Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan, vol 2 | Page 3

law to rock formation. And stones will begin, perhaps, to
assume for you a certain individual or physiognomical aspect--to
suggest moods and sensations, as they do to the Japanese. Indeed,
Japan is particularly a land of suggestive shapes in stone, as high
volcanic lands are apt to be; and such shapes doubtless addressed
themselves to the imagination of the race at a time long prior to the date
of that archaic text which tells of demons in Izumo 'who made rocks,

and the roots of trees, and leaves, and the foam of the green waters to
speak.
As might be expected in a country where the suggestiveness of natural
forms is thus recognised, there are in Japan many curious beliefs and
superstitions concerning stones. In almost every province there are
famous stones supposed to be sacred or haunted, or to possess
miraculous powers, such as the Women's Stone at the temple of
Hachiman at Kamakura, and the Sessho-seki, or Death Stone of Nasu,
and the Wealth-giving Stone at Enoshima, to which pilgrims pay
reverence. There are even legends of stones having manifested
sensibility, like the tradition of the Nodding Stones which bowed down
before the monk Daita when he preached unto them the word of
Buddha; or the ancient story from the Kojiki, that the Emperor O-Jin,
being augustly intoxicated, 'smote with his august staff a great stone in
the middle of the Ohosaka road, whereupon the stone ran away!' [2]
Now stones are valued for their beauty; and large stones selected for
their shape may have an aesthetic worth of hundreds of dollars. And
large stones form the skeleton, or framework, in the design of old
Japanese gardens. Not only is every stone chosen with a view to its
particular expressiveness of form, but every stone in the garden or
about the premises has its separate and individual name, indicating its
purpose or its decorative duty. But I can tell you only a little, a very
little, of the folk-lore of a Japanese garden; and if you want to know
more about stones and their names, and about the philosophy of
gardens, read the unique essay of Mr. Conder on the Art of Landscape
Gardening in Japan, [3] and his beautiful book on the Japanese Art of
Floral Decoration; and also the brief but charming chapter on Gardens,
in Morse's Japanese Homes. [4]
º3
No effort to create an impossible or purely ideal landscape is made in
the Japanese garden. Its artistic purpose is to copy faithfully the
attractions of a veritable landscape, and to convey the real impression
that a real landscape communicates. It is therefore at once a picture and
a poem; perhaps even more a poem than a picture. For as nature's
scenery, in its varying aspects, affects us with sensations of joy or of
solemnity, of grimness or of sweetness, of force or of peace, so must
the true reflection of it in the labour of the landscape gardener create

not merely an impression of beauty, but a mood in the soul. The grand
old landscape gardeners, those Buddhist monks who first introduced
the art into Japan, and subsequently developed it into an almost occult
science, carried their theory yet farther than this. They held it possible
to express moral lessons in the design of a garden, and abstract ideas,
such as Chastity, Faith, Piety, Content, Calm, and Connubial Bliss.
Therefore were gardens contrived according to the character of the
owner, whether poet, warrior, philosopher, or priest. In those ancient
gardens (the art, alas, is passing away under the withering influence of
the utterly commonplace Western taste) there were expressed both a
mood of nature and some rare Oriental conception of a mood of man.
I do not know what human sentiment the principal division of my
garden was intended to reflect; and there is none to tell me. Those by
whom it was made passed away long generations ago, in the eternal
transmigration of souls. But as a poem of nature it requires no
interpreter. It occupies the front portion of the grounds, facing south;
and it also extends west to the verge of the northern division of the
garden, from which it is partly separated by a curious screen-fence
structure. There are large rocks in it, heavily mossed; and divers
fantastic basins of stone for holding water; and stone lamps green with
years; and a shachihoko, such as one sees at the peaked angles of castle
roofs--a great stone fish, an idealised porpoise, with its nose in the
ground and its tail in the air. [5] There are miniature hills, with old trees
upon them; and there are long slopes of green, shadowed by flowering
shrubs, like river banks; and there are green knolls like islets. All these
verdant elevations rise from spaces of pale