I chose five temples in Kamakura city, and mentioned about the historic backgrounds of the time those gardens were constructed. I especially emphasize the unique topographies, emergence of samurai, and Zen. As the first step, I refer to documents about the construction of the garden, and consider of them with the civil engineering point of view.
As a result, the following points were made clear. One is that the Kencho-ji temple had realized the garden that was contrary to the main-stream methods of that period. They had managed to create several viewing-points in the narrow site. The other is that we can find several aspects between Kamakura garden and contemporary Kyoto garden such as “karesansui.” And, finally, the Kencho-ji garden is the first example where the concept of classification of the space was applied, which was already common in architecture.
I had tried to capture the general ideas of how the conceptual aspects of Japanese zen garden was imported from China in this essay.
