Tokikuni Garden

A Garden Carved Into the Hillside Above the Machino River

On the right bank of the Machino River, near the northeastern tip of the Noto Peninsula, the Tokikuni family laid out a garden by cutting into a hillside rather than by smoothing flat ground. The national government recognised the result on 29 January 2001, designating it a Place of Scenic Beauty (meishō) under the criterion for parks and gardens. It stands in the Machino district of Wajima, in Ishikawa Prefecture.

The garden belongs to the residence known locally as the Shimo-Tokikuni house, which translates as "Lower Tokikuni." The Tokikuni were once a single family that divided into two branches in the early Edo period. The senior line kept the older form of the name and became the Kami-Tokikuni, "Upper Tokikuni"; the junior line, which built this house and garden, became the Shimo-Tokikuni. The two residences sit a few hundred metres apart along the same valley, and each holds its own nationally designated garden.

What sets the place apart is its method of construction. The builders cut a level terrace into the sloping foot of Mount Iwakura, set the house on that terrace, and then turned the three cut banks wrapping around the house into the garden itself. The slope was not an obstacle to work around. It became the raw material of the design.

From a Court Noble's Exile to Wealthy Landholders

The family name comes from Tokikuni, a son of Taira no Tokitada. Tokitada was a senior court noble of the Taira clan, and after the Taira were defeated at the close of the Genpei War, he was exiled to Noto in 1185. By the family's own account, his son settled in this part of the peninsula and began opening up the land.

From the middle of the Muromachi period into early modern times, the Tokikuni grew into one of the most powerful farming households in the region. They ran extensive wet-rice estates worked by a large body of dependent labourers, and they were active in coastal shipping and in the salt production for which the Noto coast was long known.

The family divided in 1634. The senior branch came to be called Kami-Tokikuni. The junior branch, the Shimo-Tokikuni, settled lower along the Machino River on land that belonged to the Kaga domain. From 1655 its heads served the domain in official posts, acting as district administrators and holding duties tied to forest patrol and the inspection of salt. The house and garden described here belonged to this junior branch.

The residence still standing today is a single-storey wooden building under a deep thatched roof of hip-and-gable form. Its main hall was designated an Important Cultural Property in 1963. The date of construction is not fully settled. It was long thought to have gone up soon after the family split, while study of the joinery and of ink inscriptions found in the timber has led some specialists to place it in the early eighteenth century. The garden is generally assumed to have been completed at roughly the same time as the house.

Why the Garden Is a Place of Scenic Beauty

National designation as a Place of Scenic Beauty is reserved for landscapes and gardens judged to carry high artistic or scholarly value. The Tokikuni garden was recognised on two counts.

The first concerns its design. The official assessment singles out the contrast between the dark, densely wooded slope behind the house and the bright, open garden in front, and the way the garden handles depth and elevation within a small inlet and its waterfall stones. The arrangement keeps the layout of an early-Edo residential garden while drawing unusual visual effects from a confined, sloping site.

The second concerns what the garden reveals about the people who made it. It is read as evidence of the cultural level reached by the wealthy farming families of this corner of Noto during the Edo period. The neighbouring Kami-Tokikuni garden was designated on the same day, and the two are understood as a pair: together they show that landowners far from any major city commanded the resources and the taste to commission gardens of real ambition.

What to Look For in the Garden

Water enters the garden from a channel that winds westward through the woods behind the house. It supplies a pond northeast of the shoin, the formal reception room, and a second pond, long and narrow, to the southwest. Between the two, the water runs quietly along the foot of the cut banks.

The pond southwest of the shoin, with the artificial hill rising behind it, forms the main scene. The ground here was shaped into an inlet meant to suggest a narrow ravine. On the slope above the head of that inlet stand three upright stones, set one behind another at measured intervals. Viewed straight on from the shoin sitting room, they read as a dry cascade, a karetaki: a waterfall built entirely from stone, without water. The spacing of the stones produces an impression of distance and height that the small site could not otherwise hold. A visitor seated on the tatami sees a gorge where there is only a low garden bank.

Across the slopes of the artificial hill, rock arrangements are set among clipped azaleas. The intent is a light, open feeling, set against the heavy green of the forest behind. The azaleas, Kirishima azalea among them, reach their best in early May, when the rockwork is threaded with red.

This is a garden built to be looked at, not walked through. It was composed for the view from inside the house, from the tatami of the shoin, and its perspective tricks only resolve fully when seen from that fixed point. Understanding this changes how the place reads. The dry cascade is not a sculpture to be circled but a picture, framed by the posts and lintel of the room.

The Machino District and Visiting Noto

The Machino district lies inland from Wajima's better-known coastal sights, roughly twenty kilometres from the centre of the city and reached by local bus. A few hundred metres from the Tokikuni garden stands the Kami-Tokikuni house, with its own designated garden, so the two can be considered together by anyone studying the gardens of Noto's old landed families. The surrounding valley is farmland and forest, a quiet landscape that itself helps explain how the Tokikuni built their wealth.

One practical point matters more than any other for travellers. The Shimo-Tokikuni house and its garden are not currently open to the public. The house suspended visits in November 2020, as falling visitor numbers made the cost of upkeep difficult to meet. On 1 January 2024 a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula, causing severe damage across Wajima and the Machino valley; the neighbouring Kami-Tokikuni main house collapsed, while the Shimo-Tokikuni house escaped collapse. The region is now in the middle of a long recovery. Anyone hoping to see the garden should check current conditions with the Wajima tourism authorities before making travel plans, and should treat a visit as something to look forward to once the area has had time to rebuild.