Daimyo Gardens by Shirahata Yōzaburō (review)

Shirahata Yōzaburō’s Daimyō no teien is among the most important books on the history of Japanese gardens to have been published in recent decades. Though aimed at a broad readership, that book introduced a new paradigm in scholarship on the subject, shifting the focus from reductionist Kyoto gardens, for decades erroneously labeled “Zen gardens,” to the lively and colorful world of Edo gardens. The English edition under review here is part of a translation project of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) aimed at making books by its scholars more accessible to an international readership. Translated by Imoto Chikako and Lynne E. Riggs, Daimyo Gardens offers a significant restructuring of the original, with a discussion of pleasure gardens in Japan and Europe, for example, presented early in the book rather than hidden in later chapters. This edition also has a larger format and is much more lavishly and colorfully illustrated than the original paperback. Thus Anglophone readers are afforded a better visual impression of the daimyo gardens than their Japanese counterparts.¹

Shirahata, a leading scholar of Japanese garden history, was one of the first to challenge the orthodox view that Kyoto gardens from the middle ages represent the pinnacle of Japanese garden culture while Edo gardens symbolize its general decline. His 1997 Daimyō no teien preceded another work with an iconoclastic take on the Japanese garden, published in 2005, by fellow Nichibunken scholar Yamada Shōji; the book by Yamada, as it happened, appeared in English in 2009, seven years prior to Daimyo Gardens.² These two works in English place Nichibunken at the forefront of redefining Japanese garden history, which is remarkable for an institution founded in 1987 to sustain conservative discourses of Japaneseness.

Prior to Shirahata’s scholarship, daimyo gardens had been largely neglected by historians notwithstanding the more than one thousand gardens of feudal lords that in their time had been the pride of the capital. The quarters of the shogunate’s retainers, which dominated Edo, must have resembled a large garden landscape, making it a green city indeed despite the extreme population density in the commoner’s quarters. Today not even a dozen of these daimyo gardens still remain, most of them having been scrapped in the construction of modern Tokyo.

The book under review brings the rich culture of daimyo gardens back to life. Most daimyo built several gardens in Edo. Though initially they would maintain only one residence, after the great fire of the Meiroku era in 1657 they added more as retreats in case of emergency. Typically, a daimyo would own a main, a middle, and a lower residence in what today is the Yamanote area of Tokyo, and each residence was adorned by a garden (p. 101). Aesthetically, the daimyo gardens were different from those in Kyoto, which were smaller in size, more secluded, and often part of a temple. In contrast, the Edo gardens featured open vistas, huge ponds, and large lawns as the daimyo competed to build spacious, open gardens that reflected their wealth and political influence. The sites often took up literary allusions and mimicked famous landscapes.

Daimyo Gardens does more than elaborate on the aesthetic splendor of the gardens, focusing rather on their social function—another area that has been mostly neglected by traditional histories. Shirahata uses the famous garden of Katsura Detached Palace in Kyoto to illustrate the problematic consequences of the predilection for aesthetics in previous scholarship. With scrutiny placed exclusively on the aesthetic qualities of the Katsura garden, its rich history of “gaiety and fun” was supplanted by a “stiff image” of an “elegant garden modeled on Heian-period standards of beauty” (p. 8). Daimyo and imperial gardens like Katsura served a multitude of social purposes in the Edo period. They set the scene for banquets, garden parties, meetings for composing renga, horseback riding, duck hunting, fishing, and so on. Lawns were a...