Sokoji Temple Garden

A Garden Kept Out of Sight Behind a Zen Hall

At Sōkōji, the garden does not greet you at the gate. The approach is lined instead with rows of cedars clipped into rounded, mushroom-like crowns, and once you pass through the gatehouse the main hall stands squarely in the way. The garden, named Hōraien, lies behind the hall and the priests' quarters. You see it only after you reach the shoin reception room, where the view opens eastward. Japan's national government designated this garden a Place of Scenic Beauty (meishō) on 29 March 1996.

Sōkōji sits in the Matsuyama district of Sakata, a city on the Sea of Japan coast in Yamagata Prefecture. The temple occupies the western foot of a wooded ridge, roughly 12 kilometres up the Mogami River from the centre of Sakata. Its full name is Tōrōzan Sōkōji, and it belongs to the Sōtō school of Zen Buddhism.

Hōraien is a hill-and-pond garden built to be looked at from a fixed seat rather than walked through first. From the shoin room of the kuri, the building where the priests live, a visitor faces due east. The composition climbs from a pond in the foreground to a waterfall set high on the left, with the forested mountain slope rising behind it.

From a Hermitage on the Peak to a Castle-Town Temple

Temple records place the founding in 1384. A senior monk named Geppan Ryōen travelled from Eitokuji, a temple in Mutsu Province in what is now Iwate, and enshrined a single image of Yakushi, the Buddha of healing, on the peak above the present site. The lord credited with establishing the temple proper was Satō Masanobu. Family tradition, drawing on the medieval war epic The Tale of the Heike, holds that a Satō ancestor died at the Battle of Yashima after taking an arrow meant for the warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune.

Fire and warfare destroyed and rebuilt the temple more than once over the following centuries. The settled period came under the Edo shogunate, when Sōkōji was protected by the Sakai family, rulers of the Matsuyama branch of the larger Shōnai domain. Matsuyama grew as their castle town, and traces of that role still show in the parks and school grounds at its centre.

Almost everything a visitor sees today dates from a single rebuilding campaign. A fire in 1756 cleared the precinct, and the reconstruction that followed produced the garden along with the buildings around it. The main hall, called Rurikō-den, and the adjoining kuri were finished in 1761. The gatehouse was rebuilt in 1811 and is now a registered cultural property of the city of Sakata. The garden itself is understood to be a work of the later Edo period.

Why the Garden Was Recognised as a Place of Scenic Beauty

The national designation rests on two ideas. The first is that Hōraien is an unusually complete example of the kind of garden that Japanese designers had perfected by the close of the Edo period. The waterfall and stream on the upper left, a bold rock-built hill at the centre, a gentler hill on the right, and a pond held by a low stone shoreline are fitted together with care. The garden never turns showy. It keeps the restraint expected of a Zen temple, and that balance of skill and reserve is what the designation singles out as exceptional.

The second idea concerns the view beyond the garden wall. Far up the slope, framed between old fir and pine, stands a small hall dedicated to Yakushi at the summit of the peak. The garden was laid out to draw that distant hall into its own picture. This use of borrowed scenery (shakkei) means the designed space and the natural mountain read as one image, and in autumn the colour of the broadleaf forest completes it.

For these reasons the protected area was drawn widely. It covers not only the garden but the precinct that shares its beauty, the temple-owned woodland, and both the summit hall and a second Yakushi hall partway up the climb.

Reading the Garden Stone by Stone

Sit in the shoin room and the design explains itself from left to right. The uppermost waterfall is built from a slab of stone about 1.5 metres high and a little over a metre wide. Water falls, catches on a ledge, then bends in a sharp zigzag through one or two small drops before becoming a paved stream of laid stone. A second, smaller waterfall arrangement carries it on, and two low steps finally feed it into the pond.

In the pond, directly in front of the room, lies a flat central island. Larger stones set at its north and south ends give it the look of a turtle-island, a long-standing motif of long life. Step down into the garden and you can cross to the island over five round millstones laid as stepping stones in the shallows. A single slab of stone bridges the narrow gap between the island and the far bank.

Beyond that bank the garden becomes a path to walk. Stepping stones scatter up the slope toward a small grassy clearing behind the central hill. A natural stone lantern and an aged cherry tree stand along the way. The route is a circuit: it loops back past the middle reach of the stream, crossed here by a stone bridge, and joins the short trail to the founder's memorial.

That memorial, the kaisan-tō, is a stone pagoda about two metres tall, raised in 1732. Its inscription names Geppan Ryōen, the founding monk. From here the climb continues to the mid-slope Yakushi hall and then, by a steep path through broadleaf forest, to the hall on the summit. The peak stands roughly 150 metres above the garden.

The Mushroom Cedars and the View from the Summit

Long before the garden, most visitors notice the cedars. About 120 of them line the roughly 100-metre approach, each trained over generations into a rounded crown that sits on a bare trunk like a cap on a stalk. They are said to have been planted in the Genna era, between 1615 and 1623, and successive head priests shaped them by hand into the form seen now. Local people call them kinoko-sugi, the mushroom cedars, and Yamagata Prefecture protects them as a natural monument.

The climb to the summit rewards the effort. From the platform in front of the peak hall, the view runs to Mount Chōkai in the north and Mount Gassan in the south, while below to the west the Mogami River winds across the Shōnai plain toward the sea. The temple treats this spot as its inner sanctuary and a noted place to photograph the river.

Visiting and the Surrounding Area

Hōraien is best seen first from inside the shoin room, where the garden sits framed like a hanging picture, and then on foot along the circuit path. The temple serves matcha with a seasonal sweet, and the room overlooking the garden is a quiet place to pause. The water of the stream is audible from the building, which is part of why the temple also offers seated meditation here.

The garden is open from spring through late November and closes through the winter months, so it is worth checking the temple's current notices before a trip. The Matsuyama area itself repays a longer stay. The former castle town keeps its old layout, and the local cultural museum stands a short walk away. The wooded heights nearby, known for a sweeping outlook over the Sea of Japan, are a recognised spot for night views.