Japanese Gardens/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
GARDEN ACCESSORIES (LANTERNS AND PAGODAS)
“The garden ways are dark, the stars are gone
From the dim sky, the lantern gleams alone
Beside the lake, where its dark form reveals
The fire-fly’s spirit prison’d in the stone.”
Perhaps the most characteristically Japanese things in a Japanese garden are the lanterns. If they, and the little pagodas which so much resemble them in effect, were omitted, as well as the small shrines, the charming miniature bridges, and perhaps the most ornamental of the water-basins and well-covers, one who did not know their gardens intimately might easily be deceived into believing them pretty bits of natural scenery. Yet these ornaments, delightful in design, quaint and attractive as they may be, are but accessories after the fact of the garden’s raison d’être. While one hardly ever sees a garden, even of the poorest, which does not boast a lantern of some sort, be it only a little wooden one, resembling a house for birds, every other item which I have named can be dispensed with, and the place would still remain typical of the national mind and hands which produced it.
It is a great satisfaction for one who loves the Japanese to note that stone lanterns were not, as everything else in the artistic line appears to have been, introduced into Japan from China. They seem to have been a veritable product of the natural genius of the people, and are employed everywhere. I have never seen them in a Chinese garden, and, so far as I know, they are never used in them.
The first lantern of this sort appears to have been set up in the fourth century A.D. by a certain Prince Iruhiko, the son of the Emperor Sinko, beside a lonely lake in a spot infested with robbers. Whether this little glimmering light illumining the dark served to frighten the bad men away or helped the samurai to see to kill them off is not stated, but, at any rate, after awhile it was taken to the Tachibana Temple at Yamato, and set up in the grounds there.
This beginning was possibly what caused lanterns to become such popular adornments to temples, Shinto as well as Buddhist, where, lining the avenues of approach, they stand in their hundreds, and even in their thousands, like sentinels with their torches held aloft.
Lanterns may be roughly separated into two types: those with legs and those without, although it would perhaps be more accurate to say those which are set up off the earth by
CHERRY BLOSSOMS AND STONE LANTERN
UENO PARK
means of legs, and those of a single stem rising from a plinth or flat base resting upon the ground. The latter sort, much like a ‘Standard’ lamp in appearance, may be called the senior variety. They are used in gardens or temple grounds where a dignified effect is sought, and usually carry on the architectural features of the buildings they are near. They are generally made of stone, and the pedestal as well as the outside of the fire-box and the top may be carved with Buddhist emblems or the crests of daimios. They are handsome and stately, but lack, maybe, a little of the quaint charm of the more informal kind with legs and greater individuality.
However much foundation for it there is in fact, it would appear that religious sentiment is greatly concerned in the employment of the ‘Standard’ types of lanterns. They were a favourite form of votive offering, or propitiatory gift to the temple god, from the great daimios and noblemen, and their use in private gardens seems to have a little of the religious element as well as of the æsthetic still lingering about it; nor is it at all an uncommon sight to find their tiny glimmering lights, shining out like larger glow-worms or fire-flies, in small home gardens at the time of one of their temple festivals, while they remain dark for a private celebration or gathering.
Temple lanterns are made of bronze as well as of stone, but the former are put inside the sacred edifice itself, or at least in the courtyard, while those of stone are kept for the grounds. These last are used in any places where stones or rocks might be found, and where they would fit in with their natural surroundings. They are nearly always of the ‘Standard’ type.
There are iron lanterns too, although these are usually hung up, not standing; and porcelain ones, which, from the inharmony of their colouring and composition to their surroundings, are seldom used.
A more lovely effect than that produced by the long lines of stone lanterns at Miyajima would be hard to imagine, with their myriad lights reflected and repeated in the waters of the incoming tide. These lanterns, and those in or about other temples, vary in size from the tiny ones inside the small temples to the huge ones which line the avenues or stand at the doors of the large temples. Some of those at Miyajima, which stand in rows, like troops, fronting the shore, might serve as guardsmen in the lantern army, although most of them would be a good deal more than six feet tall. Then there are giants, in pairs, in various places, that soar as high as eighteen or twenty feet. But as everything in this, as in other directions, is comparative, the height of the lantern is governed by that of the surrounding objects, by the scale of the whole composition. In temple or palace grounds, planned on a big scale, are the great stone or bronze ones, and there are prescribed shapes, too, for these large lanterns, based on the principle of appropriateness.
For smaller gardens there are shapely things, four or five feet tall, which are much used either alone or in groups composed of an ‘Erect’ lantern,—that is, one of the ‘Standard’ type,—a ‘Recumbent Stone,’ and some shrubs, or an overhanging pine. For little gardens the sizes shrink, as if Alice had lent them some of her mushroom to eat; and in some of these it is as though the mushroom itself had come alive, here before, there after taking, for some are large and some small, but all gracefully patterned to resemble that fungus. These mushroom shapes are generally set up on short legs with their widespreading umbrella tops; they are known as ‘Snow-scene’ lanterns, because, although most picturesque in summer, and quaintly suited to the diminutive rustic nook in which they are placed, they are still more charming in the winter, with their broad flat tops softly covered with white snow.
