[in Japanese]

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Classification of Japanese Gardens from Forms of Garden-Making
There are no Formal Gardens in Japan in the strict sense of the term, because Japanese gardens make it their keynote to reproduce Nature. In Nature we find no such scenery as composed by geometrical disposition of straight lines or curves which go to the making of Formal Gardens. Further, Japanese gardens which we make a point of harmonizing with their environs, are not to be isolated from their surroundings by encompassing them with tall quicksets or walls as in the cases of Formal Gardens.
Shapely mounds in Japanese landscape gardens are the artistic replica of natural mountains and hills reproduced in the limited space of gardens through the artistic genius of each gardenmaker. Garden ponds should also be likened to lakes and oceans created under the same artistic conceptions. Thus, the Nature as represented in Japanese gardens is not Nature itself, but what has been artistically reproduced through processes of spiritual refinement within human brains.
Some of Japanese garden artists were not content with their faithful representation of Nature in their creative works, , but advanced further from this rather commonplace art when they conceived the idea of reproducing Nature with as spare use as possible of the materials and methods which had been considered necessary for garden making. This is how these ingenious old Japanese masters have hit, upon the delightful art of conveying the ideas of water-falls, streams, lakes and seas without the aid of any actual water. This is what the Japanese people are so proud of as their unique “Kare Sansui” or Hortus Siccus (Literallydry landscape; in this case meaning quaint landscape imagery).
Love of simplicity has been a distinguished trait of our ancestors. Alike in literature, music and other branches of Japanese fine arts, they have always preferred mellow simplicity to gorgeous intricacy. This predominant love of simplicity may be observed in the quietude of the Japanese dancing, importance of “Ma” or moments of stillness introduced between resonant sounds in Japanese music, and extreme omission of touches in Japanese “Black and white” painting which leaves the greater part of pictures in pregnant whiteness.
To give an instance, if a branch of cherry flowers is to be represented either by faithful and exhaustive descriptions or by chaste drawing in black and white, the latter would be decidedly the favorite for any Japanese of the refined sort.
The Zen sect of Buddhism preaches that all descriptions whether verbal, written, pictorial or plastic, are subject to limitations. When you say or write “One”, there you are bound to that One and cannot change it into “Two”, but imagination can conceive the immense infinity between the maximum and the minimum, the sect concludes.
However cleverly you might represent Nature in your pictures, all the drawings of cherry flowers are after all the same, in that they are nothing more than the medium by which the spectators are reminded of the idea of cherry flowers. if you might represent cherry flowers without making such elaborate descriptions and the spectators could imagine the flowers all the same from your slight artistic touches, it would also be quite a sensible method of pictorial representation. it might be as well for a painter to be able to describe cherry flowers in his picture without taking the trouble of bedaubing the canvas with colours.
This is at least one of the purposes of the Monochrome painting in Nippon. Consequently the merit of the painter of this school depends upon his skill of representing simply and artistically what he conceives of cherry flowers. On the other hand, any connoisseur who can appreciate this fundamental concept, will readily understand the pictures of this sort from the few touches of the brush on the expressive sea of whiteness.

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