Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, vol 2 | Page 2

loveliness of a
solitary spray of blossoms arranged as only a Japanese expert knows

how to arrange it--not by simply poking the spray into a vase, but by
perhaps one whole hour's labour of trimming and posing and daintiest
manipulation--and therefore I cannot think now of what we Occidentals
call a 'bouquet' as anything but a vulgar murdering of flowers, an
outrage upon the colour-sense, a brutality, an abomination. Somewhat
in the same way, and for similar reasons, after having learned what an
old Japanese garden is, I can remember our costliest gardens at home
only as ignorant displays of what wealth can accomplish in the creation
of incongruities that violate nature.
Now a Japanese garden is not a flower garden; neither is it made for the
purpose of cultivating plants. In nine cases out of ten there is nothing in
it resembling a flower-bed. Some gardens may contain scarcely a sprig
of green; some have nothing green at all, and consist entirely of rocks
and pebbles and sand, although these are exceptional. [1] As a rule, a
Japanese garden is a landscape garden, yet its existence does not
depend upon any fixed allowances of space. It may cover one acre or
many acres. It may also be only ten feet square. It may, in extreme
cases, be much less; for a certain kind of Japanese garden can be
contrived small enough to put in a tokonoma. Such a garden, in a vessel
no larger than a fruit-dish, is called koniwa or toko-niwa, and may
occasionally be seen in the tokonoma of humble little dwellings so
closely squeezed between other structures as to possess no ground in
which to cultivate an outdoor garden. (I say 'an outdoor garden,'
because there are indoor gardens, both upstairs and downstairs, in some
large Japanese houses.) The toko-niwa is usually made in some curious
bowl, or shallow carved box or quaintly shaped vessel impossible to
describe by any English word. Therein are created minuscule hills with
minuscule houses upon them, and microscopic ponds and rivulets
spanned by tiny humped bridges; and queer wee plants do duty for trees,
and curiously formed pebbles stand for rocks, and there are tiny toro
perhaps a tiny torii as well-- in short, a charming and living model of a
Japanese landscape.
Another fact of prime importance to remember is that, in order to
comprehend the beauty of a Japanese garden, it is necessary to
understand--or at least to learn to understand--the beauty of stones. Not
of stones quarried by the hand of man, but of stones shaped by nature
only. Until you can feel, and keenly feel, that stones have character,

that stones have tones and values, the whole artistic meaning of a
Japanese garden cannot be revealed to you. In the foreigner, however
aesthetic he may be, this feeling needs to be cultivated by study. It is
inborn in the Japanese; the soul of the race comprehends Nature
infinitely better than we do, at least in her visible forms. But although,
being an Occidental, the true sense of the beauty of stones can be
reached by you only through long familiarity with the Japanese use and
choice of them, the characters of the lessons to be acquired exist
everywhere about you, if your life be in the interior. You cannot walk
through a street without observing tasks and problems in the aesthetics
of stones for you to master. At the approaches to temples, by the side of
roads, before holy groves, and in all parks and pleasure- grounds, as
well as in all cemeteries, you will notice large, irregular, flat slabs of
natural rock--mostly from the river-beds and water-worn-- sculptured
with ideographs, but unhewn. These have been set up as votive tablets,
as commemorative monuments, as tombstones, and are much more
costly than the ordinary cut-stone columns and haka chiselled with the
figures of divinities in relief. Again, you will see before most of the
shrines, nay, even in the grounds of nearly all large homesteads, great
irregular blocks of granite or other hard rock, worn by the action of
torrents, and converted into water-basins (chodzubachi) by cutting a
circular hollow in the top. Such are but common examples of the
utilisation of stones even in the poorest villages; and if you have any
natural artistic sentiment, you cannot fail to discover, sooner or later,
how much more beautiful are these natural forms than any shapes from
the hand of the stone-cutter. It is probable, too, that you will become so
habituated at last to the sight of inscriptions cut upon rock surfaces,
especially if you travel much through the country, that you will often
find yourself involuntarily looking for texts or other chisellings where
there are none, and could not possibly be, as if ideographs belonged by
natural