In the garden at Nijo castle

Nijo's garden is famous for the wealth and variety of its rocks.

This peculiar sentence captions one small picture in the two page spread on Nijo Castle in the Eyewitness Travel guide to Japan.

The main focus of the description is paintings in the rooms of the shogunate palace, Ninomaru, painted in the early 1600s by artists of the Kano school, actually members of a samurai family who gained prominence for the distinctive decoration of the walls of this rambling set of rooms. Kano school trees, birds, flowers, and landscapes spread across gold backgrounds. Even with the evident damage from 200 years of neglect during the period when Edo became the focus of power, they still are impressive.

The guide helpfully points to a scene of wild cats in a cloudy bamboo grove, noting that the artists "mistook leopards for female tigers". The paintings impress less for this supposed confusion and more for the way the bodies of the felines undulate, their heads elongated unnaturally. Signage in the palace notes that these cats "were unknown" in Japan at the time except through imported pelts, and we can imagine artists trying to think through these feline bodies with only house cats as models.

The palace creaks as we walk, an engineered effect called "nightingale floors" that would warn residents of anyone attempting to break in. The chirping becomes so normal that it is when it stops, in a section that perhaps has been restored (or is in need of restoration?) that the sound of shuffling feet without the bird noises becomes noticeable.

And then we exit into the pathway that winds over to the garden, with its justly remarked-on rocks. The water runs from a small fall arranged at one end, and the rocks surround the pool, each one individually distinctive. There are fewer people here enjoying the view. There are no benches, no resting places to stop; in a World Heritage site, keeping people moving is more the goal than allowing them to stop and contemplate. A few people arrange themselves in front of the water for photos of themselves to post for their friends and family.


I take my own photos, despite the unsuitable light, that suffuses everything with a mist that is like the clouds surrounding the mythical tigers in bamboo groves, enjoying their lives with their leopard companions. I want to be able to think of this place again.