Former Ekishukan Garden

A Garden Built Inside a Quarry

The largest stone at the Former Ekishukan Garden measures about 5.8 meters across and rises roughly 4 meters from the water's edge, placing it among the biggest stones ever set into a Japanese garden. It is not a natural boulder dropped into a scenic spot. Look closely at its surface and rows of small rectangular notches come into view, the marks left by quarry workers who once split stone here for the building of a castle town.

The garden sits in Sumoto, the largest town on Awaji Island in Hyogo Prefecture, at the northern foot of a low hill called Magatayama. It covers about 5,396 square meters and is laid out as a chisen-kaiyu garden, a style organized around a pond with a path that carries visitors around its edge. On February 26, 2019, it became a National Place of Scenic Beauty, the first garden on Awaji Island to receive that designation.

Most Japanese gardens of this rank were created by temples, court nobles, or powerful daimyo lords. The Ekishukan garden has a different origin. A samurai family made it on the floor of a working quarry, and it still carries the rough honesty of that beginning.

From Quarry Floor to Samurai Retreat

The story begins in 1631, when work started on a new district of Sumoto's castle town, the area known as Sotomachi. Stone for the project was cut from the slope of Magatayama. Once the district was complete, the abandoned quarry pit was reshaped into a garden for a villa belonging to the Inada family.

The Inada served as chief retainers of the Tokushima domain, which governed Awaji Island throughout the Edo period. Their villa here was called Seiso. In 1854 the family moved its private academy to the villa, and from then on the place was known as the Ekishukan, a name that can be read as a hall for deepening one's study. Sons of Inada retainers and well-to-do local families studied here, taking up Confucian texts and Chinese classics alongside military science and martial training.

That quiet routine ended violently. In 1870 a dispute over samurai status during the early Meiji reforms erupted into the Kogo Incident, also called the Inada Disturbance. Armed men from the Tokushima domain attacked Inada residences across Sumoto, and the Ekishukan buildings burned. The garden, made of stone and water, did not. The episode is regarded as one factor that pushed the central government toward separating Awaji from Tokushima, and the island was later placed under Hyogo Prefecture.

In the decades that followed, the property passed through other hands. Owners in the late Meiji and early Showa periods rebuilt a shoin reception hall, raised parts of the ground, added stepping stones, and installed stone lanterns, one of them standing more than four meters tall. The land and its buildings were given to the city of Sumoto in 2013.

Why the Garden Was Recognized

When researchers examined the site after the donation, they confirmed that the garden had changed over the centuries. Part of the original pond had been filled in, and the shoin was a later addition. Yet the elements that give the garden its character had survived without major alteration: Magatayama rising behind it, the line of immense stones, and the long pond at its base.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs describes the garden as a leading example of the samurai gardens that developed on Awaji Island during the Edo period, and judges its design both unusual and accomplished. Hyogo Prefecture had already listed it as a prefectural Place of Scenic Beauty in March 2016. National designation followed in February 2019, recognizing the garden's artistic worth and its value to the study of Japanese garden history.

What to Look For

The stones are the reason to come. Along the embankment on the mountain side of the pond, slabs of Izumi sandstone stand shoulder to shoulder, their scale almost architectural. The wedge holes scored into them, called yaana, are worth seeking out. Each line of notches shows where a worker once drove iron wedges to break the rock apart. Few gardens display their own raw material so plainly.

Water and planting soften the stone. Maples ring the pond and turn the garden warm in late autumn. Higher up the slope the planting shifts to evergreens such as camphor and ring-cupped oak, so the hillside stays green behind the seasonal color below. Following the path around the pond changes the view at every turn, and the great stones read differently as the angle shifts.

At the edge of the garden stands the shoin, a Japanese-style hall. On ordinary open days visitors walk the garden paths only, but during town events the hall is sometimes opened, occasionally with a serving of tea. In late November the garden holds evening illuminations, a tradition that has run since 2015, when lantern light picks out the stones against the dark hill.

Around the Garden

The approach itself is part of the visit. A lane known as the Sumoto Retro Komichi, lined with older shopfronts, runs straight to the garden gate and has become a small attraction in its own right.

A short walk away is Itsukushima Shrine, long connected with the Inada family. Above the town rises Mount Mikuma, crowned by Sumoto Castle, whose stone walls share their geology with the garden below. The Awaji Cultural Museum, near the castle hill, places the garden within the wider history of the island and the Kogo Incident.

The garden is reached in about 15 minutes by car from the Sumoto interchange on the Kobe-Awaji-Naruto Expressway, or roughly a 15-minute walk from the Sumoto Bus Center. There is no dedicated parking, so drivers use nearby lots and cover the last stretch of about ten minutes on foot.