The Manyo Garden found in Nara's Kasuga Taisha shrine was opened at the end of 1932 as a popular tourist spot. A botanist by the name of Honda Seiroku envisaged a recreational botanical garden to utilize the land set aside for the Nara Imperial Villa in Nara Park towards the end of the Meiji period. In 1927, a proposal was forwarded to create the Manyo Garden. However, it wasn't until a scholar of Japanese literature, Sasaki Nobutsuna, formed an organization to champion the idea of establishing the Manyo Gardens that the project was set in motion. Donations were collected, and the gardens were designed by the Osaka city planner, Oya Reijo. Oya referred to the Shinsenen garden in Kyoto and Poseokjeong,the rock garden found in Gyeongju in Korea. This was rather surprising considering the gardens were being named after the Manyoshu, the anthology of poems representative of the culture of the Tempyo era. Furthermore, although the plants found in the garden were supposedly the same varieties mentioned in the poems of the Manyoshu, many were in fact not planted in gardens during the Nara period. Thus, although called the Manyo Garden, there were many aspects that were far removed from Temyo era culture, and its promotion as a tourist destination was relatively short lived.
