A Garden Devoted to Enduring Beauty

English translation of the prose

AI-assisted English translation of the prose; quoted poems remain in Japanese. The Japanese original remains authoritative.

Warriors Encountered on the Twenty-fifth “Romantic Poetry Journey,” Organized by Japan Romanticism Academia

A Land of Youthful Gardens Staked on an Immortal Aesthetic

An enduring businessman, unlike warriors fallen into ruin
Seishu Hamano, President of Japan Romanticism Academia

Adachi Zenko is a warrior of the modern age

I met this master of the martial way in an art museum.

Against a backdrop of medieval fortifications, I encountered a solitary lone wolf, his long hair unbound, his penetrating eyes shining. Thinking about this man’s existence brings my own father to mind.

Zenko was born and raised in the countryside outside even the urban area of Yasugi, Shimane Prefecture. The Sino-Japanese War, the upheaval of the Pacific War, and the hardships of the postwar years: after enduring adversity himself, he awakened to beauty and to Japanese painting. With his own fortune alone, he brought this vast garden and museum into being. He lives on even now. Though the body perishes, the heart is eternal, sustained by this beautiful garden. He continues to live like the steel produced in Yasugi.

Yasugi is one of the few places in Japan that produces special steel.

Special steels bear names such as high-speed steel type two or type three and hot-die steel. They are steels used to cut and machine iron, with a purity beyond comparison with iron. Heat and hammer iron as much as you will, it remains iron and cannot possibly match special steel.

That is why tamahagane from this place was once used to mass-produce military swords.

It also became the steel wire running through the fuselages of Zero fighters.

Why was the Zero so strong in aerial combat? When the pilot stamped as hard as possible on a pedal in the cramped cockpit, the steel wire rope transmitted that command faithfully to the tail’s up-and-down flaps. The tail surface sprang upward and held firm against the wind pressure, allowing the aircraft to loop over and settle right behind the enemy plane.

Da-da-da-da… the 7.7-millimeter machine-gun rounds flying out between the propeller blades… I often heard such stories from my father in the air-raid shelter.

Thanks to the Yasugi tamahagane he had bought, my father said, the Zero won every battle.

My father was president of Toa Kiko Co., Ltd., but defeat was pitiful. I remember his sobbing on that August 15 as vividly as if it had happened yesterday.

With those eyes, I came to Yasugi and read the chronology of Adachi Zenko’s achievements in this splendid, air-conditioned museum.

Zenko’s life unquestionably lives in the present.

My father, too, was a patriotic warrior, and I would like to let him live in the present. But there is no longer any chance of revival. It is all long ago now, his shadow hanging in midair.

Yet my father’s final undertaking, known only to me, lay deep in a manganese mine tunnel in the mountains of Gifu: the “phantom imperial residence” he built. As a small child I entered that tunnel.

“We’re going to live here.”

His words made me cry. No, I’m frightened, no, no…

Matsushiro was the decoy, and this was the real place.

Was my father mad to do such a thing?

After the war, when the Space Shuttle was exhibited in Yurakucho, former Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi invited me because of his connection with my father. For some reason the seat beside him was empty, and I sat there. That day, too, is unforgettable. Mr. Kishi, who had asked for the imperial residence to be built, must surely have remembered my father when he invited me. There had been many activities that could not be written in a biography or anywhere else.

But now it is all a phantom.

These experiences of warriors in the early Showa period—the Kato Hayabusa Fighter Squadron, the exploits of Lieutenant Colonel Tachibana and of 江川北川作江—now belong to a realm known only to historians. Mashimo Hisen’s existence, too, remains only in specialists’ memories.

“Sen’yu,” then. It continues with the words ここは御国の何百里　離れて遠き満州の…, so most people would probably think it came from around the time of the Manchurian Incident. In fact, it is from the Russo-Japanese War, and however one reads it, it places friendship above commands issued directly under military rule. Yet no one today would listen to a discussion of the lyricist’s feelings in writing “Hisen” with characters that evoke the homophone “antiwar.” Once things recede far beyond the flow of time, politicians, their feelings, and lyricists’ feelings all become mixed together and fall into the bottomless bog of oblivion.

Yet Adachi Zenko, founder of the Adachi Museum of Art and a man of that same period, has achieved something extraordinary: he remains magnificently embodied in contemporary space. Thinking how remarkable this was, I stood alone in the museum, read his chronology, and recalled the stirrings of the era I had experienced. I could not keep tears from welling up.

The crystallization of conviction, even after the body perishes

This museum is Zenko’s castle, where he lives on through the strength of his spirit. It is a great, impregnable fortress. However many tens of thousands visit its vast Japanese garden each year, not a single arrow or bullet flies. There is no fear of so much as a wound. The phantom castle stands proudly, endlessly unfolding eternity.

This museum understands romance, whose claim to eternity is greater than realism’s. To those of us in the Academia, the Adachi Museum’s great garden appears a supreme treasure of spatial romance without any time limit. I always tell people: “Realist novels cannot tell the whole reality of the human heart.”

The Adachi garden is a perfect example.

