wish you were here (Art Sites)

While talking to a guy at work who lives close to Ritsurin Koen, I heard a rumor that the park would be changing its English name to Ritsurin Garden as it’s more of a Japanese garden than a park. To me it’s clearly a matter of what part of the park you go to. Living a few train stops away and having the year round entry passport (that cost 5000 yen and gets you and two other people in anytime all year), I was in the habit of going there almost every weekend with my older son when my wife was pregnant with number two and wasn’t up for going out to “do stuff”.
In my mind, if you go in the main gate and go toward the right side of the park there are lots of “Japanese Garden” areas but there is also a big open space with a nice big tree in the middle, some benches and some monuments: a park. Perfect for morning picnics or Hanami in the spring. However, the scene of the garden cradled by Mt. Shuin that opens up as you walk in along the broad path from the main entrance is unmistakably a Japanese landscaped garden. And most of the park to the left is more of what I think of as a Japanese garden than park too.
Regardless, my three year old son loves the place. My wife and I have to be careful about mentioning it becuase, if he hears its name, he reads it as an instant promise that we are going and we will never hear the end of it. So we have to talk in code and often call it by an alternative reading of the Kanji with the same meaning, Kuribayashi (Chestnut Forest). The main selling point for him are the dango sold at a couple places in the park. He loves settling down to a skewer of dango and a rod of dry baked fu for feeding the Koi.

I like that too but, more than the defrosted dango, I like the places built in the garden made to sit down and have a cup of macha tea while looking out over the garden. The last time I went with the family, we stopped by the smaller of the two main tea houses in the garden, the Higurashi-tei (not pictured here), for some informal tea and sweets. This tea house overlooks a small garden but the woodwork of the building itself draws my attention as much as the views of the garden. For taking tea here we got a free entry pass to the bigger, main teahouse, the Kikugetsu-tei that overlooks the south pond (following two pictures). This is a much more elaborate place that, I think, is best appreciated when visited in each season. The park is so big and accommodates so many different types of trees and flowers that it seems like every month there is something new in bloom, completely changing the scene and showing you new niches of the park that you overlooked the month before. I must have been there a hundred times now, early in the morning before the tour buses pull in, and I amazed to always find something new.