It has its prescribed ritual of appalling rigidity, this tea-ceremony, invented and elaborated by a pious monk to
A TOKYO GARDEN
distract a young and giddy Shogun from his debaucheries. It was taken up as a political weapon by the House of Tokugawa, and crystallised into its present adamantine form, becoming a social engine of the most powerful nature in its power of bringing all the nobles together. Here, then, is one of its temples where the rites were celebrated in their due ordinance, with their prescribed compliments, obeisances, and admiring exclamations over the prescribed flower, arranged in the prescribed spot, and indicated by the host in the prescribed words, to be followed by the invariable litany of conversation and courtesy over the cup of tea to be made, handed, accepted, and drunk all with remarks and gestures and smiles of ancestral rubric.
Outside any tea-house built in accordance with these prescribed regulations one sees “a row of stepping-stones, finishing beneath a little œil-de-bœuf in the wall above, by which the visitors had to enter, ignoring the thoroughly practical door. They approached, making the due bows upon each stone, and at last their host was to fish them in through the window.”
Another ceremony inaugurated within these precincts was the ceremonial of “incense sniffing,” to our minds merely an innocent, childish game, the winner being the person possessing the keenest sense of smell, as the pastime consisted of five or more different kinds of incense being burnt, sniffed, given poetical names, then mixed up and sniffed again, and the man who guesses best the names of the various kinds, is the winner. The boxes which contained the incense, the burners in which it was burnt, were all works of art, and the same grave etiquette which governed the tea-ceremonial governed these incense-sniffing parties, in which poets, writers, priests, philosophers, Daimyos, Shoguns, the greatest and most learned in the land, took part. We can only gaze with wonder and perplexity—not hoping to understand—at a “nation’s intellect going off on such devious tracks as this incense-sniffing and the still more intricate tea-ceremonies, and on bouquets arranged philosophically, and gardens representing the cardinal virtues. Such strict rules, such grave faces, such endless terminologies, so much ado about nothing!” (Professor Chamberlain’s Things Japanese.)
To return to the garden proper, laid out with great elaboration by Soami. Although it is now much neglected, the trees are not kept trimmed according to the rigid laws, their stems are lichen-clad, and Nature has tried to reassert herself over art, yet the beauty of the spot is great. The lake, of ingenious form, backed on the north side by the thickly pine-clad hills and to the west by the regulation grove of maples, is an admirable example of the arrangement of garden stones, its shores being rich in rare and precious rocks, each with its characteristic name. One of the principal stones lying in the lake is the stone of Ecstatic Contemplation; the little bridge which divides the lake is the Bridge of the Pillar of the Immortals; the water of the cascade which fills the lake, being of exceptional purity, is called the Moon-washing Fountain. In the foreground of many of these older gardens was an open space covered with white sand, carefully raked into ornamental patterns, and here is a large mound of the sand suggestive of a mammoth sugar-loaf with a flattened top, called the Silver Sand Platform, the smaller one of the same shape being the Mound facing the Moon; on these sat Yoshimasa and his favourites, indulging in another favourite pastime of moon-gazing, to our prosaic minds merely another elaborately conceived method of killing time. I know no garden in Japan which seemed to take one back so far into the world of the Old Japan as this little garden of Ginkakuji, and no more peaceful spot to sit and enjoy the reddening maple leaves on a bright evening in late autumn, when there is a touch of sadness in the air, in keeping with the departed glories of the Pavilion and the fast-fading beauties of the trees.
Many of the smaller and most interesting gardens in Japan are those attached to tea-houses or small suburban houses, showing, as they do, the ingenuity and resource of the landscape gardener in making a perfect garden of any size, from ten acres to half an acre, or only a few square yards. Among tea-house gardens, that attached to the Raku-raku-tei at Hikone can hardly be counted, as it was formerly the garden of a great Daimyo and is one of the finest gardens in the country. The numerous little summer-houses built out on piles in the lake have been erected for the entertainment of the guests of the tea-house, a gathering place for the most élite, but otherwise the garden remains unchanged; the paths which wind round the lake, across the bridges, past the Stone of Worship, from where the beauties of the garden may be enjoyed to best advantage, are the same paths which the feet of successive Daimyos trod in the feudal days of old.