Shakkei: composing a garden with scenery beyond it

Shakkei incorporates scenery outside a garden—mountains, woodland or buildings—into its composition. Nearby pools, stones, hedges and architectural openings guide the view towards it and screen unwanted elements. The distant mountain remains outside the grounds, while becoming part of the scene composed with the garden.

The same garden looks different from a room, veranda or path. At Murin-an, its managers identify places such as the position before an alcove or a large stepping stone as clues to viewing arrangements. Moving changes how openings, trees and foreground elements overlap, and therefore how much of the outside scenery is revealed.

Kyoto designates a point within Entsū-ji’s Miyuki Goten as the viewpoint. Towards Hiei, the innermost left and right pillars delimit the protected viewing corridor. Lines from that same point through the hedge’s north and south corners define the directions of the near- and distant-view design zones. The room opening and garden edge therefore frame different extents. Moving elsewhere would alter their overlap with the mountain; the arrangement depends on a particular position.

Tenryū-ji’s Sōgenchi garden retains features of the garden made by Musō Soseki in the fourteenth century. Centred on a pond, it incorporates Arashiyama and Kameyama into the view. From the abbot’s hall, pond-side stones and trees lead into the mountain backdrop. The temple also notes that its overall appearance preserves features recorded in the illustrated Miyako Rinsen Meishō Zue of 1799. The temple’s present description calls this borrowed scenery; it does not establish that Musō himself used that term.

At Entsū-ji’s Edo-period garden, a low hedge links the stone-set level garden to Mount Hiei beyond. At Shugakuin Imperial Villa, built around 1656–1659, gardens and buildings occupy different levels, connected by pine-lined routes across rice fields; surrounding mountains form part of their backdrop. These examples work at different viewing scales, from a concentrated garden-and-mountain scene to an expansive villa landscape.

The term has Chinese roots: it occurs in Song-period writing and receives a chapter in the Ming garden treatise Yuanye. Poetry and garden books carried it to Japan. The history of composing actual garden views does not follow the same timeline as the circulation of the word. Discussion and study of borrowed scenery in Japanese gardens increased from the nineteenth century onwards.

Murin-an was developed in 1894–1896 under Yamagata Aritomo’s direction, with its garden made by the seventh-generation Ogawa Jihei. Higashiyama anchors the composition, beyond open lawn and running water supplied by the Lake Biwa Canal. Here borrowed scenery works with the open space and moving water of a modern villa garden. The garden was designated a national Place of Scenic Beauty in 1951.

Borrowed views depend on continuing horticultural work. After a period of reduced care following the Meiji Restoration, overgrown trees at Shōden-ji obstructed Mount Hiei. In 1935, Shigemori Mirei directed work including the removal of unnecessary trees to restore the earlier view. Pruning has to preserve the outline while thinning branches so light reaches the interior; otherwise inner branches die and only an outer layer of leaves remains. This continuing care sustains the relationship between foreground and mountain.

A 2015 maintenance report describes how trees around Murin-an had been kept tall to conceal surrounding development. Dense upper growth then shaded out lower branches, allowing outside structures to show through. Restoration under the management approach introduced in 2007 first thinned upper branches to admit light and encourage middle growth. Staff then lowered inner shrubs and small trees previously kept tall as screens. The sequence revealed Higashiyama while retaining foliage that concealed outside distractions. Maintaining a borrowed view did not mean cutting every obstructing tree down low.

Buildings and land-use changes outside the grounds can also alter borrowed scenery. Kyoto defines a protected viewing area from Entsū-ji’s Miyuki Goten towards Mount Hiei, with standards covering building height, roofs and colours. Conservation therefore extends to the space seen from a particular position. Gardens such as those at the Adachi Museum of Art continue to compose their grounds in relation to natural mountain scenery.

Entsū-ji’s protected viewing corridor normally limits every part of a building to an elevation of 110.2 metres, with permitted exceptions. This is elevation above sea level, not building height above the ground. The near-view zone also regulates roof form, materials and colour; the distant-view zone focuses on exterior and roof colours in relation to the mountains. Kyoto distinguishes the procedures: new construction or increases in elevation within the viewing corridor require certification, while work changing appearances in the near-view zone normally requires notification. Some design-zone notifications can be handled within other landscape procedures. Conservation consequently also reaches development outside the garden.