In the Japanese rock garden

‘To stand a stone, one must first know the great principles.’ Thus begin the opening lines of the Sakuteiki (Records of Garden Creation), the 11th-century book thought to be Japan’s oldest garden creation manual. In ancient Japan, ‘standing a stone’ was a metaphor for creating a garden. In later periods, Buddhist monks who excelled at making gardens were called ‘stone-standing monks’. Stones, water and plants are the main elements of a Japanese garden; among them, the stone arrangements are what make up the garden’s framework.

Even small stones have weight. Until modern transport technology developed in Japan, the difficulty of transporting stone was a major factor governing the selection of garden stones. For ancient Japanese gardens, stones were typically gathered from sources within 10km of the garden site.

Of all the stones that could be obtained from the mountains surrounding Kyoto, there was one that was especially prized as a garden stone: an angular mountain stone known today as chert. In the Sakuteiki, chert stones were either called ‘with angles’ or ‘mountain stone’: commonly seen in the mountains around Kyoto, the stones themselves are used to evoke the local mountainous scenery.

Okiie Hashimoto’s woodblock print Seijaku (Sunaba II), which depicts the rock garden at Tenryu-ji temple in Kyoto

Credit: Okiie Hashimoto / The Trustees of the British Museum

The raked gravel represents the ocean in the Hōjō Garden at Nanzen-ji temple in Kyoto; the six large stones popularly imagined to be a tiger and her cubs

Credit: Alex Ramsay / Alamy

In a dry garden (karesansui), stones express water through the ripples raked over their surface. At the foot of Kyoto’s Higashiyama mountains, there is a karesansui garden in front of the abbot’s quarters (hōjō) of Nanzen-ji temple, thought to have been created by the legendary garden designer Kobori Enshū in the 17th century. White gravel represents the ocean, next to which six stones are set, the largest laid to the left. The garden came to be called ‘Tiger Cub Crossing’ (Toranoko watashi), the large stone interpreted as a mother tiger and the five smaller stones imagined as her cubs crossing the sea. The white gravel used to express the ocean is another type of stone gathered from the mountains near Nanzen-ji temple: a granite stone that has been used for many purposes in Kyoto, including stone walls for castles and stone lanterns, but also daily tools such as mill stones. In an age before electricity, it was hoped that the white gravel in the karesansui gardens of Zen temples would also have the practical advantage of brightening rooms with its reflected sunlight. In this way, the stones in Japanese gardens not only reflect the landscape of their local origin, but are intimately connected to human life.

While making effective use of nearby materials was common, there are also cases where garden stones thought to have rarity value were brought to gardens from afar.

‘There are now many areas of Japan that prohibit any new quarrying of stones for the sake of environmental protection, disaster prevention and preserving regional scenic beauty’

The garden of Mōtsū-ji temple, made in the 12th century in the north-eastern region of Hiraizumi and likely ordered by the ruler Fujiwara no Hidehira, uses clay slate stones with tiny round holes, dug by a clam species that lives on rock shores, to express a craggy shoreline. Over 800 years ago, stones were brought all the way from Japan’s coast so that a shoreline could be evoked at an inland location like the garden of Mōtsū-ji temple.

There is a legend, dating from the Edo period, that tells the story of a famous Kyoto tea master named Yabunouchi Kenchū Jōchi who once traded three short-sleeved kimonos to gain a garden stone he coveted. Sometimes known as the ‘three short-sleeved kimonos stone’ (mitsu-kosode), this is an andesite stone found in Kanagawa Prefecture, which is located much closer to Tokyo than Kyoto. These stones were used in many gardens in Tokyo and Kanagawa, but in Kyoto the difficulty of transporting them made them extremely valuable.

