Japan: Gardens of Tokyo

Among the buildings of Toyko is a series of gardens for the 12 million residents, says Carl Thompson.

With greenery accounting for just 14 per cent of Tokyo's sprawling surface area - far less than the figure for London, New York or Berlin - it hardly sounds like the place to go looking for traditional Japanese gardens. As I am to learn, however, cherished examples of all four types are tucked away in some surprising corners of the capital. In a city of 12 million inhabitants, many of whom live in densely packed apartments, these act as "public gardens" in the truest sense.

Gardens have always been taken seriously in Japan: Rikugien, a walled tsukiyama "stroll garden" in a quiet suburb of northern Tokyo, took seven years just to design. To step under the ancient weeping cherry tree at the gate is to step back to 1702, the year the garden was completed. Seemingly aimless pathways connect complex little panoramas that unfold with every step. If some of them seem familiar, they're meant to: the "garden of the six poetic principles" recreates classic landscapes taken from 31-syllable waka poems in miniature. A hilly island turns out to be a scaled-down version of a mountain range near Mount Fuji; a bridge comprising two stone slabs balanced on a boulder represents the passage of the moon.

Koishikawa-korakuen, an Edo-period garden of the same type, also brings distant vistas to the centre of town; the main pond is modelled on Lake Seiko, in China. The moon appears again, submerged in the perfect reflection of a curving stone bridge built by a Confucian scholar. This time, though, any sense of being transported back to a bygone age is shattered by regular volleys of screams from the vast roller-coaster that loops incongruously over Tokyo's oldest garden.

More peaceful by far is the relatively young Kiyosumi garden, inaugurated in 1932 close to the Sumida river. On a dazzling winter's day, fleets of pintail and Mandarin ducks pick their way between the three tiny islets of the central pond, as fattened orange carp wriggle below the drifting ice. The garden itself looks a little washed out at this time of year, with only narcissus, camellia and Japanese apricot bearing up against the frost. None the less, the scene is a blaze of colour: I happen to be here on Coming-of-Age Day, the annual celebration of passage into adulthood, and the place is full of 20-year-olds in silk kimonos, posing for photos in what is, for my money, the prettiest corner of the capital.

Having been transported to faraway places in the confines of the stroll gardens, a journey of another kind - one of introspection - awaits across town at Happoen. The name of this chaniwa "tea garden" means "beautiful from any angle", and standing by the stately 13-tiered pagoda at the entrance, sturdy enough to have withstood the great earthquake of 1923, it's easy to see why. A gravelled path slopes through the spacious soto-roji (outer garden) past bonsai specimens tended for 500 years before cutting into the dense uchi-roji (inner garden). Here, the trail turns tightly past evergreens symbolising eternal peace, a crumbling stone lantern carved by a long-dead Heike warrior and a stepped waterfall - elements designed to instil the spirit of wabi (oneness with nature) before you arrive at the cedarwood teahouse. Since it's full with another party of young adults, I skip the ritual of the tea ceremony in favour of another product of the Zen tradition: the dry-landscape garden.

Often attached to Zen temples, minimalist karesansui "dry" gardens are places to sit and meditate, not to wander. An otherworldly example of this third category of garden, located amid the extensive grounds of the Hotel New Otani, overturns all my preconceptions of what a garden should be. With all distracting sound, movement and colour stripped away - trees, flowers and water are absent - it resembles a giant riddle. Nature, I decide, is represented in the sparse elements of stone, gravel and open space. The fine white gravel (raked into straight bars, wavy lines and concentric circles) reminds me of water; the largest of the reddish-brown rocks, excavated from the goldmines of Sado island, weighs 22 tons and could be a mountain. But in the distracting shadow of a 1,600-room hotel with 36 restaurants and bars, and with hundreds of wedding-reception guests milling around, my contemplations don't get much deeper than this.

For a little spiritual guidance I turn to Shunmyo Masuno, the head priest of the Kenkoji temple, responsible for a similar Zen garden on the fourth-floor terrace of the Canadian Embassy. This time, small gravel pyramids give way to stepping stones that thread between flat granite boulders before ending at a large split rock. "The garden is like a picture, framed for the viewer from inside the building," Masuno-san says. "I consider balance in deciding the size and texture of rocks and where to place them."

When you know what you're looking for, there is, indeed, great balance in the way the monochrome elements of the garden match the stark concrete and glass of the modern building in which it is housed. So is my interpretation of oceans and mountains correct? Not really. "This garden was designed to inspire visitors and embassy staff to consider what they should do for Canada-Japan relations."

Understanding Zen messages like this, I now see, takes years of devoted contemplation.

Without that amount of time on my hands, I take a more direct route to enlightenment: a 40-minute train ride south to the village of Kanazawa-bunko, where I'm hoping to find a rare type of garden.

Speeding through the heavily built-up suburbs, I'm reminded of the need for breathing space between the city's buildings. One recent answer has been to place gardens on top of them: as well as cutting heating and cooling costs for the structure below, roof gardens are helping to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A 2001 law decreed that all new medium-sized buildings in central Tokyo must dedicate at least 20 per cent of the roof space to a garden. Since then, a number of ingenious architects have given the concept an imaginative twist: the split-level garden on top of the Suntory Concert Hall is criss-crossed with paths in the shape of a Union Jack; there's even a small rice paddy on top of the Virgin cinema in the Roppongi Hills complex.

Finally, I reach the temple of Shomyoji, the centrepiece of a jodo teien "paradise garden" first laid out in 1319. Gardens such as this sprang up in the 9th century to evoke the Shingon Buddhist ideal of the Pure Land. This remains a place of worship, with a kind of symmetry and serenity missing in other garden types. A graceful vermilion bridge draws the eye across a lake tinted red in the evening sun to a prayer hall on the opposite shore. The wooded hill behind, actually outside the garden, is "borrowed landscape" used to frame the scene. As the setting sun passes down a precise line dissecting the hill, you don't need to be a master of Zen to see that this was meant to be, quite literally, heaven on earth.