Its creator, Adachi Zenko, was a businessman, not someone devoted to intangible pursuits like Basho, Shiki, or Shikibu. Factories, land, buildings, and every kind of artifact—things made by people—were therefore forms of wealth he could pay for and willingly engage with. Zenko ought to have been a realist wholly devoted to immense wealth.

And yet, how delightful.

The garden he created by investing that supremely tangible accumulated wealth is so transcendent that even putting a price on it would be outrageously discourteous. Looking like the immortal Kume, Zenko flung realism aside and transformed his assets into a construction of dreams.

This garden is now a space of beauty itself. Looking at the grouping of red pines, I found a poem coming unbidden to mind.

　　若松も白砂に赤き幹そろえ
　　　　　美学に生きよと我等に諭す　成秋

Letting my thoughts travel back to the Middle Ages, I recall how Ashikaga Yoshimitsu wielded his power as he pleased to build Kinkakuji. The ruler whom the source next names 義光 also left a splendid garden to posterity. Kinkakuji was burned down and transformed into Mishima’s work of the same name, but its garden remains the parting gift of a ruler whose life was brief. It is a rare survival. Still, I cannot shake the feeling that he indulged in beautiful gardens without a thought for the corpses of people starved to death in a time of political unrest, when bandits prowled the capital. One therefore glimpses ugliness within the beauty. It is not the ultimate in eternal beauty. Many artifacts mixing beauty and ugliness in this way also exist in the West.

The Palace of Versailles is a typical example.

Walking through the gardens of Versailles, I felt some anger at rulers’ greed, unashamed of squandering money. In their overbearing quality, so different from the Adachi garden’s eternal beauty, it was ugliness rather than beauty that offended me.

Beauty has evil spirits of beauty that carry ugliness on their backs.

The thinkers living in Concord, Massachusetts, inhabited a world where developers priced woodland space according to its distance from a railway station, or its proximity to tracks along which locomotives charged, belching black smoke. “Nature” of this kind amounts to no more than the distinction between the natural and the artificial.

Thus they were never overwhelmed by the imposing presence of woods and forests.

Unlike Florida’s jungle, Concord’s woods contain no wilderness: they have become a tame, comfortable garden to live in.

Emerson and Thoreau resemble Ton Satomi, Nobuko Yoshiya, and Yasujiro Ozu, who loved gardens and historic sites more than wilderness.

This is quite different from Poe’s mysterious profundity.

Of course, the beauty of that profundity, the comfort of Concord, and 義光’s greed lie outside the connoisseur’s field of vision. Yet I am bewildered if told to appreciate beauty without knowing those things. Even if offered a free viewing of the murderous Nobunaga’s gorgeous Azuchi Castle, I could not conceal my unease. That is the nature of “romantic beauty.”

Does the Adachi garden then possess such mysterious beauty? Its atmosphere is different. It is bright and safe.

Turning my thoughts to film, I encounter another kind of aesthetic vision.

In Rebecca, the dark woods of Manderley, harboring the spirit of the dead, brood in silence. They have something in common with the groaning ancestral resentments projected upon the old mansion in Poe’s House of Usher. There is none of this in Adachi’s beautiful garden. A beautiful garden it may be, but no matter which corner of this vast space one probes, one cannot discern the gloomy sense that the mighty must fall, symbolized by old stone towers. What one sees instead is an innocent youthfulness utterly opposite to the old Adachi’s appearance.

It is the beauty of innocence.

Red pines, moso bamboo, dry landscape: each is youthful and alive. Nothing is uncanny. There is an innocence diametrically opposed to the forest where the three witches plot in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It is a young beauty.

Gassan Toda Castle is Eliot’s Waste Land

The following day I placed myself at Gassan Toda Castle, twenty minutes away by car. Looking down from the little plateau of the main enclosure at its summit, I found myself full of resignation before the impermanence of all things, incapable of approaching the feelings of the Amago family at the height of its power.

　　亡び果てし尼子の城に越し来る
　　　　　我が現身うつしみよこれが終焉　成秋

They say that beauty is short-lived, but what stood at Gassan Toda was a deserted castle abandoned after a bitter, losing war. How pitiful.

The learned explanation of 平原金造, director of the Yasugi City Historical Museum, restored the castle’s dignity. But after five hundred years since its final struggle, under the fierce assault of the Mori family who had once been its subordinates, the place was left entirely to wind and snow. How cruel the elements are. Time has no compassion.

As I climbed, I repeatedly recalled this waka:

　　人住まぬ不破の関屋の板廂
　　　　　荒れにし後はただ秋の風　　藤原良経

I searched with my eyes, wishing that even a wooden castle eave remained. But the god of nature resembled Nobunaga: without mercy, it had confiscated every surviving human artifact.

It left only the place’s bearing. It would not permit even a fragment of a rotted eave to remain hidden there.

Here I could feel a desolate landscape far removed from the living breath of the Adachi Museum. This, too, was certainly natural beauty.

Yet this appearance was utterly at odds with the beauty supposedly won by warriors who triumphed in one battle after another, in sayings such as “Only the brave win the fair.”

