I first contacted Akira Nakata because I wanted to buy photographs to use in a brochure for our building project. Through his pictures, I hoped to introduce readers in Taiwan to teioku ichinyo (庭屋一如): the idea that a house and its garden form a whole.
I had browsed his work in bookstores several times before then. At the time, my main interest was in gardens. I knew relatively little about the photographer who had spent so many years recording Kyoto's landscapes, gardens, and festivals. As I came to read more about his experiences and his work, I also wanted to introduce the way he observes the things before him.
I enjoy taking photographs myself and have spent time thinking seriously about how to take better ones. I know how much waiting a good photograph can require: waiting for light, waiting for the weather, spending hours in one place for what may be only a brief moment when the conditions are right.
Later, I read an introduction to 『西芳寺新十境』, a photobook whose title can be translated roughly as "Ten New Views of Saihoji." One detail caught my attention. Published in 2021, the book brings together text by Shugaku Fujita and photographs by Akira Nakata. Nakata visited Saihoji more than a hundred times across the seasons to make these photographs, including views at dawn and at night that ordinary visitors rarely have the chance to see. The introduction describes his photographs as capturing the most beautiful moments of the day.1
I envy the opportunity to enter Saihoji more than a hundred times in this way. I also admire his willingness to give so much time to a single book, returning again and again to photograph the garden.
I wondered, too, about the differences between those visits. What was worth photographing in the same garden at different times of day, in different weather, and in different seasons? What might those pictures reveal when seen together?
In 2024, Saihoji's website published Nakata's series 「五季風光」, Five Seasons of Scenic Beauty, pairing his photographs with his own writing. At Saihoji, the rainy season, when the moss takes in moisture, is counted as a season in its own right alongside spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Reading the photographs and words together, we can follow his attention from the scenery to the lives of plants, the history of the garden, and the work of the people who care for it.2
The photographs discussed below can be viewed in the individual installments of Nakata's series, linked in the sources at the end of this article.
A Morning in the Rainy Season
In his 2024 essay 「緑苔」, about green moss, Nakata recalls his first opportunity to photograph Saihoji some fifteen years earlier.
It was June, and he had only about two hours in the morning to take photographs. Before dawn, heavy rain woke him. He then drove toward the hills of western Kyoto. By the time he reached Saihoji, the rain had eased. He remembered stepping into the garden and seeing moss so full of moisture that it seemed water would seep out at the slightest touch. Years later, its fresh, wet color remained vivid in his memory.5
While the photographer was still on his way to the garden, rain was already falling on the moss. The color he remembered had something to do with that downpour before his arrival.
I have heard people say that Japanese gardens are at their most beautiful in the rain. In an account of the rainy scenery valued by Aritomo Yamagata, Murin-an's official website describes how rain sounds bring out the quiet, how the green of plants becomes more vivid, and how wet garden stones take on deep, rich colors.6
For a traveler with only one day to visit, rain can be disappointing. Yet Nakata's recollection suggests that the colors and textures the rain brought out might have been absent on a sunny day. Weather changes our plans, but it also changes what deserves a closer look.
Saihoji's recognition of the rainy season makes the idea of five seasons more tangible. When we recognize a season through the appearance of moss full of moisture, we are also noticing how plants respond to their surroundings. A garden has its own rhythm of change through the year.
In the same essay, Nakata writes that returning through all five seasons for 『西芳寺新十境』 often made him reflect on the remarkable life of moss.5 He remembers its color after rain, but he also takes an interest in how it grows and the conditions in which it lives. These observations, accumulated over time, seem to have deepened his understanding of what he was photographing.
The Leaf Behind the Lotus
In 「大賀ハス」, about the Oga lotus, the focus shifts to the lotus pond outside the temple's entrance. The photograph accompanying the essay shows a flower with its petals closed, set against a leaf through which the light shines.7
The leaf is a bright yellow-green, its veins spreading outward. The flower is darker, its outline standing out against this luminous background. If we expect only a lotus in full bloom, we may overlook the shapes of the flower and leaf, their light and shade, and the veins made visible by the light passing through. What we expect to find worth looking at also affects where we pause.
Nakata's words describe changes in the flower's life beyond the instant captured in the photograph. He explains that a lotus flower usually reaches its widest opening on the third day. On the fourth, the petals begin to fall, eventually leaving the receptacle behind. Seeing the flower after its petals have fallen brings to his mind mujo jinsoku (無常迅速), a phrase about the swiftness of impermanence.7
His account follows the flower through its bloom and on to the loss of its last petals. Returning to the photograph after reading it, we understand that the closed flower is still in the midst of change. The photograph preserves one brief state in its life.
When Did the Moss in These Photographs Begin to Grow?
In 「桜」, his essay on cherry blossoms, Nakata looks much further back. He writes that when Muso Kokushi created the garden, the islands in Saihoji's pond were covered with white sand, planted with pines, and furnished with garden stones. Corridors connected the buildings beside the water, and spring brought cherry-blossom viewing and boating. He closes by reflecting on the change from that once splendid garden to the familiar world of moss, invoking shogyo mujo (諸行無常), the Buddhist teaching that all conditioned things are impermanent.9
The essay 「緑苔」 adds more to this history. After disasters, warfare, and periods of neglect, moss began to cover Saihoji's garden a little over three hundred years ago. People subsequently helped it grow by clearing fallen leaves from its surface, sustaining the scenery we see today.5
The dense green covering the ground can give an impression of age and stability. Knowing this history makes us notice that Saihoji's most distinctive feature took shape gradually, through a long succession of changes after the garden was built. Its present beauty includes what happened after the original design.
