Abstract
Yataro Iwasaki founded the Mitsubishi Group, which has been the biggest business group in Japan for these past 100 years. His younger brother Yanosuke, Yataro's son Hisaya and Yanosuke's son Koyata in this order succeeded Yataro as the leader of the Mitsubishi Group. These four men of the Iwasaki Family built many gardens, and this research examines eleven of the Iwasaki gardens made in the period between early Meiji Era and early Showa Era (1877-1935) and the development in the designs of these gardens.
After the long seclusion period in the Edo Era, western culture was eagerly introduced in Japan and western-style buildings, clothes and foods became popular in the Meiji Era. Each of Yataro, Yanosuke, Hisaya and Koyata had extensive exposure to western culture: Yataro's business involved trading with western merchants and he stayed in Nagasaki and Yokohama where many western people lived in western-style buildings; and Yanosuke, Hisaya and Koyata had experience living in the United States or England. Nevertheless, the designs of the earlier Iwasaki gardens had similarities to the Daimyo gardens of the Edo Era. In the later half of the Meiji Era (1889-1912), even when the Iwasaki Family constructed western-style houses designed by Josiah Conder, an English architect, however, most of the Iwasaki gardens around these houses were not western-style gardens but remained in the Japanese style. The only western-style garden was made at Yanosuke's house in Takanawa built in 1908.
After the end of the Meiji Era, the taste of the Iwasaki Family favored a new type of Japanese gardens, which are the gardens designed by the famous gardener Jihei Ogawa and the Choukinso garden in the Koiwai Farm. The gardens of Hisaya and Koyata abandoned the Daimyo style and the western-style, both of which were adopted with the likely intention of showing the Iwasaki Family's power and wealth to raise the public's estimation of the Iwasaki Family and Mitsubishi. Hisaya and Koyata began to seek gardens for personal pleasure and chose a new type of Japanese gardens. Those new gardens were composed of Japanese-style elements in the designs of ponds, streams, stepping-stones and plants. Although these gardens used Japanese elements, these gardens could be described as "new" Japanese gardens because they were not bound by traditional expressions often seen in previous Japanese gardens such as symbolisms, religious meanings or views sourced from Japanese poem (tanka) or noted places. The new designs emphasized components of nature selected by the owner and reflecting the owner's individuality and sense of value. For example, Hisaya liked mountains and farmland while Koyata liked haiku and tea ceremony - these elements played the main roles in their new Japanese gardens. This transformation in the garden designs seems to be a derivative of the idea of "individualism" introduced at the end of the Meiji Era.
The sequence of the eleven gardens of the Iwasaki Family shows us the development of Japanese garden culture from the Meiji Era to early Showa Era. Facing the flood of western culture in the Meiji Era, Japanese gardens were not ruined but were restructured to a new type of Japanese gardens to reflect the idea of "individualism" after the end of the Meiji Era.
