While most of Tokyo has surrendered to concrete and noise, Rikugien still reflects an age when space, time, and nature were handled with discipline rather than speed.
The garden was built in the late 17th century by Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, a trusted retainer of the fifth shogun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. It took seven years to complete. Its name — “Rikugien,” the Garden of the Six Principles — comes from the classical framework used to interpret waka poetry. The garden itself is a physical expression of that literary world: scenery as verse, landscape as philosophy.
Rikugien is a strolling garden, designed to be experienced step by step. Nothing is meant to be grasped at once. Paths twist around a large central pond; artificial hills rise and fall to shift the viewer’s perspective; teahouses are quietly placed for contemplation. The landscape reveals itself gradually, the way a poem unfolds line by line. This is not a place for spectacle, but for stillness and deliberate observation.
In spring, the garden sits under a canopy of weeping cherry blossoms. Summer brings a heavy green silence. Autumn burns scarlet through the maples, and in winter, the shapes of branches and stones emerge clean and bare, dignified even in the cold. The garden does not “perform” for its visitors — it simply exists in season, as it always has.
Unlike reconstructed gardens of the modern era, Rikugien is a genuine product of daimyo culture — the taste and refinement of men who saw power not in display, but in restraint. After the Meiji Restoration, the garden passed briefly into private hands before being donated to the city, and today it is protected as a Special Place of Scenic Beauty, one of the highest cultural designations in Japan.
Even the popular night illuminations respect the garden’s character. The lighting is subdued, almost quiet — evoking moon-viewing more than modern marketing. The emphasis is not on brightness, but on atmosphere: shadow, reflection, and distance.
Rikugien is not a park to “see” but a garden to inhabit for a little while — to move through slowly, as people in the Edo period once did. In a city that constantly races forward, Rikugien reminds us of a time when beauty came from patience, intention, and silence.
