designs, still refreshing in their reinterpretation of tradition, aptly express Shigemori’s mission to create gardens for the modern age.
Endorsing the notion that the traditional contains an exuberance that can invigorate the new, Shigemori reacted to what he considered the stale formalism and duplication ad infinitum of garden forms, the art’s degeneration into mannerism and over-ornamentation, believing that, in common with other art forms, gardens needed to evolve. Thankfully, many of his gardens are open to the public. A sampling of his post-war work is instructive.
Dominating the citadel-style courtyard of Kishiwada Castle, Shigemori’s 1953 dry landscape garden has a suitably military theme. Observed from the uppermost floor of the castle turret, we have a clear overview of his Hachi-jin no Niwa (Garden of Eight Combat Formations), the design, representing a mythological Chinese battle, conducted by General Zhuge Liang. In this extraordinary visualization, the general’s encampment, a dense cluster of rocks, stands at center, the base surrounded by eight protective sub-camps. Shigemori’s intention was that this singular garden could be viewed not only from the standard ground level, or slight elevation afforded by a raised deck, but from a multitude of angles, including aerial perspectives from passing planes and helicopters.
A series of hedges beside the stone pathway leading to the entrance of Kozen-ji temple are pruned into undulating forms, setting in motion static patterns that, replicated in the main garden, become almost kinetic. Shigemori completed the main garden of the Rinzai sect Zen temple, located in an ancient Kiso Valley post town on the trade and pilgrimage Nakasendo Road, in 1963 as a design experiment in which its grounds would reflect the natural environment outside of the garden walls. Inspired by the sea of clouds that gather above the valley, the garden, named Kanun-no-Niwa, the Garden for Appreciating Clouds, features a sinuous outline of cumulus represented by lines of white concrete snaking across gravel. “I used a two-dimensional drawing technique,” Shigemori commented, “for a garden which has three dimensions, something I have never seen done in a Japanese garden.”
Built as an adjoining feature to the exhibition hall of Kyoto’s Association of Yuzen Manufacturers, the first incarnation of Shigemori’s 1969 Yurin-no-niwa had a rather short life. In 1999, both the building and garden were demolished. Thanks to the timely intercession of Toshio Iwamoto, a former Shigemori apprentice, the dismantled garden components were reassembled in the courtyard of a newly constructed town hall in the designer’s hometown of Kibichuo-cho in Okayama Prefecture. A modern version of the chisen kanshoshiki teien, a pond appreciation garden, Yurin-no-niwa is one of Shigemori’s most abstract designs. The work differs from many of his other gardens in its emphasis on a detailed, largely water-submerged horizontal plain, one with only a minimum number of the artist’s signature vertical rocks. The location deep in the Okayama countryside, and with only an irregular bus service, means the work is viewed by only a limited number of public office workers, locals, and the occasional garden researcher.
You sometimes come across other Shigemori landscapes in similarly remote rural areas – distinctive works forgotten or sidelined by the garden fraternity because of their location. The Rinsho-ji temple garden, an uncommonly beautiful design, deep in the Osaka countryside, is one such site. A large space disposition was needed to create this multi-levelled design, which resembles an elevated, slightly tilted English knot garden or maze. Shadowy blocks spill like dark liquid light into the spaces between large segments of azalea bushes, creating an irregular green and black checkered effect, with wedges of shade suspended like a sequence of dark pools. Starkly contrasting with much of his work in the dry landscape field, the design reflects the influence of the great topiary master, poet, and aristocrat Kobori Enshu (1579-1647). This is evident in its stacked, graduated hedges, each portion perfectly interlocking.
Considering its location in the deep countryside of Hyogo Prefecture, the temple garden of Sekizo-ji is astonishingly well-maintained. Completed in 1972, this late Shigemori work departs from the formal stone garden approach of using rocks to recreate landscape, opting instead for single, highly symbolic arrangements. Another striking innovation is the use of four contrasting colors of gravel, whereas for centuries just one had sufficed. If first impressions are of a highly contemporary layout, the underlying design principles dig deep into Chinese religious philosophy and geomancy, resulting in what garden writer Christian Tschumi contends is the “first garden in Japan ever to be based on the concept of shishin soo”. This refers to a quartet of gods who protect the four divine directions. Given the huge importance of this design in the development of the Japanese stone garden, Sekizo-ji deserves considerably more attention than it currently receives. It seems that the remoteness of the location has condemned the garden to an unintended obscurity.
The gardens at the water deity shrine of Matsuo Taisha in Kyoto, were Shigemori’s last project. Completed in 1975, the first landscape in the Horai Garden trilogy comprises a number of islets floating in a shallow, phoenix-shaped pond. The garden is atypical for Shigemori, as it uses real water instead of his preferred abstracted version using sand and gravel.
The inner landscape, the Kyokusui no Niwa, or Garden of the Winding Stream, is the most contemporary of the set. The shallow brook that flows through the garden is a natural stream, but its banks and bed are made from blue rocks cut into flat paving stones set in concrete. The backdrop to the water course, and its visual centerpiece, is an undulating mass of topiary, tightly clipped azalea bushes, pierced by soaring rocks. Assertively modern, the composition nevertheless, pays tribute to traditional garden associations, its configuration the shape of a turtle, a symbol of longevity. The Joko no Niwa, or Prehistoric Garden, sees Shigemori returning to pre-Shinto rock arrangements, evoking the aura of sacred iwakura stones, gathering places for the gods. Shigemori believed that sacred rocks, and the devotion accorded them, were the origin of the Japanese garden. Inspired by a large rock standing on the mountain behind the shrine, one honored as a deity, Shigemori, in this final work, aspired towards the divine.
It will be up to future generations of garden scholars and visitors to sites like these to evaluate this unique landscape designer’s legacy. Shigemori wrote that “the artistic value of the garden is proportionate to the degree of simplification carried out”. That would, I believe, be the standard by which he would want us to judge his work.
Stephen Mansfield is the author of three books on the Japanese garden, including Japan’s Master Gardens: Lessons in Space & Environment.
