Tokiwa Park

Tokiwa Park (Kairakuen): The Mito Garden Designed to be Shared

The official designation reads "Tokiwa Park" — Tokiwa-koen — but ask anyone in Mito for directions and they will send you to Kairakuen. The two names belong to the same 138,500-square-metre garden on a bluff above Lake Senba in eastern Ibaraki Prefecture, better known abroad as one of Japan's three great gardens, alongside Kenrokuen in Kanazawa and Korakuen in Okayama. The doubled identity is part of the history. Tokugawa Nariaki, the ninth lord of the Mito domain, opened the garden under the name Kairakuen in 1842. After the Meiji Restoration, the new government re-opened the grounds to the general public in 1873 under the name Tokiwa Park, and that is the name carried by the 1922 designation as a National Historic Site and Place of Scenic Beauty.

A Philosophy of Rest, Set in Stone

Nariaki built Kairakuen as the deliberate counterpart to the Kodokan, the domain academy he had founded the previous year. The Kodokan was for study; Kairakuen was for the recovery that makes study possible. The principle behind the pairing — known in classical Chinese as icchō-isshi, "one tightening, one loosening" — is set into the stone of the Kairakuen-ki monument that still stands east of the central pavilion. Erected in 1839, three years before the garden opened, the monument carries Nariaki's own essay declaring that a ruler should share his pleasures with the people. The name Kairakuen itself comes from the same idea, drawn from the Confucian classic Mencius: "The ancients shared their pleasures with the people, and so they could truly take pleasure." From the start, the garden was opened to ordinary commoners on certain days of each month — an unusual arrangement for the late Edo period and the reason Kairakuen is often cited as a precursor of the modern public park in Japan.

Designation and Significance

The 1922 designation, made under the Historic Sites, Places of Scenic Beauty and Natural Monuments Preservation Law, covers the main Kairakuen garden (about 110,478 m²) together with the wooded slopes of Sakurayama (25,916 m²) and Maruyama (2,099 m²) across the Sakuragawa river. Two criteria were applied: the site qualifies both as a park or garden, and as a place of particular historical association. This reflects its dual status as one of the last great daimyo gardens of the Edo period and as the philosophical origin point of Japan's public-park tradition. In 2015 the Agency for Cultural Affairs further recognised Kairakuen, along with the Kodokan, as part of the Japan Heritage story "Modern Japanese Educational Heritage."

Reading the Garden: Yin and Yang in Mito

The composition of Kairakuen is built around a binary that visitors are meant to experience by walking. Enter through the front gate (Omote-mon) and the first stretch of path runs through a dense grove of moso bamboo and old cedars — Nariaki's intentional "yin," a shaded, hushed transition zone. The path narrows. Sight lines close in. Then, after passing several smaller garden gates, you arrive at the Kobuntei pavilion and the view opens onto plum groves and Lake Senba beyond. This is the "yang." The contrast is the point. The dramatic spatial compression and release is what most distinguishes Kairakuen from its more pictorial siblings in Kanazawa and Okayama, both of which centre on ponds in the conventional pond-strolling style.

Tucked beside the cedar grove is the Togyokusen, a natural spring whose water once supplied the tea ceremonies held at Kobuntei. Local tradition once held its water effective against eye diseases. The water still pours from a circular curb of white kansui-seki marble quarried at Mt. Mayumi in Hitachiōta — the present stone is the fourth such curb, installed in 1987. Above the spring stands the Tarō-sugi, an ancient cedar said to be around 800 years old.

Kobuntei: The Lord's Three-Storey Retreat

Kobuntei is the architectural centre of the garden, and one of the few buildings in Japan known to have been designed personally by a daimyo. Nariaki drew up the plans in 1840. The structure has two physical storeys with three internal floor levels in the main hall, plus a single-storey rear wing (the Okugoten) attached to the north. The name comes from the plum's old literary nickname, kōbun-boku, "the tree that loves letters," drawn from a Chinese legend that plums refused to bloom when Emperor Wu of the Jin dynasty neglected his studies.

The pavilion is closer to a teahouse in spirit than to a palace. Rooms are deliberately darkened; the corridors deliberately winding. Small details speak of Nariaki's character: a small "warrior's alcove" cut between the first and third storeys for guards who would have flanked the lord on his way up; a hand-pulley dumbwaiter for delivering food; sliding paper screens linked so that a single pull opens many at once; wooden doors painted with rhyming dictionaries to help guests compose Chinese verse. The original building was destroyed in the firebombing of Mito in 1945. The current reconstruction, completed in 1958 to drawings of the original, recreates the interior in painstaking detail, and the ninety-six fusuma paintings were restored by the Japanese painters Suda Kyōchū (1908–1964) and Tanaka Seihyō (1903–1994).

The climb is rewarded at the third-floor Rakujuro chamber. The room is small. The view, on a clear day, takes in Lake Senba directly below, the plum groves beneath the eaves, and the distant silhouette of Mt. Tsukuba.

Three Thousand Plums and the Six Named Trees

Kairakuen is best known internationally as a plum garden. About 3,000 plum trees of roughly 100 varieties grow across the eastern and western groves, planted partly for poetry and partly for very practical reasons — Nariaki's "Record of Plum Planting" stele states that the fruit was to be salted as emergency rations. Early-blooming varieties open as soon as late December; the late-blooming Kōnan-shomu lingers into early April, giving the garden a longer plum season than almost anywhere else in Japan.

Of the hundred varieties, six are designated the Rokumeiboku, the "six famous trees" of Mito, chosen for the shape, colour or fragrance of their blossoms: Rekkōbai (named for Nariaki's posthumous title), Tsukikage, Tora-no-o, Shiro-naniwa, Yanagawa-shidare, and Kōnan-shomu. Each is set inside a hexagonal wooden enclosure, so they can be picked out from a distance. The Mito Plum Festival, now in its second century, runs from mid-February through late March.

Beyond the Plums

Although the plum festival draws most foreign visitors in spring, the garden is structured to reward every season. The Sakurayama section across the Sakuragawa keeps about 600 cherry trees, including a stand of unusual nikisaki-zakura varieties that flower both in spring and again in autumn. Azaleas — kirishima and dodan, roughly 380 plants — colour the slopes in late April and May. The bush clover bordering the cedar grove peaks in September, and the maples around Lake Senba turn in November. Just outside the East Gate sits Tokiwa Shrine, dedicated to the Mito lords Mitsukuni and Nariaki, founded in 1874 on land carved from the park. The Tokugawa Museum, ten minutes' walk further, holds about 30,000 documents and objects from the Mito Tokugawa house, including pieces associated with Mitsukuni, the historical figure behind the popular jidaigeki Mito Kōmon.