Of the hundreds of public Japanese-style gardens built outside Japan over the past century, most claim to be “authentic Japanese gardens.” This rhetoric persists despite the numerous differences between these gardens and premodern gardens in Japan in terms of design elements and plant materials as well as patronage and function. Even if one could perfectly replicate a Japanese garden, as was done in the copy of the stone garden at Ryoanji at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in the early 1960s, the gardens outside Japan exist within almost entirely different cultural contexts and are usually put to very different uses.

Given that Japanese-style gardens—that is to say gardens built outside of Japan but using Japanese idioms—exist in large numbers, in virtually every part of the world, and have a history stretching well over one hundred years, we would do well to think of these gardens as constituting a separate category from that of premodern gardens in Japan. Japanese-style gardens are different from Japanese gardens: they are self-consciously foreign and exotic and their goal is to replicate something existing in a different time and space. While Japanese-style gardens are “about” being Japanese, gardens in Japan serve various functions including the representation of religious paradises, the suggestion of famous locales, and the elucidation of Confucian precepts.

Of course there are some underlying similarities, although these are usually played down or ignored in the rhetoric of Japanese-style gardens and in most writing on Japanese gardens. These resemblances include the garden as a symbol of cultural sophistication, as a location for cultural role-playing and temporary transformation, or as a place that offers escape from and thus implies criticism of the dominant social order and cultural forms. To admit these deep functions of gardens would be to admit that they are fully cultural and, in the broadest sense, political creations that serve as barometers of the patrons and societies which created them. Instead, however, most writers on Japanese-style- and Japanese gardens prefer the fantasy of the garden as a pure space of spiritual retreat and rejuvenation.

Once we make the break to a new paradigm and think of Japanese-style gardens in America, for instance, as part of American landscape history, then these gardens become richer, fully three-dimensional, and more revelatory of their true histories and meanings. Japanese-style gardens are literally and figuratively constructions of Japan and as such they tell us about how Americans have wanted to see Japan. Because many of these gardens were built by the Japanese, they also tell us how the Japanese have wanted to be seen abroad. Surely Japanese-style gardens are more compelling on these terms than as generic symbols of the ostensible Japanese “love of nature.”

It is also important to recognize Japanese-style gardens as components of modern Western garden history, because this status directly affects the inevitable question of restoration versus renovation. Gardens are fragile, living entities, and as such they require constant maintenance. In the absence of such maintenance, gardens deteriorate after a number of years, requiring major changes. Because Japanese-style gardens are not recognized as having any value apart from their role as replicas, the decision is usually made to renovate (alter) in order to render them more authentic, more like the essentialized and dehistoricized generic “Japanese garden” discussed in innumerable popular books.

When we understand Japanese-style gardens in their proper historical context, it makes sense to restore at least some representative examples or those with unique historical value. The Japanese garden at Hillwood, although far from authentic, is one such historically important Japanese-style garden. First, it is a wonderful example of a postwar garden built on an American estate. Second, it is the best extant garden by Shogo Myaida, who firmly believed that Japanese garden aesthetics and functions had to be modified in modern America, and who strove to create American Japanese gardens. It is precisely the idiosyncrasies—the “inauthenticities”—of the Hillwood garden that make it historically important as a Japanese-style garden and that reflect the values of its famous patron and important designer.

Kendall H. Brown is Assistant Professor of Asian Art History, California State University, Long Beach, and author of Japanese-style Gardens of the Pacific West Coast (Rizzoli, 1999).