Spaces in Translation: Japanese Gardens and the West

By Christian Tagsold

One may visit famous gardens in Tokyo, Kyoto, or Osaka—or one may visit Japanese-styled gardens in New York, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Berlin, London, Paris, São Paulo, or Singapore. We often view these gardens as representative of the essence of Japanese culture. Christian Tagsold argues, however, that the idea of the Japanese garden has less do to with Japan's history and traditions, and more to do with its interactions with the West.

The first Japanese gardens in the West appeared at the world's fairs in Vienna in 1873 and Philadelphia in 1876 and others soon appeared in museums, garden expositions, the estates of the wealthy, and public parks. By the end of the nineteenth century, the Japanese garden, described as mystical and attuned to nature, had usurped the popularity of the Chinese garden, so prevalent in the eighteenth century. While Japan sponsored the creation of some gardens in a series of acts of cultural diplomacy, the Japanese style was interpreted and promulgated by Europeans and Americans as well. But the fashion for Japanese gardens would decline in inverse relation to the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s, their rehabilitation coming in the years following World War II, with the rise of the Zen meditation garden style that has come to dominate the Japanese garden in the West.

Tagsold has visited over eighty gardens in ten countries with an eye to questioning how these places signify Japan in non-Japanese geographical and cultural contexts. He ponders their history, the reasons for their popularity, and their connections to geopolitical events, explores their shifting aesthetic, and analyzes those elements which convince visitors that these gardens are "authentic." He concludes that a constant process of cultural translation between Japanese and Western experts and commentators marked these spaces as expressions of otherness, creating an idea of the Orient and its distinction from the West.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Sep 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812294330

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Spaces in Translation

PENN STUDIES IN LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

John Dixon Hunt, Series Editor

This series is dedicated to the study and promotion of a wide variety of approaches to landscape architecture, with special emphasis on connections between theory and practice. It includes monographs on key topics in history and theory, descriptions of projects by both established and rising designers, translations of major foreign-language texts, anthologies of theoretical and historical writings on classic issues, and critical writing by members of the profession of landscape architecture.

The series was the recipient of the Award of Honor in Communications from the American Society of Landscape Architects, 2006.

Spaces in Translation

Japanese Gardens and the West

CHRISTIAN TAGSOLD

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tagsold, Christian, author.

Title: Spaces in translation : Japanese gardens and the West / Christian Tagsold.

Other titles: Penn studies in landscape architecture.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2017] | Series: Penn studies in landscape architecture

Identifiers: LCCN 2017005515 | ISBN 9780812246742

(hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Gardens, Japanese—Europe—History—20th century. | Gardens, Japanese—North America—History—20th century. | Gardens, Japanese—Design—Philosophy.

Classification: LCC SB458 .T33 2017 | DDC

712/.60952—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017005515

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. From China to Japan: The History of Asian Spaces

Chapter 2. Discourses of Spaces

Chapter 3. Spreading the Japanese Garden Worldwide

Chapter 4. Between Essence and Invention

Chapter 5. Zen and the Art of Gardens

Chapter 6. Elements of the Japanese Garden

Chapter 7. Authoritarian Gardens

Chapter 8. Connecting Spaces, Disconnecting Spaces

Chapter 9. Postmodernizing Japanese Gardens

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Japanese gardens are a global phenomenon, and nearly every major city in the world has at least one. We find them in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, London, and Paris and also in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Singapore. It is certainly not surprising that there are many Japanese gardens in Tokyo, Osaka, and especially Kyoto, and many tourists travel to Japan to visit them. However, the abundance of Japanese gardens around the globe might seem puzzling at first glance.

Why are Japanese gardens so popular? A search on the Internet produces among others the following interesting answer, on a website called Meditations on the Japanese Garden: The Japanese garden finds its main roots in an aesthetic that gives the garden an intrinsic value of its own, as a means of representing the natural world in an idealized state for contemplation, as a way of expressing the relationship that humans have to the natural world and its elements. Perhaps what most fascinates the Western viewer when first seeing photos of Japanese gardens, is that they seem to be paintings, using natural materials in three dimensional space.¹

This explanation is backed up by popular as well as scholarly literature. However, this statement creates more questions than answers. Surely contemplation and meditation are popular in the West. But perhaps the fact that Japanese gardens look like paintings is so fascinating to people because everyone desires one of his or her own? And would this not be true for Chinese gardens as well? In fact, in the eighteenth century, Chinese gardens were also described as picturesque, conducive to contemplation, and close to nature, much closer, in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers, than gardens in the artificial French or Italian styles. Yet in spite of these similarities, Japanese gardens massively outnumber their Chinese counterparts outside their respective countries.² No other Asian type of garden is as ubiquitous as the Japanese; in 2006 Kano Yoko counted 432 worldwide.³

