Kishiwada Castle Garden (Hachijin Garden)

A Stone Garden Shaped Like an Army

The garden that crowns the inner bailey of Kishiwada Castle was finished in 1953, a year before the castle keep above it was rebuilt. It is the work of Mirei Shigemori (1896–1975), among the most influential garden designers of twentieth-century Japan, and it carries a second name that explains its strange geometry: Hachijin no Niwa, the Garden of Eight Battle Formations.

Covering 6,581 square meters, the garden sets aside almost everything a visitor expects of a Japanese stone garden. There is no pond, no rolling expanse of raked sand, no miniature mountain range. In their place stands a tight ring of stone groups raised on three stepped platforms, drawn up like soldiers in defensive order. Kishiwada City commissioned the design, and in 2014 the Agency for Cultural Affairs added it to the national register as a Place of Scenic Beauty.

A Garden Built on a Battle Plan

Shigemori looked to Chinese military history for his subject rather than to the Buddhist or Daoist imagery that underlies most older stone gardens. The composition follows the hachijinhō, the system of eight troop formations attributed to Zhuge Liang, the strategist of China's Three Kingdoms period whose name reads Shokatsu Kōmei in Japanese.

Nine stone groups make up the garden. One stands at the center as the general; the other eight ring it. Shigemori took the ground plan from the nawabari, the layout diagrams of medieval Japanese castles, and built it up in three tiers of greenish chlorite-schist edging, each step about 20 centimeters high. Seen from above, those tiers read as ramparts.

The formation he chose has a specific meaning. A hōenjin, the circular arrangement that gives the garden its plan, was a defensive posture in classical warfare. Shigemori deliberately picked the formation that guards rather than the one that strikes, and that choice governs how every group of stones leans and faces.

Why It Was Designated

The Agency for Cultural Affairs set out two grounds for the 2014 designation. The first is artistic: the garden shows Shigemori's commitment to abstract, non-representational design carried through without compromise. The second is academic: it holds a clear and identifiable place in the development of the modern Japanese garden.

One detail of the listing is worth knowing. Of all the gardens on Japan's national register, this was the first created in the postwar period to be named a Place of Scenic Beauty. A garden barely sixty years old took its place beside compositions many centuries older.

Reading the Stones

The general's group occupies the top tier. It rises from fifteen standing stones, the tallest reaching 219 centimeters. The middle tier carries two groups, the tiger and the wind. The lowest tier holds six more: heaven, earth, cloud, dragon, bird, and snake. Each has its own character. The heaven group is built from three uprights, one of them 234 centimeters tall. The snake is a single low stone 416 centimeters long, made by joining two pieces end to end. The dragon is a 265-centimeter slab set on a deliberate slant. Most of the rock is chlorite schist and quartz schist, chosen for its cool grey-green tone.

There are two ways to look at the garden, and Shigemori wanted both. Walking the perimeter at ground level lets you take each group as freestanding sculpture, watching how the uprights balance and answer one another. The second view is from straight overhead. Shigemori knew the castle keep would go up the following year, and he composed the tiers and groups so that the whole plan resolves into a legible diagram when seen from its top floor. Climbing the keep is not an optional extra. It completes the design.

The garden began as a stricter thing than it is now. At first only three aged black pines and a few patches of moss around the general, tiger, and dragon mounds broke the bare ground. Today a single pine survives and the moss is gone, so the stonework now carries the composition almost alone.

Around the Castle

The garden lies at the foot of the keep and is open without charge. The aerial view, the one its designer cared most about, comes from the top floor of the keep, which charges a modest admission. The keep dates from 1954 and was among the earliest castle reconstructions of postwar Japan. Its three concrete stories replaced an original five-story tower that burned after a lightning strike in 1827.

Kishiwada is best known for the Danjiri Matsuri, the September festival in which teams race massive wooden floats through the streets at full pace. The Danjiri Hall near the castle explains the tradition throughout the year. A short walk away, the villa garden of Gofūsō offers a gentler, more conventional counterpoint to the hard geometry of the Hachijin no Niwa. The castle stands about a ten-minute walk from Kishiwada Station on the Nankai Main Line, or roughly seven minutes from Takojizō Station on the same line.