Tokyo's Special Place of Scenic Spots - Rikugien Gardens

🏡🏘️Ryugien Garden is a Tokyo metropolitan garden located at 6-chome, Honkomagome, Bunkyo-ku. As one of the daimyo gardens in the city, it is very representative in Tokyo and even in the whole country, so it is designated as a national special place of scenic beauty. 🏯⛩️Rikugien Gardens is a "wandering mountain and spring water garden" in Japanese gardens. The area now called Komagome was once a wilderness before the garden was built. The garden was built in the middle of the Edo period. Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu, a close attendant of the fifth shogun of the Edo shogunate, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, acquired the land from Tsunayoshi and personally designed and directed the construction of the entire garden, including the mansion, over a period of seven years. ⛩️⛩️The garden site is connected to Musashino. It was originally a vast wilderness area with many trees, abundant water resources and excellent conditions for gardening. During the heyday of the Genroku culture, Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu utilized the concept of "villa garden" and based on Yoshiyasu's own interests, built mountains, dug ponds, and diverted water on the wide and flat land of the Hongo Plateau, imitating the beautiful scenery of Wakaura in Kishu. At the same time, he selected famous scenic spots from the "Manyoshu" and "Kokin Wakashu", and finally created the 88 scenes in Rikugien. Compared to the gardens before this time, such as the "Shinden-zukuri" of the Heian period, the "Shoin-zukuri" of the Muromachi period, and the "karesansui" of Zen Buddhism, the Rikugien Gardens are completely different. 🥷🏻🥷🏻——Yoshiyasu Yanagisawa created a "wandering mountain and spring water garden" belonging to the Edo period. 🏯🏯"Liuyi Garden" is named after the six principles in the ancient Chinese poetry collection "The Book of Songs": Feng, Ya, Song, Fu, Bi, and Xing. It is pronounced "Mukusano-sono" in Japanese, and later changed to the Japanese kanji Liuyi Garden (written as "六义园" in Japanese), and the meaning is the same as the original. 🏯In the Meiji era, it was purchased by Yataro Iwasaki, the founder of the Mitsubishi Group, as private property, and then donated to the city of Tokyo. It is now open to the public as a Tokyo Metropolitan Garden. 🏯Compared with the "Complete Map of Yanagisawa-no-Ryugi-en" which was said to have been painted by the Kano school painters in the late Genroku period, the most significant difference between today's garden and the one after it was completed is that there was originally a pond on the east and west sides, but now only the pond on the east side remains. Today, the size of the Rikugi Gardens has been reduced by about one-third compared to the more intact periods in its history, but the more important parts have been preserved. With the arrival of spring, the weeping cherry trees are half-bloomed. Today, the Rikugi Gardens are a place to calm your mind in the busy city, and to experience the leisurely and leisurely environment of the past and present.