WHYS ALL HEADS FOR JAPAN
Shopping, taking in the sights, and eating like an emperor
Tomorrow, I will be winging my way to Tokyo to lead 42 people on an exclusive 14- day tour of some of the best gardens in Japan, plus all sorts of other cultural highlights.
You can follow along with us by going to vancouversun. com/ gardens where I will post stories and photos daily on my In the Garden blog.
Our flight to Tokyo will be a first, too. We will be among the first to fly on All Nippon Airways’ new direct flight from Vancouver to Tokyo’s Haneda airport.
Great gardens are the focus and primary connecting theme for this tour. But like all my tours, we will also be spending time delving into cultural and historic highlights; walking in beautiful gardens is always a deep and lasting pleasure, but there are many other things we want to see and experience.
We will, for instance, get cooking lessons from a sushi chef as well as have a sake tasting at one of Japan’s premier breweries.
We will certainly spend time in Tokyo’s famous Ginza shopping district as well as the Akihabara, the area known worldwide as “electric town” because of its Times Square- like neon lights and stores full of high- tech electronics and robot wizardry.
I have not yet decided whether I have the stamina for kabuki theatre, but it is also on my list along with a visit to Tokyo’s immense fish market.
Our journey will take us from Tokyo to Mount Fuji and to Takayama and on to Kanazawa on the Sea of Japan, where we will stay in a Ryokan, a traditional Japanese inn.
The idea here is to get a taste of what it was like to live in a medieval Japanese village. I am told it will involve wearing kimonos and dining like an emperor. And we will have the chance to get into some of Japan’s specialty art forms: origami, bonsai, and ikebana.
From Takayama, we’ll go to the world heritage village of Shirakawago and then on to Kanazawa, Osaka, Nara and Kyoto. Getting to some of these places will be interesting in itself.
We will be travelling a couple of times on “bullet trains” and I understand it can be something of an adventure accessing villages.
But the main reason we are going to Japan is to see beautiful gardens, and some of the best temple gardens are located in and around Kyoto, which was once the centre of the imperial rulers and a place where for hundreds of years wealthy aristocrats chose to build exquisite garden retreats, usually with a temple in the centre.
We will visit the famous Temple of the Golden Pavilion ( Kinkaku- ji) garden as well as the moss garden of Saiho- ji and the dry- landscape garden of Ryoan- ji. We also get a free day in Kyoto, so there will be an opportunity to see more temple gardens.
For me, this close contact with Japanese gardens is what I have craved for years. It is an encounter that I am a little anxious about because I know how important these gardens have been and continue to be in the wide world of garden culture.
The Japanese approach to gardenmaking more than a thousand years ago, was very different from our Western approach. Many gardens were built first with the temple, living quarters and other buildings and structures coming second. This attitude is often cited as a sign of the esteem with which gardens are held in Japanese culture.
The Japanese garden as an art form has had immense influence on today’s garden designers, mainly because of the simplicity and elegance of the planting and emphasis on recognizing views and vistas.
The deep spirituality of Zen Buddhism and Shinto also had a profound influence on the shape and content of the gardens with rocks and trees used as sacred symbols. It was, for instance, the minimalistic Zen side of Buddhism that ultimately produced the unique dry- landscape garden with its flat areas of sand or gravel raked beautifully into wave patterns.