Nozaki Buzaemon Shotoku Monument Garden

A Meiji Memorial Garden Built Around an Obelisk

The Nozaki Buzaemon Shotoku Monument Garden (野﨑武左衛門翁旌徳碑の庭園) is a small memorial garden laid out in 1894 in Kojima Ajino, Kurashiki City, Okayama Prefecture, whose four stone structures, an 18-meter obelisk, a pair of gateposts, a bridge and a boundary wall, were registered together as Registered Tangible Cultural Properties in 2004. Locals simply call it the Nozaki memorial.

It honors Nozaki Buzaemon (1789 to 1864), who made his fortune from salt. In 1829 he finished the Moto-Nozaki salt beds, about 48 hectares of irihama fields on the Ajino shore, where the tide was let into sand beds and the brine was boiled down into salt. He kept reclaiming tidal flats along the eastern Kojima Peninsula and became known as the "salt field king."

Thirty years after his death, his grandson Nozaki Bukichirō (1848 to 1925), elected to the House of Peers in 1890, completed the garden and its obelisk. The engineer Yamada Torakichi, who had trained in France, drew up the design, and the granite came from Mukuchijima, an island just off the Kojima coast.

The garden covers about 1,000 square meters in the streets of Ajino, some 400 meters southwest of the old Nozaki family residence. It belongs to the Ryuo Kaikan Foundation, which also cares for the Nozaki family house and archives.

How the Garden Is Laid Out

The Nozaki Buzaemon Shotoku Monument Garden is organized along a single axis. A pair of 4.7-meter gateposts stands at the street entrance. Beyond them a 4.4-meter stone bridge crosses a pond, and past the pond rises the obelisk, its shaft a single 12-meter piece of granite. A stone wall 1.1 meters high and 128 meters long wraps the east and north sides.

All four structures date from the same year, and all four exist to present the tower. The finials on the gateposts and the pyramid caps on the bridge posts repeat the obelisk's pointed form at a smaller scale. The bridge keeps its curve low so the view to the monument stays open, and the wall is kept low so passers-by can see into the garden.

A good way to see it is to start in the street, taking in the wall and gateposts, then stand between the gateposts and look across the bridge to the obelisk head-on. The four pieces were registered on June 9, 2004, each under a different reading of its value: the obelisk as a structure that would be hard to reproduce, the gateposts as a model of design, and the bridge and wall as contributions to the historic landscape.

Visiting and Getting There

The Nozaki Buzaemon Shotoku Monument Garden is outdoors, and the obelisk, gateposts and wall can all be seen from the public road. We found no published opening hours, admission fee or rules for entering the grounds as of September 2026. The owner's museum at the old Nozaki residence, the Nozaki Family Salt Industry Museum (tel. 086-472-2001), is the place to ask before going inside.

The nearest station is Kojima on the JR Seto-Ohashi Line. The garden lies about 1 kilometer northwest of it in a straight line, so allow around 20 minutes on foot. It is about 400 meters southwest of the museum, close enough to combine the two on one walk. Drivers reach the museum in about 10 minutes after leaving the Seto-Chuo Expressway at Kojima Interchange; we found no information on parking for the garden itself.

No photography restrictions are posted. The garden sits on a residential street, so keep clear of cars and pedestrians when taking pictures.