“Katsura is far beyond all expectations and is misread, misrepresented in practically every coverage of it—so I shall do it again and contribute to the damage that publicity has brought to Japanese architecture, for all photographs lie to a degree unique, I think, to Japanese architecture. Its scale is so different from what you expect, and the arrangement so different from the photograph, that only misrepresentation is possible, and that goes for the theories as well.”¹

“[No] description, photograph, film, can convey anything of its effect. […] More than any other building in Japan, it demonstrates the sense of refinement, of restraint, of severity, of melancholy, of simplicity that Japanese taste can achieve. […] That is why I advise young Japanese architects to forget about Katsura. Like the Golden Pavilion, it can be an albatross to the development of new tradition.

Katsura is not a single building and cannot be seen as such. It is a complex, almost more of a story than a building, since it really is an adventure through a landscape that consists of several buildings—tea-houses, pavilions, and palaces—set in a garden. Here the fusion between building and garden is a unity unsurpassed elsewhere. The building without the garden would be nothing; the garden without the buildings—nothing. Together, they achieve the most poetic statement ever to be made, I think, in the [built environment].

I have been three times to Katsura, the first on the usual tour, the others on Saturday afternoons alone, which required special permission. I hope to go several times again on my return in September, for each time it reveals a little more of itself—a little of its mystery is unveiled bit by bit in an all too Japanese way. It’s difficult when you fall in love with a building. A human can respond and the adventure can develop or deteriorate but a building [is] cold face to your infatuation!

And why is it so haunting? I don’t know. Certainly the poverty is pretentious; the elimination of every embellishment is so carefully planned so that nothing can distract you from its essence. And the essence is the most elusive in the world. It is not in the building itself, but somewhere between the building and the garden and defies definition.”²

“[In Kyoto, our] futons were brought into the beautiful room which opened at either end through the shôji onto a garden. The gold quilts were almost weightless. One awoke in the morning with a soft light diffusing through the shôji […] and shuffled in the slippers used on the black boards of the corridors to the bathroom where we changed into wooden clogs. […] After tea on the porch, breakfast was taken in the main room, the Tessai changed and [gave us] a tour of the living quarters. A new wing, or rather gallery, connected the guest quarters with the Bishop’s rooms: a small tea room displaying the ten accessories made and used by Tessai. Here we sat for some time discussing the difference between the Japanese approach to building and our own, best studied in the tea room: the interlocking space, or spiral (the yin-yang figure) so prominent in [Frank Lloyd] Wright’s way of planning, the extraordinary subtlety of colour, the extremely subtle balancing of structural members, windows (never the same size or shape on different walls), and surfaces that can seem precious but exquisite when carried off. The connecting gallery did not connect directly, for instance, but descended in a ramp at an angle to the tea house and rose again to the Bishop’s rooms; the windows along it varied and the opening sash were beautifully detailed large sliding glass doors.”¹

“As I probably have mentioned before, […] whereas Chinese ideas intrigued me at first, in Japan now they seem only curious. This applies particularly to the roofs, which in Japan were originally thatch or shingle. The temples introduced tile: first green as in China and then the black natural clay of the smoke ovens. These eventually became cheaper than thatch or shingles, and more importantly, [were] fire-proof, so that all roofs are ordered to be in tile. Somehow, although this provides a pleasant texture to the street, […] the subtlety of curvature that is the achievement of the Japanese in the roofs is not possible—or rather, [it] is not effective with the coarse texture of the tile. What the origin of the lifting corners of the roof is I do not know, but it is surprising to see how closely it corresponds to the lift at the end of a pine branch, and how closely it harmonizes with the forest because of this. Again the Japanese seem to attenuate it to the curve of growth. Kyomizaderu, on its ledge on a hillside, is an especially good example of the vitality of this curve: the concentration on [the] simple line, strongly stated, is well shown in this roof. From here [roofs] range from the superb octagonal roof of Koryuji […] to Kinhakiji, to the bridge of Shujahuin, to Katsura, to the extreme of the dramatic and evocative roof of the Hiunkaku, which had been part of the Joraku palace of Hidegoshi. The roof attains a maximum dramatic effect—and I am sure [this was] a profound influence on Wright, for there are glimmerings of his cantilever here.”¹

“We turned off the highway, went down a lane and stopped before an unassuming gate of lashed bamboo. Then the magic began. There was a cool forest path through the gate, freshly sprayed with water so that leaves and stepping stones glistened. Although it seemed much longer, the path continued not more than fifteen feet before it branched left and right at a composition of stones and a lantern: the right over a bridge and dry river bed to the tea house hidden in maples, the left through a grove of bamboo each emerging starkly from the packed earth. Each part of the garden was a separate passage—but a long enough passage—or seemingly so that the garden didn’t seem in the least artificial or complicated.

When seated, the shôji were opened and another world of garden spread through maples and pines to a seemingly endless forest glade. As with so many houses, the sky was completely out and concentration was on the ground lit by a filtered sky light. On the ground was a wild garden, but each tiny twig of bamboo or azalea carefully and inconspicuously pruned. A corner of the pool could be seen under the foliage and part of a stone bridge where, when we visited this later, a vista suddenly opened up across to the roofs of neighboring houses.”¹

“Yesterday I visited the Hirozumi Park in an unpleasant part of the city—one of the reiji gardens—it was an extremely handsome pond garden. A sense of great distance is achieved in the garden by the pruning of the large trees so that they are reduced to half their natural size or at least seem to be twice as big and old as they are. They have an arrangement of the foliage so that the somber greyed tones of green remain in the background and the brighter greens are brought to the front. It is remarkable how the experience of great distance and even great height (as on an escarpment over the water when only about 4-feet high) is conveyed by reference to and reminiscence of the natural situation.

Here at International House there is another such garden piled-up verticality in a very narrow space (once of Mitsubishi), which, seen from the ground, takes on the element of distance and with its niche, the old clipped pines, the small but illusively majestic maples the stone temple - an air of peace - but that as at Hirozumi. The structure of the city and its frenetic noises make it too, seem out of place. At this point the gardens seem rather wistful reminders of more elegant times—without reality at the moment.”¹

“Daitokuji is the most complex of temples. […] The stones of the garden [are] starkly placed in the white sand–strangely animated at night. The Hojo was the main building of the temple, not large, divided into six rooms, the centre of which held the altar, the Buddha, and the patron ‘saint’ of the temple Kozalui. On all four sides, the Hojo was surrounded by a sand garden and connected to the other apartments of the temple—each in separate buildings—by galleries: the so-called ‘Shinsenden’ style of building.

The most famous garden was about 10-feet wide and 30-feet long. Along the side of the Hojo, an arrangement of rocks [symbolized] the passage of life—a white sand stream from birth—a stone waterfall; through the vicissitudes—the rocks and rapids along the way; and the perplexities as a stone dam where the stream is held up (and here a bridge and window over to look down); the solution and experience gained—a stone treasure ship; to the final purification in the ocean of nothingness—a great expanse of sand at the front of the Hojo with no rocks (thus some of the temptations and difficulties of life), only a single tree in the far corner, which was the tree under which ShakyamuniBuddha died, thus symbolizing the purity of the garden.

[…] During the day when all the shoji were opened and some removed, I looked through the Hōjō across the tatami and the rooms framed in white fusuma with black ink paintings on them to the far garden, the sacred tree. How easily and effectively the spaces were changed by the arrangements of the shoji and the fusuma, from extreme intimacy with the immediate garden but never, of course, the whole thing at any one time from any one point. […] [O]ne never sees more than a little [at once] and the vision of the whole can only be an accumulation of one’s remembered experiences.”¹