Hakusan Park

Hakusan Park: A Garden Born With Japan's First Public Parks

In October 2018, the Agency for Cultural Affairs added Hakusan Park to the national register of Places of Scenic Beauty (meishō). The designation covers 16,959 square meters of green space in the center of Niigata City, a short walk from the prefectural offices and the old merchant quarter of Furumachi. What earned the honour was not size or spectacle but age and continuity. When the Council of State issued Proclamation No. 16 in January 1873 encouraging towns to create public parks, Hakusan Park was one of the first twenty-five opened across the country, alongside Ueno in Tokyo and Kairaku-en in Mito.

Most of those first parks were former temple or shrine grounds simply re-labelled. Hakusan Park was different. It was deliberately laid out and landscaped as a new place, and the design has reached the present day with surprisingly little altered.

From Shrine Precinct to Public Garden

The land once belonged to Hakusan Shrine, the chief tutelary shrine of Niigata. For centuries the precinct occupied a sandbar at the mouth of the Shinano River. By the mid-seventeenth century silt had choked the channel, the town of Niigata relocated, and the shrine's grounds shrank to a narrow strip facing the water. Merchants leased the riverside land and lined it with rice warehouses known as shimagura.

Change came with the early Meiji period. In 1872 Kusumoto Masataka arrived as prefectural governor. The former shrine precinct had been transferred to public ownership the previous year, and Kusumoto decided to turn it into a park. The site already had a reputation: across the river it framed Mount Yahiko and Mount Kakuda, and townspeople had long gathered here during the Hakusan Festival. The warehouses and minor shrine buildings were cleared, and construction of a "Hakusan promenade ground" began.

A Niigata businessman, Arakawa Taiji, supervised the work, and gardeners from the town of Sanjō are said to have taken part, though the records are thin. The stone monument raised at the entrance in 1873, the Niigata Yūen Monument, states the governor's intention plainly: the park followed a Dutch model and was meant to strengthen the health and spirit of the prefecture's people. The park opened under the name Niigata Yūen. Only later did "Hakusan Park" settle into use, becoming the formal name around the time of the 1916 city park ordinance.

Period accounts give a vivid inventory of the early grounds: two pavilions, 590 garden stones, 24 stone lanterns, six lamps, and plantings of 85 mature pines and over a thousand young ones. In 1878, when Emperor Meiji toured Niigata, an artificial hill was raised at the eastern end of the Lotus Pond so the imperial party could look out over the river and the mountains. It was afterwards named Miyukigaoka.

Why It Became a Place of Scenic Beauty

The designation criterion applied here is the category for parks and gardens. Two qualities carried the case. The first is the park's place in the story of how Japan adopted the public park as an institution. Because it was newly built rather than inherited from a religious site, Hakusan Park shows what the planners of 1873 actually wanted a park to be: a designed landscape for ordinary residents.

The second is preservation. The core grounds, laid out east to west with a pond at each end and the hill between them, have kept their composition for roughly a century and a half. Later generations expanded the park and called the additions the "new park," keeping them distinct from the original. The early area has escaped major rebuilding, which is why the Agency judged its academic and aesthetic value high enough for national protection.

What to Look For on a Visit

The historic grounds are long and narrow. At the eastern end lies Hyōtan-ike, the Gourd Pond, named for its pinched shape; at the western end is Hasu-ike, the Lotus Pond. Between them rises Miyukigaoka, the small hill built for the emperor's visit. Paths loop through the whole, passing arranged stones, lanterns, and a scattering of inscribed monuments that record episodes from Niigata's past.

Pines and plum dominate the planting, joined by cherry, azalea, and wisteria, while lotus fills the western pond in summer. The seasons read clearly here: roughly two hundred cherry trees in mid-April, tree peonies in May, lotus blossom in mid-August, and coloured leaves in autumn.

One building rewards a closer stop. Enkikan is a section of the Meiji-era residence of the Saitō family, one of Niigata's three great merchant houses, built around 1907. The family donated the structure to the city in 1994; it was moved into the park and reopened to the public in 1997, and in 2000 it was listed as a Registered Tangible Cultural Property. Entry is free. For a modest charge a visitor can sit with a bowl of matcha and look out over the Lotus Pond and a small garden fitted with a suikinkutsu, a buried water chime.

Near the northwest grounds stands a bronze statue of Tama-kō, a dog who twice pulled his owner from avalanches in the 1930s. Removed during the war and recast in 1959, it remains a quiet local landmark and a favourite with children.

Getting There and When to Go

Hakusan Park sits in the middle of the city, so reaching it is straightforward. From JR Niigata Station, a bus on the Bandai-bashi line reaches the City Hall stop in about sixteen minutes, leaving a short walk; the sightseeing loop bus stops directly in front of the park. JR Hakusan Station on the Echigo Line is also within walking distance. Drivers will find four parking areas with several hundred spaces between them.

The park stays open at all hours and costs nothing to enter, which makes it an easy stop at almost any point in a Niigata itinerary. Cherry season, from mid-April into early May, is the busiest stretch; the elevated sky gardens linked to the park are lit after dark, and blossom doubles in the still water below.

Around the Park

Hakusan Shrine stands immediately beside the park and is an easy pairing. Long associated with marriage and matchmaking, it draws a steady stream of visitors hoping for good fortune in love. The shrine's main hall traces its present form to 1644.

On the southern side, a network of six raised gardens and connecting walkways wraps around Ryūtopia, the Niigata City Performing Arts Center, and leads on toward the Shinano River. Following it brings you to the yasuragi embankment, a riverside promenade that restores, in spirit, the link to the water that the early park once enjoyed. The shops and eateries of Furumachi are also within walking distance, useful for a meal before or after the visit.