Turning Gardens in Japan into Japanese Gardens

Nation, Nature, Heritage, and Modernity since the 1890s

9789048563791

246 pages

Amsterdam University Press

Hardback $136.00

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Overview

In the mid nineteenth century, as Japan rapidly modernized, garden building declined in popularity. Only in the late nineteenth century did a new class of political and business leaders revive interest in horticulture, seeking garden designs that broke away from established patterns. As a result, these innovative gardens were largely overlooked by early Japanese garden historians and excluded from the canon they sought to establish.
In recent years, both scholars and the public have begun to reexamine and appreciate these gardens and their creators. Now recognized as part of Japan’s national heritage, these sites are being integrated into the history of Japanese horticulture. Christian Tagsold’s book examines this rediscovery, unraveling the complex dynamics of nature, heritage, nationhood, and modernity in Japan through the lens of these gardens.

Author Bio

Christian Tagsold is a Professor and Researcher in the Department of Modern Japanese Studies at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany. Since 2006, he has focused his research on Japanese gardens in Japan, Europe, and the United States. His habilitation thesis on the influence of Japanese gardens in the West earned him the JaDe Award from the Foundation for the Promotion of Japanese-German Scientific and Cultural Relations in 2012. His book, Spaces in Translation: Japanese Gardens and the West (Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), received the 2019 Abbott Lowell Cummings Prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum. His further research interests include sports and the Olympics in Japan and the Japanese diaspora in Europe.