Stones were transported miles inland in the 12th century to create the garden at Mōtsū-ji temple in Hiraizumi, where they were used to recreate a fictional shoreline

Credit: Ueyakato Landscape

The Murin-an garden in Kyoto features an enormous stone quarried across the valley at Mount Daigo

Credit: Ueyakato Landscape

These strong preferences for stones with a certain rarity are seen in modern gardens too. Murin-an is a garden created near Nanzen-ji temple during the Meiji period (1868–1912). Murin-an’s owner was Yamagata Aritomo, who was well known not only as one of Japan’s political leaders, but also as a lifelong garden aficionado. Yamagata did not care for the traditional designs that Kyoto gardeners suggested to him, and decided to create a garden in his own original style. Instead of a traditional pond, he directed his gardener Ogawa Jihei VII to create a dynamic stream, and a bright and spacious grass lawn instead of moss. One of his most prized possessions was a gigantic stone brought to Murin-an from Kyoto’s Mount Daigo. The stone had originally been quarried by Toyotomi Hideyoshi – the 16th-century warlord famous for unifying Japan – when he was building his castle. Yet Toyotomi did not transport the heavy stone, and for about three centuries it remained at the spot where it had been quarried in the mountains, on the other side of a valley beyond the mountains closest to Murin-an. To pull this stone all the way to his garden, Yamagata had to use 24 cattle. It is even said that there were places where this stone tore holes in the road. Perhaps Yamagata, who was deeply involved in founding Japan’s modern military, hoped that by gaining Toyotomi’s stone for his garden, some of the great warrior’s military prowess might be transferred to him.

Ogawa Jihei VII, the gardener who built this garden for Yamagata, went on to create many celebrated gardens in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and today he is known as one of Japan’s greatest garden designers. He experienced the difficulty of handling public landscaping projects on a low budget and devised many ways of overcoming it. One of his approaches was to bring cheaply priced stones from Kyoto’s neighbouring region of Shiga via the recently completed Lake Biwa Canal, which connects to Kyoto, rather than using the famous but steeply priced stones that were available locally. The evolution of transport has made it much easier to acquire garden stones from far away. On the other hand, there are now many areas of Japan that prohibit any new quarrying of stones for the sake of environmental protection, disaster prevention and preserving regional scenic beauty. This means that there are still famous stones traded at high prices due to their rarity.

Outside the Hoshinoya Tokyo hotel, Ueyakato Landscape have created an urban realm inspired by a traditional ararekoboshi, in which stones are carefully fitted together like a jigsaw

Credit: Ueyakato Landscape

A slow and labour-intensive process, the pavement was prefabricated off-site and transported to Tokyo

Credit: Ueyakato Landscape

Today, Japanese landscaping typically must be completed within very short construction periods. For that reason, Japanese landscape gardeners almost always work in circumstances where it is difficult for them to invest the time necessary to apply their traditional skills. Yet the work that Japanese gardeners take time in doing by hand vastly enhances the beauty of a Japanese garden. One such design is a Japanese paving style called ararekoboshi (scattered hailstone pavement). Ararekoboshi is a kind of pavement where a handful of natural stones are aligned while creating a design out of the way in which the stones mesh. Ueyakato Landscape finished one such pavement in 2016 for a public space at the Hoshinoya Tokyo resort hotel in the heart of Tokyo. Both in terms of the pavement’s slip resistance and consistency, our practice had to meet very strict standards not typically required of Japanese gardens. By devising a method of prefabricating the pavement in Kyoto before transporting it to Tokyo, handwork requiring six months on-site was finished within two and a half months. In this method of construction, a wooden panel frame is used to complete a pavement made of natural stones; pavement plates are then carried to the site, where they are installed.

Garden stones reflect an original owner’s intentions and how the garden was created. When managing and caring for gardens that have several centuries of history, they are indispensable signposts for the gardener, indicating what the garden’s creator intended and providing a crucial guideline for the garden’s ongoing management and care. In a Japanese garden, stones are the fundamental framework: they are what garden owners concern themselves with. They are the very spirit of the gardener.

Translated by Michael Shapiro