Enkuunkan Garden

Enunkan Garden: A Hilltop Pond Garden Above Kesennuma Bay

On February 13, 2018, the Agency for Cultural Affairs added Enunkan Garden (Enunkan-teien) to Japan's roster of nationally designated Places of Scenic Beauty. The garden occupies just under 2.3 hectares on a south-facing hillside on the western shore of Kesennuma Bay in Miyagi Prefecture, looking out across the water toward the island of Oshima to the east and the Iwaisaki peninsula to the south.

The site is still a private residence and bears the name of one family: the Ayukai, upper-ranking retainers of the Sendai Domain who built their hilltop seat here in the seventeenth century and maintained the garden across more than three hundred years of changing fortune. Visiting requires a phone call in advance.

The Ayukai Family and Their Hillside Seat

The Ayukai trace their lineage back to the courtier Fujiwara no Yasuchika in the tenth century. In 1396 their first recognized ancestor, Shigemune, raised a castle in Dewa Province (modern Yamagata) and adopted the place-name Ayukai as the family name. Six generations later, the family entered the service of Date Harumune, grandfather of the more famous Date Masamune. When the Date moved their power base to the new castle at Iwadeyama, the Ayukai followed and were ranked among the highest tier of household vassals.

In the early seventeenth century, under the second Sendai lord Date Tadamune, the seventh-generation head Munemasu received a thousand-koku stipend at Matsuzaki in Motoyoshi District and established the family residence on the present site. Successive heads served in senior domain offices, and by the late Edo period they were entrusted with coastal defense at the Tomarihama lookout for foreign ships approaching the bay.

The sixteenth head, Morifusa (1834–1894), led a battalion in the Boshin War. His eldest son Moritoku became the first mayor of Kesennuma in the Meiji period. His second son had a different fate: adopted by the classical scholar Ochiai Naoaki, he took the name Ochiai Naobumi (1861–1903) and went on to found the tanka society Asakasha in 1893 with Yosano Tekkan, helping launch the modernist revival of Japanese poetry. Naobumi is also credited with bringing the word koibito ("lover") into modern Japanese verse. A stone in the garden carries one of his poems.

Why the Garden Was Designated

By tradition, the original layout is attributed to Shimizu Dōkan, second-generation head of the Shimizu branch of the Sekishū school of tea ceremony and tea master to the Sendai Domain, working in the Kanbun era (1661–1673). Scholars have also proposed that the main framework was extended and largely settled around Genroku 5 (1692) by the third-generation head of the same line, who is credited with the garden of the Old Yūbikan at Iwadeyama as well. The historical thread linking those two Sendai-affiliated stroll gardens is part of what gives Enunkan its place in Japanese garden history.

What the assessment committee singled out, however, is the way the garden combines two qualities that are usually pursued separately. Around the central pond and the great circular island, with the surrounding hillside forest of cedar pressing in on three sides, the space achieves yūsui, a quiet enclosed depth. Step a little further toward the southern edge and the land opens dramatically eastward toward the bay, the islands, and the open Pacific. That contrast between enclosed stillness and panoramic vastness, sustained on a single property for more than three centuries, is the rationale identified in the designation document.

Enunkan became the third garden in Miyagi Prefecture to receive the Place of Scenic Beauty designation, after the Old Yūbikan in Ōsaki and the Saitō Family Garden in Ishinomaki.

Walking the Garden

The compound is laid out on two terraces cut into the south face of the hill. The upper terrace holds the main residence and the primary garden, which opens to the west. (The current residence was rebuilt as a temporary structure in the late Edo period after an earlier building burned, and the temporary structure has remained ever since.) The pond runs about thirty meters east to west and twenty meters north to south. Slightly off-center sits the feature that anchors the whole composition: a large, near-circular island, roughly sixteen by fourteen meters, topped with an artificial mound rising more than four meters above the water.

The planting on the island follows a careful tiered logic. Satsuki azalea hugs the waterline, black pines fill the middle band, and dōdan-tsutsuji (Japanese enkianthus) crowns the top, blazing red in late autumn. To the west and south of the pond, further mounds carry maples; on the northern bank, a weeping cypress (shidare-itosugi), an unusually shaped specimen for Japan, leans out over the water and gives the view from the main hall its distinctive silhouette.

The wooden veranda of the residence is the principal viewing seat, with stepping stones leading down from each side. On the southern edge, where the land falls away toward the bay, a single block called the mikoshi-ishi marks the spot to stand for the wide view across Kesennuma Bay. The cedar grove behind the residence contains the family graves of the Ayukai, set among natural standing stones along the ridge.

Visiting the Garden

Enunkan remains a private home, and the family permits visitors only by prior arrangement. Calling a few days ahead is expected; admission is free. The grounds are generally open between nine in the morning and four in the afternoon, with no fixed closing days but irregular availability depending on family circumstances. Parking is available for about ten cars.

The garden rewards a slow circuit. Spring brings azalea bloom around the island; the dōdan-tsutsuji turns the crown of the mound scarlet in November, when the maples on the surrounding banks are also at their peak. Limited public openings have been held in some autumns since the national designation, but these are exceptions rather than scheduled events.

From central Kesennuma, the nearest station is Matsuiwa, a stop on the JR Kesennuma Line BRT bus rapid transit service, about an eight-minute walk away. Kesennuma Station itself is roughly five kilometers off; rental bicycles are available there.

Around Kesennuma

The same coastline visible from the garden is also the area's main draw. Iwaisaki, the peninsula to the south, has a natural blowhole called Shiofukiiwa, a phenomenon worth timing to high tide. Oshima, the island to the east, was reached only by ferry until the Kesennuma Ohshima Bridge opened in 2019; its beaches and the Mt. Kameyama viewpoint are now an easy add-on for visitors based on the mainland.

For a different register, the Rias Ark Museum of Art on the hillside above town houses a sustained photographic and material record of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami alongside its regular collection. The Isuzu Shrine on the Shinmei-zaki promontory and the small hill of Anbasan, with its long stairway and a sweeping view of the harbor, are both within easy reach of the city center.