“The ‘Public’ Garden in Early Modern Japan: The Sources and Costs of ‘Enduring Meanings’” - Mary Elizabeth Berry, Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

Change is as powerful a feature of Japanese gardens as of any others. Driven by nature, it is driven, too, by society—chiefly by new holders of wealth, new directions in taste, and new forms of outdoor sociability. Beth Berry offers several radical examples from the seventeenth century. Where, then, do we find continuities, or “enduring meanings,” that seem to defy or transcend change? Continuities occur most conspicuously in “public” gardens located mainly on the grounds of temples and shrines. Institutional management of the sites, fidelity to original designs and disciplines, and annual observation of local rites within the precincts ensured empirical continuity. A mental construction of continuity emerged from commercially published literature that taught gardening techniques to a new urban population of commoners, using “famous” temple gardens to illustrate points. Such texts yoked mutable landscapes to stable expectations of both pleasure and common culture. Perhaps perversely, though, they tended to reify the public garden as a site of anonymous spectation rather than intimate and lively play.

Japan Brown Bag sponsored by CEAS, Asia Pacific Research Center, and the Stanford Society of Fellows in Japanese Studies