Imperial Garden Visit: Shagakuin Imperial Villa and Katsura Imperial Villa

november 11, 2005

short story: this imperial villa was commissioned by retired emperor gomizuno-o. a palace was built for his eighth daughter on the grounds, but after the emperor died she became an nun and established her palace as a temple. to preserve it's scenic beauty approximately 19 acres of paddy fields and farmland surround the three main area comprising the villa.

the upper villa really impressed me. they played games with the landscape so that paths and certain features remain hidden until you cross them. for example, a lot of the paths are set into the ground or hidden behind berms so that they aren't seen. also, to create the pond, a mountain stream was dammed. the dam is cleverly concealed behind a huge berm of earth covered with trees and various other plants. so this seemingly natural landscape is actually very carefully calculated. pretty cool huh?

view of the pond, created by the dammed mountain stream

this bridge was a present to the emperor. the emperor thought this gift was to extravegant so he told the guy who make it to kill himself, the guy did, but he kept the bridge anyways.

it's also really peaceful, it kinda made me want to sit down and just kinda think about my project, but the guys running the show over here had a very strict timeline that we had to follow. our tour guide seemed like he didn't even want to conduct the tour. whatever, i took my time and tried to enjoy it. but it was kinda hard to enjoy it though.

i was the group leader for these tours so i had to coordinate getting there and all of that other crap. in my group was dave, korina and our instructor greg. well the day before we went to osaka and as i was leaving the subway train my instructor yells out something, "blah blah blah" i turn my head and all confused go "uhhh yeah!" so the next day we're outside of the villa waiting for out 10am appointment. 9:55 rolls around and our instructor isn't there. we go in and ask the guard to watch out for an older gentleman who might be coming late. after a 10 minute video, we start the tour and we stop by the entrance to look for him and he's not there. the guard in front crosses his arms and says that even if he does come, theyr'e not going to let him in. so the three of us go in and we're all worried that something happened to him. anyways so we finish the tour and head to the next place, only after eating at this delicious bakery where i had this bacon wrapped tomato topped with melted parmesean and mozerella cheese. it was SOOO GOOD!!!

view of nishihama, the west seashore.

katsura imperial villa

so we get to the next garden (katsura) after getting lost and me losing my patience (but that's another story in itself...) and we see our instructor. apparently what he had said to me was that he wanted to confirm that katsura garden was first and not shigakuin. and i yell "uhh yeah" so he assumed that we were meeting there first. WHOOPS! my bad... but it was cool b/c he had seen the garden before and he went off to go practice his japanese while he waited for us to show up.

don't have too many pics for this place b/c i ran out of batteries.