This shape is not of the small tribe, however, for, though squat, its top must be broad enough to display its design and form when clothed in its thick winter garment; so it is not for the very modest and small garden, of which there are so many thousands scattered all over the country, but for rather large places where there is a landscape effect. In little spaces, lanterns made of wood, like thatched houses, are seen, not more than eight or ten inches high, or small rough ones of stone, from one to two feet up from the ground.
While there are only two distinct classes of shape—the ‘Standard’ and the ‘Legged’ ones—so much variety is introduced into these that many appear to belong to totally different orders. And when I stop and think over some I know, I wonder where exactly they should be put. Certainly the ‘Valley’ shape, set up on its curved crane, like a big ‘C’ spring with a lamp-bowl atop, is neither a ‘Standard’ nor a ‘Legged’ lantern. Then there is the one Mr. Tyndale shows in the Ashinoyu garden (facing page 156), set on a granite ring, with a snow-scene top. Where ought that to go? If we say that the two classes are those with legs and those without, we gain nothing in our argument, for a ring is not a leg, nor is a crane—unless a crane might be said to be one crooked leg!
For temple gardens the ‘Standard’[1] is the favoured kind, more especially that known as the ‘Kasuga’ shape. This was named after a Shinto god whose main temple is at Nara, but he has serious rivals. The ‘Shiratayu’ design (named after a class of Shinto officials) is only slightly different in the decorations: the main lines are the same. A dozen more might be named of these architecturally severe and classic shapes which are suitable for placing near buildings, but many modifications, as well as the regular temple variety, are to be seen in private grounds.
The other distinct type differs radically from the Standard in that it is short and very broad-topped, and has three—sometimes four—feet (they can hardly be called legs, since they are so short). This is the mushroom design before referred to, and is much admired in the central parts of Japan, where snow in winter reveals its beauty. It is employed, therefore, in the more rural parts of the garden, with rocks and shrubs about, and nearly always with a Pine tree drooping over it, so that in winter the ‘flowers of the snow’ adorn them together. Personally, at all times of the year I find these lanterns enchanting, and far better suited to the intimacy of a small garden than the tall and impressive ones can ever be.
Then there are other sorts, hardly more than two stones set one on top of a second, with the inside of the upper one roughly chipped out for holding its little light. These might almost as well be placed in the list of stones. Dozens of them are to be seen in the weird desolation of Oji Goku, or Owaji Dani, near Miyanoshita, and it is as if the Brocken Top scene from Faust had been transferred to the Bad Lands of Japan, and the elves and gnomes were there, crouching dwarfed figures in stone. It is said of the Japanese that they do not personify stones, animals, and flowers, but they would be a far less imaginative people than undoubtedly they are if they did not attribute malignant life to this wild place, with its bubbling water, and seething sulphur, and vapour coming up wherever one breaks the crust with foot or stick an inch away from the none too safe path. Whether these rude little lanterns were erected from the national passion for placing them where they may appropriately add to the picturesqueness of the scene; or whether they were to propitiate the wild demon of that valley of desolation and terror, or to act informally as proper lights to the many little shrines there; or whether, perhaps, they were set up by grateful travellers in thanks for a safe passage through that gorge to Hakone or Miyanoshita, and to light others who might follow them, I do not know. The same sort of little rough stone lanterns I have often seen placed in rugged mountain passes, and also in peasants’ gardens, and close to modest wayside shrines. They are never used where the surroundings are cultivated, or where any high degree of finish is to be found in the gardening.
Hanging lanterns are frequently seen in corners of verandas of private houses, and also in tea-houses. They are usually globular, square, or octagonal in shape, of hand-wrought bronze or iron filigree work, in semi-conventional flower designs. Sometimes glowing silk, of the brilliant living colours known only in Japan, is put inside as a lining to the open-work bronze. They struck me as being very well suited for hall or vestibule hanging lamps; but I found, when trying to adapt them to the high rooms in the Hong-Kong houses, that they did not furnish enough light. They would be decorative in low-ceiled rooms more like those of Japanese houses, however, where their beauty of detail would be brought nearer to the eye.
But whether lanterns are architecturally fine, or left in the rough, whether they are of stone or of wood, of bronze or of iron, they should bear the marks of age. And it is truly wonderful how quickly young ones can be made to appear venerable in this moist and artistic country. All sorts of methods, it is true, are resorted to in order to age them. The stone ones are smeared with bird-lime, or the slime of snails, which attracts and encourages a pretty white lichen, and turns them from babes into old men with bleached heads in only a few months’ time. If the owners are in a still greater hurry to get the effect, they gum on mosses and lichens. If there is no haste, or if the stone has already put on its pretty green and gold velvet cap, it is carefully watered every day. It is droll to see this watering done, and to note with what care the nurse examines the child’s head to see how the hair is coming on!
