LANDSCAPE GARDENING IN JAPAN, by Josiah Conder, with a foreword by Azby Brown and an afterword by Terunobu Fujimori. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 2002, 248 pp., including 40 pp. of plates and 55 pp. of figures, 3,900 yen (cloth)
THE ART OF SETTING STONES AND OTHER WRITINGS FROM THE JAPANESE GARDEN, by Marc Peter Keane. Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2002, 154 pp., including 8 pp. of illustrations, $16.95 (paper)
Though he was describing a different kind of garden, Isaac Watts, an 18th-century English minister and composer of hymns, could have been thinking of Japan when he wrote: "We are a garden walled around, / Chosen and made peculiar ground; / A little spot enclosed by grace, / Out of the world's wide wilderness."
The exclusivity shared by Watts' congregation and Japan's official version of itself insists upon a radical review of nature. Walls should enclose, banishing the natural wilderness; grounds should be made peculiar, small spaces manageable. In thus rendering nature more natural (a major aim in Japanese art) one hears echoes of another 18th-century Englishman, Alexander Pope, who advised that gardeners should seek "the genius of the place."
There are, however, different ways of seeking. The way pursued by Japan has a long and interesting history, and it is this with which Wybe Kuitert concerns himself in this new edition of his excellent 1988 "Themes, Scenes and Taste in the History of Japanese Garden Art."
A landscape architect, he tells us in his introduction that he was above all interested in the garden as product. His book therefore views gardens from both the standpoint of the owner or commissioner who desired something beautiful and the garden-maker who knew how to make just this.
From early times Japanese gardeners have had recipes and regulations, from the "Sakuteiki," a garden manual from the 13th century, right on down to the present day. One of the major rules is that the garden should achieve a sense of unity. It should be created with singleness of thought and a consistency of idea.
"The Tale of Genji" describes strolling and boating aristocracy enjoying the delight created by the unity of a Heian garden. At the same time the delight was tempered by reminders of the indifference of even this tamed nature to the human plight. The 10th-century poetry collection, the "Kokinshu," spoke of those "startled into thoughts on the brevity of their lives by seeing the dew on the grass or the foam on the water."
This fertile polarity (social activity balanced by solitary meditation) has animated all art, but perhaps particularly (certainly, most noticeably) that of Japan.
One may trace its progress through the history of the garden. Perhaps it was from a need for resolution that the most typical forms of Japanese landscaping were invented.
The poet-gardener Muso Kokushi perfected the miniature landscape, of which he wrote: "Not even a grain of dust is raised / yet soar the mountain ranges. / Not even a drop of water is there, / yet falls the cataract." Discommoding as could be a real mountain or waterfall, one might admire their nonthreatening miniature. One could be safely solitary without the danger of a real solitude.
The garden, in its way, suggested a solution to a common problem, one which in its extreme form preoccupied Japan. How does one balance mass and private demands, reconcile tatemae social consensus with honne personal conviction, balance the social demands of giri with the inner questionings of ninjo?
One of the answers was through a miniaturization and a signification widely practiced elsewhere, but most visible in such arts as that of landscape gardening. Perhaps a majority of garden-lovers are not aware of the reasons for their delight, but the unifying effect of bringing together public and private, balanced into a single focus, accounts for much of the pleasure.
Foreign observers of the Japanese garden necessarily see something else. The 19th-century British architect Josiah Conder wrote that Japanese landscape gardening was "a representation of the natural scenery of the country as it appears to and impresses the Japanese themselves, in a manner consistent with the limitations of their arts."
Obliviously patronizing though he was, Conder knew that different folk see different things. "Transferred to a foreign clime where landscape presents itself in a different garb, and regarded by a people who interpret nature in another manner, these lovely gardens can hardly fail to appear as examples of a quaint and fanciful conceit."
It is as such that he wrote of them in his famous book "Landscape Gardening in Japan," which was published in 1893, with a pictorial supplement following in 1912. Both are now reprinted together in this beautiful new Kodansha edition, for which the type has been reset but the period feeling of the original editions retained.
Conder provided a catalog for those in the West aiming for similar effect in their gardens. In this, as Azby Brown points out in his new introduction, he was "an Orientalist, interpreting an Asian culture, even packaging it . . . without directly engaging its people or even fully accepting the culture as equal." At the same time he realized that this "art of considerable refinement" was also "built upon a charming system of ethics."
Like the practicing architect that he was, Conder goes into stones, lanterns, water basins, cataloging, grading, advising. He is completely analytical in a manner that could well have been incomprehensible to the authors of the "Sakuteiki." To them, synthesis, the combining of separate elements or substances to form a coherent whole, was the aim -- the creation of the wa.
For Conder, as for many Westerners, analysis was the only tool he had. His book is thus a particularly sumptuous how-to manual and, as such, has not been superseded.
There is, however, another position between that of the synthesis-prone Japanese aesthete and the analysis-dependent Western designer. This is a place in between, which partakes of both. It is, in a way, a modern site, since it demands a degree of both knowledge and familiarity not previously available. It is admirably exemplified in the writings of Marc Peter Keane.
One of the translators of the new edition of the "Sakuteiki," Keane is a practicing landscape designer who is, at the same time, fully aware of the "system of ethics" underlining the art of garden-making in Japan. He knows how to find what Pope called "the genius of the place," and he understands the satisfactions that this unification brings to the divided viewer.
He questions our Western terminology. "Natural" and "man-made," for example, defined as opposites. "The moment we accept that definition," he writes, "we separate ourselves from nature, placing ourself outside looking in, which we are not." Rather, "however much we may wish to set ourselves apart by defining a hierarchy of living things, with us conveniently on top, there is no separation. We are integral to the whole."
Following this promising path, Keane leads us deeper and deeper into a new land discovered when we give up habitual dualistic thought and approach something like the Japanese ideal of a consistent whole. There is much more to his argument than this (including some practical advice on how to set stones) and all of it deserves the thoughtful reader's attention. This series of essays may be one of our most important modern interpretations of the meaning of the garden.
And with it we may close the gap between Japanese assumptions and Western suppositions. This "chosen and made peculiar" ground, this "little spot enclosed by grace," has implications that reach out to finally unify our own hubris with nature's naturalness.
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