Former Kurushima Family Garden

A Pirate Family's Stone Statement in the Mountains

The Kurushima family who shaped this garden in 1829 had been pirates a few generations earlier. Their ancestors commanded the Kurushima branch of the Murakami suigun, the seafaring confederation that taxed and policed the choke points of the Seto Inland Sea. After siding with the losing Western Army at the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, the family lost its coastal holdings and was transferred inland to Bungo Province. From 1601 until the Meiji Restoration they ruled the small Mori Domain of fourteen thousand koku from a jin'ya, a fortified residence rather than a castle, because the new shogunate refused them castle rights.

The garden complex they built on the slope of Mt. Suehiro, designated a Place of Scenic Beauty in January 2012, is the most ambitious physical statement of that displaced maritime family. Three separate gardens, linked by a single circuit path, occupy different positions on the mountain's eastern slope and base behind the former lord's residence in Kusu Town. They share a single designer, the eighth lord Kurushima Michihiro, and a single year of completion. The work was timed to coincide with Michihiro's rebuilding of the shrine now known as Suehiro Jinja, originally called Mishima-gu, finished in Bunsei 12 (1829).

The Lord's Residence Garden and the Stone That Made the Laborer Weep

The largest of the three is the Hanshu Goten Teien, the Lord's Residence Garden, which spreads along the eastern foot of Mt. Suehiro. A long pond runs north to south below the residence site, with a central island connected on the mountain side by a cut-stone bridge and on the residence side by a wooden one. What sets this garden apart from most daimyo pond gardens is the size of the stones used to anchor its composition. A flat-topped boulder known as the Kitōji-nakase no ishi sits on the residence-side bank. Local tradition holds that Kitōji, the foreman who supervised stone hauling for the shrine and garden project, dragged this rock as far as the rear gate of the residence and there gave up in tears, stamping the ground in frustration. A mountain ascetic from nearby Ichijōji Temple is said to have been summoned to perform a ritual, after which the stone was moved the rest of the way to the pond's edge. A separate flat boulder beside the pond, called the Funatsuki-ishi or boat-landing stone, was later inscribed and turned into a memorial to the storyteller Kurushima Takehiko.

Beyond this curious anecdote, the technical achievement is concentrated in a three-tiered dry waterfall that descends the slope and turns east at its base. The largest stone set into this kare-taki rises about four meters. A separate flat boulder, roughly three and a half meters tall and aligned to face the residence, stands along the stone steps that lead up to the Seihoro pavilion. The lantern placed midway on the slope, also turned toward the residence, was clearly set to be seen from inside, not from the path.

The Seihoro Pavilion and Its Distant Peaks

At the southern crest of Mt. Suehiro stands Seihoro, a two-story pavilion whose name borrows from the phoenix. Around it Michihiro laid out a karesansui dry-landscape garden that treats the view of the Kuju mountain range as part of the composition. A small artificial hill at the southeast end carries a sanzon arrangement of three upright stones together with a stone lantern, while a flat worship stone sits in front of it. Larger flat stones serve as step-out blocks below the pavilion's veranda and as wall-like flank stones along its western face.

The two storeys frame the landscape differently. From the tearoom on the ground floor a visitor sees the artificial hill, the ridge of Mt. Hōzan behind it, and only a sliver of Kuju in the gap. Climbing to the second-floor shoin reveals the full panorama: the table-topped mesa peaks of Daiganzan and Shōganzan to the left, the castle town directly below, and Mt. Mannen with the Kuju range to the right. Seihoro is one of only a handful of surviving buildings from the jin'ya complex. The calculated tightening and opening of view from the lower to the upper floor is the design idea most often singled out by garden specialists.

The Shimizu Gate Teahouse Garden

The third and smallest garden, the Shimizu Gomon Ochaya Teien, occupies a corner of what was once the moat west of Mt. Suehiro, near the front approach to Suehiro Jinja. Michihiro had a teahouse built here so that guests could view the garden from a covered space. The teahouse itself is gone, but the garden remains. A modest artificial hill rises on the north side, and the slope down to the spring-fed pool called Tamamizu, beneath the stone wall of the former teahouse foundation, is structured around large flat boulders set as stepping stones. The first stepping stone is itself a single megalith, and a flat plate of stone links the bank to the central island. Within an awkward shape constrained by the older moat geometry, the design accommodates large stones with discipline rather than ostentation.

A Circuit for a Family That Lost the Sea

Viewed as a single project, the three gardens form a continuous circuit. Paths connect the front approach, the residence site, and Seihoro at the top, so a visitor moves upward through pond, dry waterfall, and karesansui in sequence. The unifying gesture is the use of unusually large stones throughout, in a region where the local mesa geology supplies them. The scale of the rocks and the placement of every viewing point to look out toward distant mountains, rather than back toward the residence, has been read by garden historians as a deliberate response to the family's history. The Kurushima had been a clan whose authority once extended across the open sea; the gardens at Mori reach instead toward the open horizons of inland Kyushu.

The garden lies inside Mishima Park, a small public park surrounding Suehiro Jinja. It is open all day at no charge. Adjacent to the grounds stand the Kurushima Takehiko Memorial Museum, dedicated to the Meiji-era oral storyteller who was a descendant of the Mori Domain lords, and the trailhead for Tsunomure Castle, the mountain stronghold that the Kurushima inherited from the previous lord but were forbidden to use. Allowing half a day to walk the gardens, the former town, and the castle site together is a reasonable plan.