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One of Kyoto’s most magic places stands in the northwestern part of the city, hidden behind an unobtrusive gateway.

Fifty years ago still countryside, now this has squarely become part of the city. But Shisendo, the Hall of the Poetry Immortals, is in itself contained, a form shut off from its surroundings by tall trees, in contrast to the shakkei gardens that use outside scenery which you find elsewhere in Kyoto. Therefore the magic of this hermitage has not been broken yet.

[Shisendo's roof seen from the azalea garden. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

Originally, Shisendo was the country retreat of eccentric poet and calligrapher Ishikawa Jozan, now it is a small temple to the memory of this early Edo scholar. The building and its garden form one of the most private and elegant places one can find in Kyoto. Nonetheless, in the autumn it is overrun by busloads of tourists who come to see the red leaves, but if you are lucky (for example on a quiet winter morning) you may have the house and garden more or less to yourself.

I cannot remember who first told me about Shisendo, but already during my first stay in Kyoto, when I lived for a year in the Shugakuin area, now more than twenty years ago, I several times visited the pavilion and garden with friends. Also in the late eighties, I returned here regularly, captured by the magic of the place. After that, my visits became more irregular. I lived in Tokyo and explored other parts of Japan. So my recent visit on an early September morning felt quite special again: it was like meeting an old acquaintance after a long absence.

[Shisendo's rustic gate. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

Hall of Poetry Immortals
Shisendo stands in an area that is graced by temples and other villas, most notably the imperial villa Shugakuin Rikyu and Manshuin Temple. Also Konpukuji stands, here, a small temple associated with Basho and Buson. From the bus stop at Kudarimatsu (Descending Pine) I climb upwards along a narrow road until I reach the surprisingly small gate of Jozan’s hermitage. Following a series of stone steps, I next come to another, inner gate.

As in the past, I enter via the small antechamber where the Buddhist altar stands and step into the large matted room that is open on three sides and forms a sort of terrace for viewing the garden. Building and garden were designed in 1641 by Ishikawa Jozan himself and still remain relatively unchanged, except for the lower part of the garden that is modern - here used to be a vegetable garden in Jozan’s time. But house and garden still form the perfect unity that Jozan intended.

I look up and again see the portraits of thirty-six classical Chinese poets admired by Jozan, hanging just under the ceiling, around me. A calligraphy by Jozan in the antique and difficult Chinese clerical script adorns one of the walls.

I sit down on the tatami, careful not to disturb the fragile structure. I try to become quiet, to forget the world I have left outside the gate, and allow the atmosphere of the small retreat to suffuse me. The green haze of the garden stands like a three-dimensional painting in front of me.

[The view of the upper garden from inside Shisendo. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

A scholar of things Chinese
Who was Ishikawa Jozan, the poetical man who built this wonderful retreat? Jozan was born in a warrior family in 1583 and as a young man distinguished himself in the Battle of Sekigahara, where the Tokugawa clan subjugated its rivals and started a hegemony that would last till far in the 19th century.

Although Jozan seems to have had great prospects for political advancement, by inclination he was a scholar and poet and did not feel at home in the harsh world he saw around him. He took part in the Summer Campaign of 1615 against the last remnants of the Toyotomi clan, the rivals of the Tokugawa, but at age thirty-three, in 1616, he sought release from service.

Jozan retired to Myoshinji and threw himself into the study of Chinese classical literature, which – more than Zen Buddhism – was his passion. In this, he was attuned to his times which indeed saw a great surge of interest in Chinese studies and Confucianism. Like several contemporaries, for example the scholar Hayashi Razan, Jozan himself started to write poetry in Chinese.

This was a neglected craft: Japanese court poets had written Chinese poetry in the Nara and early Heian periods, the 8th and 9th centuries, and after that Zen monks in the late Kamakura and Muromachi periods had taken up the brush to create what later would be called the literature of the Five Mountains, but that had also been the period when the native genres of waka and renga ruled supreme.

Jozan not only consciously cultivated Chinese poetry; he also modeled himself on the type of the Chinese gentleman-scholar. In this way, Jozan became one of the first Japanese “literati” (bunjin), the cultured gentlemen of the Edo-period, who wrote poetry, painted and made calligraphies.

