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Surveys of Japanese Art by Medium
Gardens
Teiji Ito (also Itoh) has written several fairly brief texts to accompany extremely
handsome books of photographs and plans: Teiji Ito, The Japanese Garden, 2d
ed., translated by Donald Richie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972); Teiji
Itoh, The Gardens of Japan (New York: Kodansha International, 1984), which
includes splendid photographs of a few gardens and lists 50 others with brief comments;
and Teiji Itoh, Imperial Gardens of Japan (New York: Weatherhill, 1970), which
is limited to Sento Imperial Palace, Katsura Imperial Villa, and Shugakuin Detached
Palace. A smaller but also attractive book, and one that covers many gardens, is
Masao Hayakawa, The Garden Art of Japan, translated by Richard L. Gage (New
York: Weatherhill, 1973). For an especially beautiful book on gardens set within
buildings, see Kanto Shigemori, The Japanese Courtyard Garden, translated
by Pamela Pasti (New York: Weatherhill, 1981). A contemporary dry landscape garden
designed by Nakane Kinsaku, at Taima-dera, Nara Prefecture, which is an emblematic
representation of a Pure Land Buddhist didactic narrative, is thoroughly discussed
by Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis in "The White Path Crossing Two Rivers: A Contemporary
Japanese Garden," Journal of Garden History 15 (1995): 1-18.
Readers less concerned with beautiful photographs and more with somewhat fuller historical
accounts of the chief gardens and with discussions of principles of design and details
of construction should begin with Loraine Kuck, The World of the Japanese Garden,
corrected ed. (New York: Weatherhill, 1970), or with Mitchell Bring and Josse Wayembergh,
Japanese Gardens: Design and Meaning (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981).
Although the photographs in Bring and Wayembergh are below par, the site and building
plans and the analytic diagrams make this book notably important. For further information
about the techniques employed in designing gardens (especially "borrowed scenery"
and "the great within the small"), see Teiji Itoh, Space and Illusion
in the Japanese Garden, translated and adapted by Ralph Friedrich and Masajiro
Shimamura (New York: Weatherhill, 1973), and, for a book emphasizing the author's
experience as an apprentice garden designer in Japan, see David A. Slawson, Secret
Teachings in the Art of Japanese Gardens (New York: Kodansha International,
1987). Somewhere between the poles of splendid picture books with brief commentaries
and relatively plain books with fuller commentaries is Irmtraud Schaarschmidt and
Osamu Mori, Japanese Gardens, translated by Janet Seligman-Richter
(New York: Morrow, 1979), a handsome, almost encyclopedic book with a densely packed
text that makes it more useful for reference than for browsing. Wybe Kuitert,
Themes, Scenes, and Taste in the History of Japanese Garden Art (Amsterdam: J.
C. Gieben, 1988) is not especially readable but it offers the best summary of the
current research in garden history.
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