Sankeien

• Japanese: 三渓園 (Sankeien)

Sankeien is a Japanese garden in Yokohama, built by silk magnate Hara Tomitarô. It contains many historic buildings moved there by Hara, including the oldest extant pagoda in the Kantô region.

Buildings

• Among the buildings located at Sankeien are the three-story pagoda and hondô (main hall) of the temple of Tômyô-ji, formerly located in the town of Kamo, in Kyoto prefecture. The temple was originally established in 735, during the reign of Emperor Shômu, but the structures moved to Sankeien date originally to the Muromachi period. The pagoda, built around 1457, is considered the oldest in the Kantô, though it has only been in the Kantô since 1914, when it was moved to Sankeien from Kyoto. The hondô, meanwhile, after being damaged in a storm in 1947, was disassembled and put into storage, then reassembled at Sankeien in 1986 and restored.

• A teahouse on the grounds is called Ôjaku-an ("Inn of Flutes") on account of the flutes or decorations depicting flutes which once adorned the otherwise very simple structure. The flutes were destroyed in WWII, however. The age of the building, and its geographical origins are unknown.

Ôjaku was also the name of a court lady of the late Heian period who appears in the Heike Monogatari, and who was in love with the courtier Saitô Tokiyori. When he refused her advances, and left court to be away from her, entering a monastery, she took the tonsure as well in order to follow him.

• One of the few buildings in the garden to not be historical, but rather to be built originally for the garden, the Matsukaze-kaku, or "Pining Wind Tower," was built as a retreat, a second home, for Zenzaburô, Sankei's grandfather-in-law. Though it once looked out over a beautiful view of the water, today that bay is filled with industrial plants and the like. The original Matsukaze-kaku was destroyed in the 1923 earthquake, along with quite a lot else of course, and has been rebuilt in concrete and a rather plain and basic construction; it is unclear what the original might have looked like.

References

• Plaques on-site.