Yesterday we cycled to Mukojima Hyakkaen - a park in Higashi Mukojima near the Sumida River. Though it features on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government's Parks and Garden's of Tokyo website, it's not really on the radar of most Tokyo-ites. It's not on the japan guide website, I've never seen it come up on the Lonely Planet's thorntree and neither my bilingual nor Hiro's Japanese atlas distinguished it from any of the thousands of pocket parks through the city. It's a small, (1 hectare) but delightful park and the only remaining flower garden in Tokyo from the Edo age. It was begun as a private garden in 1804 and then passed to government ownership in 1938 - the leaflet didn't explain why or how, but usually when historic or beautiful places are passed to government hands it has less to do with benevolence and more to do with being behind in tax payments.
Aesthetically Mukojima is quite different from any public garden I have seen in Tokyo. The free range nature is very different from the highly constructed, but ultra minimalist Zen gardens like
Ryoanji in Kyoto. And different again from the manicured Chinese style gardens like
Koishikawa Korakuen. It reminds me of Hiro's mother's garden or of the gardens in front of the public housing nearby that has just been torn down. By conventional standards it is somewhat unkempt - 'weeds' don't seem to be pulled out, plants aren't standardized into neat rows, there is little in the way of bare soil or conspicuous cultivation. It seems like a kind of a 'plants rights' garden - just grow happily, wherever. And yet there is a balance and beauty in the seeming lack of order that creates its own harmony. Hmm... it's a difficult concept to express... This website has a reasonable stab at explaining this idea somewhat, in the context of
wabi sabi - a word that seems more popular in western interior design and architecture magazines than it is in Japan.
4 comments:
Now that's my kind of garden. The prissy manicured ones make me nervous.
It's my new favourite garden. If I were a plant, it's just where I would like to live.
TOTALLY beautiful...!! I too love "wild" gardens where flowering plants and trees are free to "be themselves"! Great pictures! How lucky you were to go there!
I've been there a couple times. A real hidden gem.
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