Miyaraden Inner Garden

Five Hills of Coral Limestone: A Ryukyuan Garden in Yaeyama

Five low hills of Ryukyu coral limestone descend in a north-to-south procession through the eastern garden of the Miyara residence in central Ishigaki City. Between the second and third hills, a dry stone waterfall drops through a narrow defile, crossed mid-way by a single arched bridge. Where the third and fourth hills meet, a stone slab spans the gap on two squat pillars. Behind it all stands a dense screen of Fukugi (Garcinia subelliptica), the heavy-trunked tree planted as a windbreak around almost every traditional home in the Yaeyama Islands.

This is the Miyara Dunchi Garden (宮良殿内庭園, Miyara Dunchi Teien), laid out around 1819 in the closing decades of the Ryukyu Kingdom. It was designated a national Place of Scenic Beauty (meishō) on 15 May 1972, and remains the best-preserved example of an upper-class residential garden surviving anywhere in the former Ryukyu domain.

The Year the Eighth Miyara Took Office

The garden was created when Miyara Peechin Tōen (宮良親雲上当演), eighth-generation head of the Matsumō line, was appointed Yaeyama Tōshoku—the highest administrative office in the southern reaches of the Ryukyu Kingdom. Under the kingdom's three-district system, the Yaeyama Islands were divided into the Miyara, Ōhama, and Ishigaki magiri, and the residence of each district chief was honorifically called a dunchi. The Miyara family had held the senior post for generations; the year 1819 (Bunsei 2 by the Japanese calendar, Jiaqing 24 by the Chinese) marked Tōen's formal investiture, and the residence was built to mark that moment.

Tōen's ambitions exceeded his station. Ryukyuan sumptuary laws fixed strict rules for the size, materials, and styling of houses according to rank, and the Shuri court repeatedly judged this Yaeyama residence too grand for a district chief. Orders to demolish or downgrade were issued five times. The Miyara household ignored them. Only in 1875, eight years after the kingdom itself had been absorbed by Meiji Japan, did an inspector's reprimand finally force the red tile roof to be replaced with thatch. Tiles returned in 1899, and the building has stood largely unaltered ever since.

That stubbornness is why the garden exists at all. Most upper-class residences in Okinawa were levelled during the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. Ishigaki was spared the ground combat that devastated the main island, and the Miyara compound emerged from the war with its early-nineteenth-century arrangement intact: wall, gate, screening panel, main hall, and garden in their original positions.

Why a Garden in the Far South Was Designated a Place of Scenic Beauty

The garden's national recognition rests on two judgements made by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 1972. The first is genealogical: the layout follows the conventions of mainland Japanese temple karesansui, dry landscape gardens built around symbolic mountains, waterfalls, and rivers expressed entirely in stone. To find this orthodoxy reproduced on a subtropical island some 1,800 kilometres south of Kyoto is, in the official phrasing, "important for the study of how garden culture spread."

The second judgement is condition-based. Several Ryukyuan gardens of comparable date exist on Ishigaki and on the Okinawan main island, but few retain their full original setting: an enclosing limestone wall, a screening hinpun, a main residence still in its first position, and a garden read across the eaves of that residence as the designer intended. The Miyara Dunchi has all of them. The garden is, in the Agency's words, "the best preserved among the regional upper-class residential gardens of early modern Ryukyu."

The same Shuri garden master, Gusukuma Peechin (城間親雲上), is credited with both this garden and the nearby Ishigaki-shi Garden, also a Place of Scenic Beauty. Working in the 1810s, he adapted a Kyoto vocabulary to local materials: coral limestone instead of granite, Fukugi instead of cypress, cycads instead of clipped azalea. The result belongs to neither tradition cleanly.

How to Read the Garden

The garden is viewed from the veranda of the ichiban-za, the main reception room of the residence. Standing there, a visitor looks east across a flat sand foreground onto the assembled hills.

Each hill has a role. The first, at the north end, carries a short flight of stone steps to a small flat summit. The second and third rise close together, with the dry waterfall falling between them; the single arched bridge across that gap is the most photographed element in the garden. The fourth and fifth hills, at the southern end, are treated as rocky islands floating against the limestone wall behind. The whole composition decreases in height as it moves south, a deliberate sequence that draws the eye toward the far end and gives the relatively compact garden a sense of depth.

Planting works as ground for the stones. Cycads (Cycas revoluta), shuro palms (Trachycarpus fortunei), and creeping juniper (Juniperus chinensis var. procumbens) cluster on the hills themselves; Fukugi forms the dark backdrop. The pairing of white limestone against deep green, harsh under a summer sun, softens into something almost monochrome on overcast winter days.

Two small features near the residence are easy to miss. Beneath the eaves to the left of the viewing position, a cluster of upright rocks suggests a guardian group. To the right sits a low tsukubai, a stone water basin of the kind used for ritual purification at tea gardens—evidence of how directly the designer drew from mainland practice.

Visiting

The compound is open to the public daily except Tuesdays, from 9:00 to 17:00. Admission is 200 yen for adults and 150 yen for elementary through high school students. The main hall is still occupied by descendants of the Miyara family, so the interior cannot be entered; visitors view the garden from the veranda and circulate through the front courtyard. Items associated with the household (lacquered vessels, ceramics, a long-handled flag holder) are displayed along the open veranda.

Allow thirty to forty-five minutes. The garden rewards slow looking from a single seated position more than walking around it, since the carefully judged height sequence of the five hills only resolves from the veranda.

The site is roughly fifteen minutes on foot north of Ishigaki Port's Outer-Island Terminal. Coming from New Ishigaki Airport, take the bus to the central district and walk five minutes east from Miyara-Dunchi-dōri. There is no dedicated car park, but coin-operated parking is available on the surrounding streets.

Around the Site

The Miyara Dunchi sits in the older grid of central Ishigaki, where most points of interest are within easy walking distance. The Yaeyama Museum, a five-minute walk east, holds the standard reference collection on Yaeyama folk culture, including documents and household goods from the Miyara family itself. The Nantō Folklore Museum is two minutes north.

Heading south brings you into the Eugleena Mall, a covered shopping arcade of more than a hundred shops and food stalls that occupies the old market quarter. From there it is a few minutes further to the Outer-Island Terminal, the departure point for ferries to Taketomi, Iriomote, and the other Yaeyama islands.

The nearby Ishigaki-shi Garden, also designated a Place of Scenic Beauty and credited to the same designer, is about ten minutes on foot. It is not generally open to the public, but the limestone wall and Ryukyuan tile gate can be admired from the street.