Why then, and under what circumstances, have Japanese gardens become so widespread? This question focuses on the process of their global dispersion and its history. Differences are obvious when comparing even just a few of the gardens. While New York’s exemplar in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is more than a hundred years old, the Japanese garden in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was built three decades ago. Cologne, Germany, has two gardens to offer, one of which is about nine decades old while the other is some fifty years younger. Japanese gardens in the West have a history that stretches back about 150 years, and new ones are built each year.

These are just some of the central questions about Japanese gardens worldwide that are hard to answer simply by pointing out the gardens’ intrinsic qualities; many others could be asked. There was and probably is still a certain mystification involved in achieving this special global status for Japanese gardens. Until the last three decades most scholarly accounts of Japanese gardens reinforced the mystic qualities ascribed to them. While the first accounts of Japanese gardens at the end of the nineteenth century often had a very analytic point of view, romantic visions were also prominent.⁴ In the following decades levelheaded accounts of the gardens’ history and influence in the West were rare. Clay Lancaster’s publications were exceptions. Most of all, his book The Japanese Influence in America (1963) offered a serious explanation of Japanese gardens in the West as a success story.⁵ But even he lacked the theoretical tools for a more critical account. And in contrast to Lancaster, Western and Japanese authors alike more often than not offered interpretations resembling the earlier quote from the Internet. The popularity of this garden type was more mystifying than explainable.

Only in the last years have garden designers like Wybe Kuitert or specialists of East Asian art like Kendall H. Brown started to demystify some aspects of Japanese gardens.⁶ At the same time in Japan, Inoue Shōichi and Yamada Shōji have deconstructed common cultural assumptions about Japanese gardens.⁷ One goal of this book is to follow in the footsteps of Brown and Kuitert on the one hand and Inoue and Yamada on the other and to ask more questions about the vogue for Japanese gardens in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The questions asked at the beginning of this introduction can serve as a guideline. However, they have to be radicalized. Yamada can offer a model. He started his analysis of one of the most famous Japanese gardens, the stone garden at the Ryōanji temple in Kyoto, with a simple question: Why do people think that it is beautiful?⁸ Behind this question was Yamada’s confession that he himself was not convinced of the stone garden’s beauty.

My personal opinion on Japanese gardens is a little bit different, but my uneasiness is nevertheless quite similar. I do enjoy visiting Japanese gardens, be it in New York, my hometown of Düsseldorf, or Kyoto. In that respect working on this book has been a wonderful experience. My research has led me to visit many public parks and gardens and to look for their Asian-inspired additions. I tried to obtain archival material concerning the gardens I wanted to use as examples: I have always wanted to know how the gardens feel and work as representational spaces. This has meant visiting about ninety Japanese gardens in ten countries over the years. In addition I asked friends around the world to send me information on gardens in their cities and countries. Finally, I read many papers dealing with individual Japanese gardens, or Japanese gardens in certain regions or countries, which helped complete the picture.⁹

But the research has not only been about having fun and enjoying the gardens. I never accepted the commonplace and essentialist explanations for why people find them fascinating. Nor have I enjoyed how most of these gardens are presented to the public through informational boards and strict rules of use; it is as though the admonishing fingers of members of park commissions are trying to educate me, to remind me as a visitor all the time that these gardens are meant for meditation, that I am not free to enjoy them as I choose. Sometimes real-life guardians were in attendance and warned me not to step on pebbles or raise my voice beyond a whisper—and this happened more than once. Ascribing special qualities to Japanese gardens not only has theoretical consequences; these qualities are sometimes enforced literally. Interestingly enough, the only time that garden attendants not only allowed but even urged me to step on the green beyond the path was in a garden in Fukuoka, Japan. This practical mystification of Japanese gardens added to my questions about them. Japanese gardens are not only objects of discourse. They are also very concrete spatial ensembles.