All this to make old lamps of new! and yet with mine own eyes have I seen ardent men and boys,—perhaps twenty of them,—under the direction of their head priest, scrub, with sand and soap and water, the stone torii[2] and its two great guardian stone lanterns, just before the August matsuri[3] at Hakone. It was a cruel blow to an artist friend, as well as to me, for we had begun a sketch of the beautiful trio, and had never done admiring the lovely silvery lichens that adorned them. But one swallow does not make a summer, and I will not believe that such a crime is often perpetrated in this age-venerating and art-loving land.[4]
Although lanterns are primarily set up to give light, I should be wronging the reader who does not know Japan if I did not confess honestly the severe disappointment I suffered in them when I first went there—in that they are very seldom seen lighted. I have lived in close proximity to a lantern for months, in a pretty garden I know of, and while it invariably fitted in with its surroundings, in the spring giving the necessary relief to the flame-coloured Azaleas abloom at its foot, in the summer swayed over by splendid heads of the Lilium auratum and Tiger Lilies, and in the autumn delicately displaying the tiny carmine stars of the Maple leaves that nestled near it, yet only once did I see its little candle box alight, and that was for the Feast of Souls, in August.
But they have a reason for being, and so the most is made of them. What the sundial was to old English and Colonial American gardens, that the stone lantern is to its Japanese prototype. Can it be transplanted? Well, I have one in Hong-Kong which pretends to light the path leading up to the house. Because of the intolerable burning of our winter suns, the drying, searing qualities of our winter winds, and the monstrous ravages of our summer typhoons, no watering can restore the moss with which it was adorned in the little garden at Shimonoseki, whence it was torn. It has no delicate Plum or Cherry branches to caress it; no protecting Pine tree (as yet) to lean over and shield it; no ‘Recumbent Stone’ beside its austere straightness, to bring to it lines of beauty; in fact, it is quite out of its picture. And yet every man and woman, white or brown or yellow, who goes near it stops to examine and to admire it. And so, if it is still a pleasant thing to see here, where climate, tropical sun, scenery are all against it, what will it not be when it goes into a quiet nook in an English garden, where skies are soft and wet, as in Japan, and where its old friends, the Japanese Lilies and Maples, have also found a new home?[5]
Pagodas, although a direct importation from China,—or, rather, one by way of Korea,—have much the same effect in a garden as have stone lanterns. It may be owing to my bias for things Japanese, as contrasted with Chinese, or it may be (and I think it is) because lanterns have their sphere of usefulness and pagodas have not, that I cannot share the Japanese enthusiasm for them. Every other thing to be found in a Japanese garden has its use—if pure ornament can be considered of economic value; but pagodas have nothing to recommend them but their quaintness. Of course, where the larger originals appear in a scene which is being reproduced in miniature, they are, perhaps, necessary according to the Japanese ideas, but I confess to rather a prejudice against them. They may be all very well for Dora’s dog, Jip, to lie in, or to exhibit the piety and riches of some big man in China; but they look foolish and futile even in that land, and much more so in Japan, where they are a deliberate imitation.
However, this is not the view taken by the Japanese themselves, so I will try to find what extenuating circumstances I can for them, according to my judgment.
In their full-sized state, both in China and Japan, one can at least say that when their stairways and floors are not rotten, or porous from the depredations of white ants, you can climb to the upper storey, whence you are nearly always sure of a fine view. But in these miniature pagodas no climbing would be possible; you could not even sit on the top to look at the view because of the ball or the spike.
These little buildings are usually of stone, with from three to nine tiers of roofs. Sometimes they are only a series of projecting eaves, but more often there is at least the pretence of a storey in between. The square, hexagonal, or octagonal cap which crowns the structure is much like the top part of the ‘Kasuga’-shaped lantern, and, like the lantern, they are generally supported by a plinth rising from the solid ground. Sometimes, however, they are set up on three or more legs, like mushroom-shaped lanterns, and then they look perfectly ridiculous. They are called Koraito, or ‘Korean Towers,’ and are supposed to have some religious significance, though what it is I don’t believe the people know themselves. Their large prototypes in the temple grounds at Nikko, at Miyajima, and at Kyoto seem to have no particular use assigned to them. In China devout Buddhists build them to show their faith—or their wealth.
There is an infinite number of variations of pattern, some purely Chinese, others inclining more to the Korean, and again others very suggestive of the horrid monuments of Siam, called ‘Wats.’ I have seen them with bells at the corners which made a light tinkling when the wind shook them, and if one did not see them the fairy chiming was rather charming.
These little pagodas are not always of stone, just as the big ones are not invariably of wood. Sometimes ‘Arbor Vitæ’ trees are clipped into shape, and Mr. Tyndale, in his picture of a Buddhist temple and of a garden at Kofu (facing page 126), shows how charming these are, set in the midst of other clipped trees, beside a tiny stream. But this only goes to prove that what the Japanese adapt from the Chinese, Koreans—or from any other nations for that matter—for use in their gardens, they improve and give some of their own individuality and charm.
- ↑ As in the picture facing page 60.
- ↑ A kind of archway marking the approach to a shinto temple.
- ↑ A religious festival.
- ↑ I am told the same thing occurs yearly at Nikko; but it is so wet there that the moss renews itself in a few weeks’ time.
- ↑ I regret to say that since writing this a typhoon wrenched this stone lantern from the cement in which it was imbedded and dashed it into a thousand pieces down the stone steps which it had lighted.