Unfortunately, Jozan was not completely released from the world yet. He had an aging mother who fell ill, and as a Confucian he took the precept of “filial piety” serious. Jozan started working again, as the retainer of a small clan, to support her. That was his only reason to work, for as soon as she died, in 1635, he immediately retired, this time to Shokokuji.

[The upper garden of Shisendo. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

Six years later, at age fifty-eight, Ishikawa Jozan finally built Shisendo as his retreat. Here, in the countryside just outside Kyoto, he started living as a Chinese-type recluse. He followed the same path as the great Chinese poets Tao Yuanming and Wang Wei. In other words, he was a worldly recluse, someone who sought to be free from entanglements in order to immerse himself in his studies.

Therefore, Jozan’s writings do not show any of the medieval world-weariness of Buddhist recluses as Saigyo or Chomei. As a Confucian, he explored the work around him, be it with detachment. He also continued seeing his friends.

And so, living the life of a gentleman of leisure, he lived to a happy old age – he died in 1672 when he was almost ninety. He left a large body of Chinese poetry (an inspiration for other Japanese poets who wrote in Chinese in the Edo-period), great calligraphy, and – most of all – the pavilion and garden of Shisendo.

[The "Tower for Whistling at the Moon." Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

Waterfall for Washing Away Ignorance
It is time to walk down into the garden, which is as beautiful as the small house. I don slippers provided by Shisendo (having left my shoes at the entrance as is costumary in Japanese temples) and step down from the veranda.

The garden gently slopes down the hillside to a natural fence of bushes and tall trees, which shut out the world beyond. Today, the city has encircled this retreat, and when I look carefully I see the outline of private houses shimmering through the branches. But the illusion of a hermitage is carefully kept up.

After taking a few steps into the garden, I look back at the pavilion, which is viewed to best advantage from here. From here you can see the small, second-story room with its round moon-viewing window, which sits - like the bridge of a ship - above a patch of thatch on the roof. Such second floor rooms were a rarity in Edo Japan, and uncommon, too, is the name: “Tower for Whistling at the Moon.”

The garden is a world unto itself, with its plantings of flowering trees and tall grasses, and a pond with a pavilion halfway down. I follow the path between oblong bushes and remember coming here once in May, when these azaleas were a flaming red.

Today colors are subdued. It is a hazy morning and there is a coolness in the air that announces the coming of autumn. I see the first susuki grass standing upright in the still air.

As in other Edo gardens, the maker has laid out the garden with allusions to literature in mind - in this case Chinese literature. Examples of Jozan’s “ten locales” and “twelve scenes” are the “Waterfall for Washing Away Ignorance” and the “Slope of a Hundred Flowers.”

[The water mortar in Shisendo's garden. Photo © Ad Blankestijn]

Water mortar
Then I hear a sound I remember from former visits. The “tock-tock” of a water mortar or sozu echoes through the garden.

Around a corner I see the bamboo pipe, closed at one end, its mouth under a stream of water. When the tube is full, it tips of its own weight and hits a flat stone with a characteristic high and clear sound. Empty, it sways up again and the process repeats itself. At first such devices were used by farmers in the mountains to scare away deer and wild boars, but Jozan used it as an esthetic device, to punctuate the silence.

Slowly the water fills the tube.

The sound of water. It tips. The sound of bamboo on stone.

And nothing else.

And I, too, become part of that scene, of the gushing stream, of the sounds of water and bamboo and stone, and for a while, I too, am nothing else.

Address: 27 Ichijoji-Monguchi-machi, Sakyo-ku, Kyoto. Tel. 075-781-2954

Hours: 9:00-17:00. CL May 23 (anniversary of Jozan’s death).

Access: 10 min walk from Ichijoji-Kudarimatsu-machi bus stop (line 5 from Kyoto St)

Note: Shisendo, Hall of the Poetry Immortals by J. Thomas Rimer, Jonathan Chaves, Stephen Addiss and Hiroyuki Suzuki (Weatherhill, 1991) is the classic book on this temple. It has great articles about Ishikawa Jozan, the garden, Jozan’s calligraphy and a sampling of his poetry. More poems have been translated by Burton Watson in Kanshi: The Poetry of Ishikawa Jozan and other Edo-period Poets (North Point Press, 1990).