However, there was always more to researching Japanese gardens than simply finding out about a somehow exceptional phenomenon of spatial representation that engrained a notion of essentialism. If it was only about Japanese gardens, I would not have felt compelled to write a whole book. These gardens offered more angles for analysis. They fit very well with my interest about the theoretical problems of a cosmopolitan world and, in particular, my concern with the discursive formation of knowledge. These gardens posed problems for Western observers who lacked categories to describe them in the beginning, even as the Japanese minds behind them had difficulty understanding how they might fit into the discourse on nation and identity. Only gradually was a discursive framework established that put terms like nature, spirituality, or serenity into context, albeit within a colonial framework. Japan was never colonized, of course, but it fell into semidependence on the West during the mid-nineteenth century when Commodore Matthew Perry was sent from the United States to open up its ports for American whalers as well as for trade in general. Unequal treaties were forced upon Japan in the following years by Western powers before Japan itself turned into an imperialistic power. And it was in this later context that the first famous examples of the Japanese garden were presented at world’s fairs in the United States and Europe with the aim of convincing the Western public of Japanese equality.

The gardens that represented Japan at world’s fairs and then increasingly in public gardens and on the private estates of the rich followed spatial patterns that imperialist ideologies had mostly dictated. Such patterns cannot be fully explained within the paradigms of the spatial turn, as outlined by Henri Lefebvre, Marc Augé, or Edward W. Soja.¹⁰ Where Lefebvre, Augé, and Soja focused on spaces in social interaction mostly within one culture, the Japanese gardens came into existence on the borderline between cultures. In framing the matter thus, I do not intend to essentialize cultures in any way; indeed, whenever I talk about culture or cultures, I have an uneasy feeling similar to what I have when visiting Japanese gardens in Europe or the Americas. On the one hand, these gardens constitute a space in themselves; on the other, the space is highly dynamic and interactive. Even if it is strongly confined by fences and shrubs, as most Japanese gardens in the West are, the space interacts with its foreign surroundings—if only by virtue of being so strongly confined and closed in. And it is this combination of separateness and interaction that gets to the heart of the notion of culture that I use in this book.

Signifiers like the West or Japan are hard to avoid completely, and putting these words in quotes each time they appear would be more of a distraction than a helpful reminder. Even Stuart Hall felt obliged to excuse himself for a simplified understanding of the West in his introduction to the discursive formation of The West and the Rest.¹¹ If it is necessary for Hall to mention this at the very moment he is unraveling the discourse, it becomes all too clear that it is difficult to avoid this problem of simplification. Clearly there is no fixed West, Japan, or China—the latter two replacing Hall’s rest in my case—in the sense that I use these words. Japan exists as a state, but Japan implies much more, as expressed among other things by Japanese gardens. I can only beg the reader to keep in mind that these signifiers denote dynamic entities, as will become evident, I hope, as the book proceeds. Japanese gardens in the West are translational spaces. They spark negotiations over what is West and what is East, and they help to constitute these categories. As such they are third spaces, lively places distinct from established areas, as described by Homi Bhabha, Lefebvre, and Soja. New forms of creativity emerge in third spaces, and Bhabha, Lefebvre, and Soja see their respective third spaces as liberating. In contrast I have a much bleaker vision to offer. Power and power relations crisscross the space of Japanese gardens. There is no liberation. Instead the gardens are yet another dispositif in the Foucauldian sense. The third space is devoid of hope.

While my chief aim is to clarify theoretical problems of space and translation by using Japanese gardens as an example, I first establish the historical background of the gardens themselves. Roughly half of the time spent researching this book was passed in numerous gardens, where I endeavored to analyze spatial patterns and types of use, and where I also spoke with the guardians and officials connected to the gardens. The other half of my time was spent in archives. Methodologically, the resulting book is a hybrid, situated somewhere between the work of an ethnographer and that of a historian. Analysis of historical material goes hand-in-hand with data gathered on the spot through participant observation and interviews.

As my history of Japanese gardens in the West in the first chapters is meant to lead to the theoretical questions I want to pose, it may be that my approach is somewhat frustrating to (garden) historians. I introduce each chapter with a stroll through a garden. This adds some concrete examples to the analysis of the text and helps to remind us that gardens only exist in toto and in many historical layers. Unless just built yesterday, all gardens are palimpsests.¹² Paths through them are changed or repaved. Informational boards offer new interpretations every decade. And my garden walks not only add to each chapter in which they appear, but also connect topics throughout the whole book.

