| Some distance away an elderly man in work clothes was tending to some bantams
in an aviary shaded by linden trees. He looked like an employee but somehow
more distinguished. I subsequently came across a photograph in an old social
register of the same bearded man wearing winter clogs and realized he must
have been Kawanishi Kiichi, the owner of the garden. |
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| He was born in 1886 in a village by the Inland Sea in Kagawa Prefecture, Shikoku. After graduating from the old-style Middle School, he was appointed a soldier in the Imperial Guard and went to live in Tokyo. |
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| He came to Oketo in 1909 and moved to Nokkeushi in 1919. He held concessions for felling timber in public forests and transporting it to Honshu, thereby making a substantial profit. In 1921 he opened a large two-storied restaurant called Kasaiken on the corner of Ginza Dori 3 Chome. It housed the only piano in the Kitami region. Smiling waitresses dressed in white aprons welcomed the customers. |
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| There was a traditional-style geisha house, Ume no Ya, just across the street. Kiichi enjoyed elegant living and used to patronize it, sometimes taking with him his little daughter Setsu whom he asked the geisha to entertain. Puffing on a cigar or setting off skiing wearing knickerbockers and socks, he cut a colourful figure in a community where the plain lifestyle of the soldier-pioneer leaders was the norm. |
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| He began his political career as a town council member in the early Taisho era and in 1932 was elected to the Hokkaido Representative Council with the backing of the Minseito (Popular Government Party). At the age of forty-three and dressed in finely tailored suits, he must have cut a dashing figure as he addressed the governor Sagami Shinichi from the rostrum on matters such as forestry, roading and the establishment of meteorological stations to help prevent crop damage caused by cold weather. |
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| During that era men from fishery and land owning families often dissipated all their wealth on politics. Some forfeited their grand houses, leaving just the well and garden walls behind. |
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| Kiichi's wife Mise became concerned at his lavish lifestyle. She consulted her father-in-law, Hisakichi, and purchased five hectares of land. With Kiichi's cooperation they began making a garden. At first he planted trees and shrubs he had obtained from his home town in Kagawa but they did not survive. Tamaki Nisaku, a trained landscape gardener and grandfather of Tamaki Hidetaka, the present owner of Tamaki Nurseries, could not observe such failure without giving support. He sent for and planted peony plants from his own home region of Niigata. Initially they also struggled to survive, with stems as thin as chopsticks, but eventually produced beautiful flowers. This disproved the then prevalent theory that peonies could not be grown north of Sapporo. |
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| Peonies come in a wide variety of colours and shades - white, red, pink, purple and more recently yellow. Some are dark, others pale; some have large petals, others small; some are single, others double or multiple. The ancient Chinese poet Po Chu I mentions peony flowers in a verse entitled 'The Scent of Peonies' from his work New Musical Ballads. He describes ruby red clusters opening to reveal golden stamens and fragrantly perfumed white blooms brighter than jewels at the home of a recluse. Setsu, now owner of the garden, says that in ancient China the peony was considered an aristocratic flower. Occasionally a hundred or more blooms were trained to grow on offshoots from a single central stem. The bush, unable to bear the weight, would droop down to the ground like a princess who had wilted into the arms of her lady-in-waiting. |
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| By the late 1920's there were thirty thousand shrubs in the garden. Visitors came on special buses from Nokkeushi station - women and girls dressed in their finest clothes and carrying parasols. Even nowadays, when the flowers are in bloom some of the cars in the parking area have number plates from Kushiro and Sapporo, so the garden still has its fans outside the local district. |
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| When I visited the garden on 30 April this year the cherries were out earlier than usual. Clouds of blossoms covered the interweaving branches of the giant trees, planted by Kiichi in a checker-board pattern, and stood out against the blue sky. Huge spruces, cypresses and oaks elsewhere in the garden, some with trunks 70 to 80 centimetres thick, contributed to the display. A row of larches along neighbouring Ryokuen Dori was felled when the road was widened soon after Kiichi died in 1974. Rilke wrote in one of his poems - 'the leaves are falling, from far away the leaves are falling' - as if from the sky. With the larches gone, such a scene can no longer be enjoyed at this spot. Kiichi's dear daughter Setsu travelled all the way across the ocean by ship to Europe in order to study painting in Spain, before the advent of the age of mass tourism. She has now assumed her parents' mantle as caretaker of the garden. |
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| (June 2002) |