A garden is alive. It continues to grow, decline, and change after construction is complete. The garden we see today has been shaped over time by its original design, subsequent care, and natural change. Those influences remain within it and continue to act.
The falling lotus petals bring Nakata to mujo jinsoku, the swiftness of impermanence; Saihoji's changing history leads him to shogyo mujo.79 To me, his way of looking takes on a philosophical dimension here. The blooming and fading of a flower, and the formation of a moss garden, give us concrete ways to consider how the beauty before us came into being and how it may change.
Photographing a Garden, Seeing the People Who Care for It
The work that sustains the moss garden becomes more tangible in 「竹の春」, an essay whose title means "bamboo's spring."
This season of bamboo actually falls in early autumn. The parent bamboo, which yellowed in spring as nutrients went to new shoots, regains its green, while the young bamboo has grown tall. In this essay, Nakata describes gardener Koji Miyazaki making and using bamboo brooms.11
Miyazaki explains that the material comes from the temple's bamboo grove. In mid-September, he gathers enough for a year, then chooses the right time to strip off the leaves. He makes the brooms gradually on rainy days and at other times when sweeping the garden is difficult, adjusting them to his height and the way he sweeps. With use, they become more comfortable in his hands.
As Nakata photographs Miyazaki at work, he notices that the broom moves over the moss almost like a caress; when it reaches fallen leaves, the movement resembles a gentle scoop.11
In winter, Miyazaki stops sweeping the moss to let it rest. He turns instead to maintaining tools and repairing fences.12
Even on the same patch of moss, deciding when to sweep and when to leave fallen leaves in place depends on its condition. Once we know about this work, we are less likely to see a tidy surface, or leaves remaining on the ground, as simply accidental. The way a gardener cares for the moss shapes its growth and the appearance we see later.
In "After a Garden Is Finished," I wrote about how Ryo Sugiyama uses pruning to maintain light and views in the Nitobe Memorial Garden. Branches left in place or removed today will also affect growth several years from now. Looking at Sugiyama's work alongside Miyazaki's makes it easier to understand that gardeners tend the garden before them while helping to shape its future appearance.
What Is There to See Without Flowers?
In 「苔眠る」, about moss at rest, Nakata describes another response to the garden. From December, the moss gradually becomes inactive, its color deepens, and fallen hinoki cypress foliage covers its surface. He feels affection for these tiny plants clinging to the ground and adapting to survive the cold. As the days grow longer, the moss gradually wakes and puts out yellow-green new growth.12
The photograph accompanying this essay shows an undulating surface of moss in the foreground, bright yellow-green where the light falls. Dark tree trunks rise from it, casting long shadows diagonally across the ground. Beyond them, the water of the pond is visible between the trunks.12
There are no brightly colored flowers in the picture. Yet there is much to look at in the rise and fall of the ground, the spaces between trunks, and the variations of light and shadow.
Gardens after their floral color has faded bring to mind a 2015 interview with Chisao Shigemori.
In that interview, he recalled something his father, Kanto Shigemori, often told him: the beauty of a landscape reveals itself in the depths of winter. If a scene is still beautiful when no flowers are blooming and the deciduous trees have shed their leaves, it will naturally be beautiful in spring and autumn. Chisao himself especially appreciated the delicate forms of branches in the winter air.13
Rain brings out the colors of moss and garden stones. When flowers and leaves are gone, branches, trunks, stones, and the spaces between them become easier to see. A garden in rain and a garden in winter each reveal different details, encouraging us to look beyond the seasons of peak bloom and autumn foliage.
In the same interview, Shigemori also said that if you find a garden you like, you should return often. Weather, time of day, and light change, and each visit may bring a new discovery.13
How Photography Brings Gardens to More People
Many people first encounter a garden on a page or a poster, before they arrive there. The angles and moments chosen by a photographer help shape that first impression.
From 2001 to 2014, Nakata took the cover photographs for JR Central's onboard magazine 『ひととき』 (Hitotoki). He also photographed posters for the 「そうだ 京都、行こう。」 campaign, with subjects including Jojakkoji and Yasaka Street.14 Through books, magazines, and posters, his work reaches readers who cannot visit Kyoto often.
For many readers in Taiwan, returning to the same Japanese garden in different seasons and at different times of day is not easy. Nakata's photographs offer glimpses of scenes they have not been there to see. His writing adds the history of the garden, the changes in its plants, and the work of caring for it. From the image in front of them, readers can begin to understand how that view came to be.
Photography also leaves a record we can return to. The shutter captures an instant, but the scene in the photograph may have taken hundreds of years to form. Plants will keep growing, and the people who care for them may change; the photograph preserves the garden's appearance at the moment it was taken. Pictures made in different seasons, weather, and light also let us see the differences between those moments.
Looking at Nakata's photographs and reading his words has deepened my appreciation of the photographer's craft. Beyond using equipment and composing an image, it involves careful observation over a long period. Understanding what one photographs affects what one notices, what one chooses, and what makes it worth returning again and again.
Returning Once More
At the close of Five Seasons of Scenic Beauty, Nakata describes the moss garden's seasons as recurring through nature, time, and human activity, and invites readers to visit several times throughout the year.12
Returning to those hundred-plus visits at the beginning, what interests me is the understanding that each visit can add. Moss after rain, the shape left after a flower has faded, a gardener's movement as he sweeps the ground: each has a place in Nakata's photographs and words. Together, these details help us imagine the life of a garden and make us want to look a little longer.
The next time we enter a garden or open a book of garden photographs, we might pause a little longer. Notice where the light falls, the moss beneath a tree, and the leaves on the ground. The scene before us has a history, and it will continue to change.