Chapter 1 deals with Chinese rather than Japanese gardens in the West. As noted, before Japanese gardens aroused European interest, Chinese-style gardens were in fashion, and my first chapter deals with this eighteenth-century Enlightenment phenomenon. There are only a few direct linkages between the vogue of Chinese gardens and their Japanese counterparts of a hundred years later. Nevertheless interesting parallels exist, especially in the notion of a special Asian relation to nature. In addition, the assumption that religious motives underlay the gardens is common to both types. The discursive analysis of Japanese gardens starting in the late nineteenth century drew from these dispositifs of knowledge. I treat these discourses in Chapter 2. The formation of a canonical body of knowledge about Japanese gardens paralleled their actual arrival in the West in the last three decades of the nineteenth century when, within the context of the imperialist world order, Western authors living in Japan began to write books about Japanese gardens. These introductions were essential for Westerners to appreciate Japanese gardens. Chapter 2 introduces these main early publications and also discusses the rules of knowledge formation that guided their discourse. The distinction between discourse and practice is somewhat artificial, as both together form the body of knowledge on Japanese gardens; books and gardens, textual treatment, and design composed what was to be known. Nevertheless, for analytical reasons it makes sense to first treat both realms separately, and it is in Chapter 3 that I turn to the actual arrival of Japanese gardens in the West.

World’s fairs in Europe and North America first made Japanese gardens popular. Museums and garden fairs helped spread that popularity further. The rich of the Gilded Age in the United States and their counterparts in Europe liked what they saw and started to commission their own Japanese gardens. The first real Japanese gardens do not quite fit into our contemporary understanding of the category and differed to a large degree from what is seen today as an authentic version. Spectators lacked knowledge about how to look at these spaces and enjoy what they saw. Within two decades and through discourses and practical experience, however, a canonical body of knowledge had formed. This first vogue of Japanese gardens in the West ebbed in the 1930s. During the Great Depression, money for new gardens was scarce. In addition, Japan’s aggressive imperialistic policies in the East increasingly repelled the rich in the United States and England—those who had been most active promoting Japanese gardens.

After dealing with Chinese predecessors, discourses, and practice in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, Chapter 4 takes a detour into the theoretical implications of Japanese gardens in the West—and in Japan. I argue that older frameworks for analyzing these gardens and their path to the West, such as cultural essentialism or constructivism, can be valid, but that the case is much more complicated. By offering a semiotic analysis based on the notion of translation, I hope to provide a much more accurate theoretical framework that goes beyond the mere example of gardens and is valid much more generally for the globalization of cultural artifacts.

The theoretical background will be of use when we move back into history. After World War II, Zen Buddhism began to dominate the interpretations of Japanese gardens (a mode of analysis based on discourses that had already started emerging in the 1930s). A new, second vogue of Japanese gardens in the West started to form. Soon Japanese gardens were once again ubiquitous. This second vogue, still closely connected to Zen Buddhism, has lasted up to the present and offers a clear case of cultural translations and re-translations. In Chapter 5, it serves as a test of the theoretical assumptions put forth in the preceding chapter. From a more discursive exploration I move back to practical matters in the next two chapters. In Chapter 6 I describe what gardens must contain in order to be considered Japanese. There are certain elements that are essential—in more than one sense of the word. How these elements are arranged spatially is the core of Chapter 7. Japanese gardens are often presented to visitors as Other spaces; authoritarian rules and limitations of space underline this.

These spatial analyses lead to the question addressed in Chapter 8 of how Japanese gardens can be seen as spaces in between the East and West. Concepts of translation are but one way to express this. Taking up translation as a metaphor also stresses the deep entanglement of global modernity. Ideas as well as objects travel around the world. But Japanese gardens are no longer mere gardens. In the last two decades they have left the boundaries of space and have infiltrated other areas. I will scrutinize these postmodern versions in Chapter 9 and provide an outlook on how Japanese gardens have finally left their boundaries and confinements behind.

Chapter 1

From China to Japan

The History of Asian Spaces

Garden Stroll I: Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Our first garden stroll takes us through the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London. The gardens have many attractions, but the most eye-catching is the Pagoda located at the south end of the park, which stands ten stories (fifty meters) high. The layout of the gardens encourages visitors entering through one of the main gates to walk on the grass, taking in the Pagoda Vista, the name of the path leading up to the structure. The view of the Pagoda is very impressive when approached in this way. However, upon closer inspection, the building itself does not look as Chinese as it does from afar. Its octagonal layout and the overhanging roofs of each story certainly have a chinois flavor, but the plain brick walls and red window frames look rather English. That is a bit unsettling, as is the noise. The Pagoda is situated below one of the main approach paths for aircraft using Heathrow Airport, and planes pass overhead every two minutes, disturbing the peaceful atmosphere. Indeed, the Pagoda is one of the West London landmarks visible from these aircrafts.