When owners perish in war, their gardens too grow ugly with weeds. The Adachi Museum is different. Its garden’s life does not end.

Lord Zenko, magnificent indeed is this tireless aesthetic of yours.

I thought of the Ouchi residence, once proud of being the “Kyoto of the West.”

Now, whatever the season, its garden is cloaked in the desolation of 人こそ見えね秋は来にけり…. However much one tries to wipe it away, it will never wholly disappear.

The estate of Arnheim in Poe’s prose poem has a continuity of mysterious profundity, but little of the “breath of life” present in Adachi’s garden. Strangely, meeting Adachi Zenko face to face, with his appearance like the immortal Kume, I feel in his piercing eyes something more akin to the breath of Frost or Whitman.

Before and during the war, Adachi must have studied the completeness of Japanese gardens. One might say he combined the gardens of Kinkakuji and the Moss Temple with the old pines of Kenroku Park and the stone lanterns of Lord Maeda’s beautiful garden: an ancient form of beauty created by an exceptionally rare modern individual. Alongside it is a gallery exhibiting dozens of Japanese paintings by Yokoyama Taikan and a collection of rosewood tea cabinets ornamented with gold leaf and mother-of-pearl. Yet many visitors may be so overwhelmed by the force of the magnificent garden, the crystallization of Zenko’s thought, that they scarcely feel able to appreciate those exhibits properly.

Zenko is a splendid warrior.

We must not dismiss him simply as a man of conviction.

Nor must we dismiss him as a man full of dreams who amassed an enormous fortune in business.

Zenko is a warrior living by a school of his own.

His chronology says that as a young man, enchanted by Yokoyama Taikan’s paintings, which only the very wealthy could buy, he secretly vowed, “I will buy a Taikan,” though he did not yet have enough money. This resolve resembles that of the first Amago ruler who decided, “Very well, I will become a great lord here.” The Adachi Museum and Gassan Toda Castle are only twenty minutes apart by car. Does breathing the same air produce the same ideas? Certainly not. Their periods and circumstances differed, but Adachi too made up his mind, worked his way up from jobs that had him pedaling a bicycle around Osaka, and achieved great success.

The Amago were guaranteed high office from the start, yet after acquiring immense wealth they perished. Adachi, by contrast, rose from virtually nothing, succeeded spectacularly, and created a pinnacle of beauty envied by the world. Ironically, very close to the modern warrior’s beautiful garden, the Amago expose their almost naked castle ruins to wind and snow. Why did they meet such a miserable downfall?

How the Amago lost Toda Castle

The Amago family began in relatively favorable circumstances. Recognized as retainers of the Sasaki-Kyogoku family, who lived in luxury in the capital, they were dispatched here as military governors. They belonged to the ruling class from the outset. Under the military-governor system, unless the central government held very strong power, controlling governors sent out to the provinces was difficult. Since the Kamakura period, warrior groups had acted according to the size of their rewards, so the Amago’s ready betrayal of the Kyogoku in the age of civil war might be seen as a natural development.

Yet the later struggles among warrior groups involved not only military strategy but rampant intrigue, schemes, and treacherous attacks. Ordinary peasants, usually tilling fields, were constantly summoned as low-ranking retainers and made to kill one another. This relationship of status is hardly praiseworthy.

A common view holds that the Amago treated ordinary people warmly. But Mori Motonari, himself skilled in political stratagems, also sheltered thousands of peasant families in his small Yoshida-Koriyama castle when attacked by the Amago, feeding and comforting them with warm meals. When the Amago forces encamped nearby were nearly frozen to death by winter and began retreating, he had the peasants attack their rear guard, the weakened troops at the very back. In other words, repayment of his “kindness” was taken for granted.

Winning over peasants as lower-ranking warrior groups was a standard technique. Nobunaga’s free markets and guilds, Shingen’s embankment works, and the philosophy 人は石垣、人は城—people as the stone walls and the castle—belong to this category. Hideyoshi and Ieyasu likewise made extensive use of peasants in becoming rulers of the realm. In the Amago case, too, Gassan Toda’s construction and defenses depended on lower-ranking troops risking their lives, which is hardly a method one can praise without reservation.

Motonari diversified the Mori forces by having two sons adopted into the Kikkawa and Kobayakawa spheres of power. Through intrigue, he set the vast Ouchi and Amago armies against each other. Once both were exhausted, he profited from their struggle and succeeded in expanding his own power alone. With that strength he attacked Toda Castle and, through scheme after scheme, induced the besieged Amago forces to defect. In the end, it is said, only a hundred and fifty men remained in this vast castle. The Mori were bad enough, but the Amago, unable to keep their subordinates from betraying and abandoning them, were pitiful too.

Thus the struggle for power ends on a road to oblivion.

In the medieval world, where the family name came first, countless castles appeared and countless wars continued, yet very few of those family names survived. In contrast, in an individualistic age—perhaps it is going too far to call it full of egoists—when respect for ancestors has diminished, the Adachi Museum’s magnificent achievement in bringing forth a garden worthy of being handed down to later generations is remarkable. It is a miracle. I cannot help praying for its good fortune and for the enduring life of what it has brought into being. (End)