When the Pagoda was finished in 1762, the land was not yet designated a royal botanic garden. It belonged to Augusta, the widowed Princess of Wales, who had appointed the architect Sir William Chambers to extend the garden of her late husband, Frederick, Prince of Wales. Chambers had been to China and was therefore well suited to bring to Kew the chinois flavor so in vogue during the eighteenth century. Before his death, Frederick had commissioned a House of Confucius in 1749, which Chambers may also have planned. Under Augusta’s patronage, a Chinese pavilion and the Pagoda were erected as well.¹ Chambers planned a total of twenty-three buildings for Kew, among them a Moorish alhambra and a Turkish mosque to flank the Pagoda. The Pagoda itself was then much more colorful than it is today, with roofs made of tiles that were varnished green and white, gaudy banisters, and eighty dragons on the roof corners. In line with the fashion of the times, the garden thus offered visitors various curious experiences.

Today the House of Confucius, the alhambra, and the mosque are all gone, as are the dragons of the Pagoda. Instead a Japanese garden is situated near the Pagoda. It is not fenced off as are many Japanese gardens in the West; benches, plants, and pebbles clearly demarcate how visitors should move within the space. Small signs are present, asking visitors not to step on the pebbles. The Chokushi-Mon (Gateway of the Imperial Messenger), built for the Japan-British Exhibition of 1910, now occupies a space on a slight slope in the middle of the landscape. It was given to the Royal Botanic Gardens after the exhibition and was left to deteriorate until it was restored as a centerpiece of the new Japanese Landscape.²

Through the proximity of the Pagoda, the gateway, and the Japanese Landscape, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew vividly links the various vogues of Asian gardens in the West (see Figure 1). If the Pagoda is the archetypical building of the Chinese vogue of the eighteenth century and its architect, William Chambers, a popular but also controversial designer of the era, the Gateway of the Imperial Messenger is one of the finest examples of Japanese architecture at fairs in the Age of Imperialism. Today gardens like the Japanese Landscape can be found all over the world, with the more recent examples proof of the long-lasting popularity of Japanese gardens.

THIS FIRST STROLL through a garden has taken us into a chinois setting that demonstrates that Japanese gardens were not the first Asian-style gardens to be regarded highly in the West. During the eighteenth century, long before the first Japanese gardens were built in Europe and North America, chinois architecture, Chinese-style garden layouts, and the Pagoda of Kew were in vogue. Just as Japanese gardens would be popular in the context of Japonism roughly a hundred years later, these buildings and gardens were part of a fashion for all things Chinese. Most significant of all Chinese imports was porcelain, the white gold that astonished Western nobility until Europeans found out how to produce it themselves. Besides porcelain, Chinese-inspired interior decorative schemes and ornamental art were popular. But the Chinese fashion had a philosophical side as well; some of the best minds of the century, like Voltaire, felt a certain affinity for Chinese thought.³

Figure 1. In the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, the Japanese Landscape (1996; in the middle) and the Gateway of the Imperial Messenger (1910; to the left) in front of William Kent’s Pagoda (1762; to the right) visually connect three vogues of Asian gardens and buildings in Europe. Photograph by the author.

This Chinese vogue was a consequence of expanded trade relations in the eighteenth century, but of course actual gardens were not direct imports; only the idea of the Chinese garden was taken up and given concrete form. The richest and most powerful rulers in Europe adorned their vast parks with Chinese-style gardens and chinois edifices, but lesser sovereigns, too, wanted to keep up with fashion, even when it was beyond their means. These gardens reached remote places and were soon ubiquitous in Europe. The Chinese effect of these gardens was often limited to chinois buildings with an exotic touch such as pagodas, bridges, or teahouses. The design and initially the plants of the gardens rarely had any prominent Chinese qualities to offer, though the importation of plants did become more significant later on. However, some of the garden designers emulated Chinese-garden design in the overall layout of their plans and thus achieved a more profound Chinese effect than those who just added chinois buildings to a picturesque garden. The difference between a Chinese effect through chinois buildings on the one hand and the same effect achieved through deeply embedded planning decisions certainly matters for contemporary connoisseurs of garden design as well as for present-day garden historians. Yet contemporary unknowing visitors probably did not see much difference between the two ways of bringing China into European gardens. For them, both turned Western garden scenes into a more or less perfect Chinese scene.

China went out of fashion at the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, some of the basic features of Western interpretations of Chinese-style gardens experienced a rebirth in the nineteenth century in Japonism. Some Western architects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries even deliberately established a relationship between the first Asian fashion and the new one. In Brussels the architect Alexandre Marcel used chinoiserie motifs in a Chinese pavilion that stands near the Japanese tower at Laeken, which were both built beginning in 1901.⁴ In truth, some