Japan Takes Up Cottage Industry

TOKYO — For decades, Japan’s green thumbs have traipsed to the roof of the prestigious Mitsukoshi department store to admire the exotic potted plants--especially the crown jewels of the collection, the elegant bonsai.

Last spring, however, the stunted pines and tiny flowering plums were banished. The bonsai may distill the essence of the ancient Japanese aesthetic into a tiny patch of gravel and green--but they weren’t selling, Mitsukoshi spokesman Tomohiko Koizumi explained.

Instead, amid the skyscrapers of Nihonbashi, Tokyo’s urban heartland, Mitsukoshi now presents the Chelsea English Garden Store, the flagship for Japan’s latest midlife infatuation: the British pastoral look. Lavender and roses are in. So are herbs and wildflowers, topiaries and hanging floral baskets, window boxes and container gardens, all artfully arranged to achieve a tousled, cottage-garden look that softens the gray concrete that has gobbled up much of modern Japan.

Just when Japanese-style gardens have made it big in the West, trendy gardeners here are turning to pansies and primroses. Many are land-poor urban dwellers who are landscaping their balconies, rooftops or window boxes.

But a few ambitious horticulturists have ripped up rice fields or had trees removed from their gardens to create space and light for flowery English gardens, which they find cheaper, more cheerful--and more in keeping with the increasingly Westernized Japanese lifestyle.

“People are sleeping in beds, not on tatami mats, they sit at tables and drink coffee, and it would be incongruous to look out the window of their Western-style home and see a traditional stone lantern,” said Isamu Sato, a Tokyo landscape architect who specializes in English-inspired gardens.

“It is not that people dislike Japanese gardens, but they find them unsuitable,” said Sato, who heads the Japan branch of the Royal Horticultural Society.

On one level, the passion for English gardens is just an outgrowth of the entrenched Anglophilia that has made golf, English tea, Winnie the Pooh, Burberry and Laura Ashley fixtures of Japanese life. The English gardening craze, however, is also one of many indicators of how the traditional Japanese arts, while no less admired and cherished, are becoming more difficult to integrate into ordinary life as the 20th century draws to its end.

Maintaining a fine Japanese garden--like wearing kimonos, playing traditional musical instruments or making ceremonial tea--has become too expensive, too time-consuming, too stern or too impractical for mass-market appeal.

According to the government’s 1997 White Paper on Leisure, three times more women go bowling than practice traditional flower arranging. Almost twice as many play with their personal computers as perform the ancient tea ceremony.

The nation’s treasured samurai culture is by no means being trashed. The ancient arts, from Kabuki to court music to the exquisite green tea ritual, all have wealthy patrons and dedicated enthusiasts and continue to attract a few serious young students, their practitioners say. And faddish Japan’s incessant “booms” guarantee periodic--if short-lived--revivals of popular interest in the Japanese classics.

But the nation’s genius lies in reinventing its traditions and adapting what it imports.

And once again, traditional culture is being updated for the era of Tamagotchi toys, satellite television and a global emphasis on practicality.

For example, few women younger than 50 know how to dress themselves in kimonos, which they tend to wear once a year at most. Many depend on older relatives or beauty parlors to dress them, or attend kimono-wearing schools to learn to wrap themselves into elegant silk packages. Enrollment at these schools is now declining, however. Surveys find that 70% of young women say they want to learn to wear a kimono, but few actually do so, said Masahiro Saito, spokesman for one school.

“You can’t wear a kimono in the subway at rush hour,” Saito said. “And people now walk faster than they used to,” a pace not in keeping with the stunning but constraining formal kimono.

A few years ago, Japanese designers brought out brightly colored and less expensive yukata, informal cotton kimonos that young women can put on with minimal instruction. This year, designers have updated the traditional geta, the wooden clogs that were once the geisha’s answer to high heels. The reincarnated geta are often seen paired with pants. Some have been redesigned to make them easier to walk in.

Calligraphy and flower arranging also are evolving. Penmanship classes are popular with students who find it too impractical to grind their own ink and write on rice paper with a brush, as are Western-style flower arrangement courses, said Shunichi Warita, director of the NHK Gakuen Open School, which offers cultural classes for adults. “Traditional Japanese arts are more easily influenced now by world fashion,” Warita said.

Kazue Ishikawa, a teacher of the Ikenobo school of flower arranging, said she has only 10 disciples learning the traditional art that dates to the 15th century. But 150 students, from high school girls to grandmothers, attend her English-style “Royal Flower Arrangement” classes.

Ishikawa said many of her students live in condominiums or Western-style homes that lack a tokonoma, the alcove in traditional homes that is used to display seasonal flower arrangements and scrolls. “The Japanese housing style has changed,” Ishikawa said. “People don’t have a tokonoma, or if they do, it’s tiny and they don’t know how to use it.”

Instant Gratification

The time crunch and the taste for quick gratification also challenge the understated, patient Japanese arts. For example, pampered bonsai plants can live for more than a century but their shape barely changes for decades, noted Kazushige Sunaga, director of the Sokyusha landscape design firm. “Young people who want instant results think they’re boring,” Sunaga said.

Top bonsai specimens can cost up to $8,000 and require twice-a-day watering in summer. Aficionados don’t mind. The Japan Bonsai Society boasts 18,000 members to just 2,000 for the upstart Royal Horticultural Society, and bonsai-growing is taking root in the West.

“Bonsai do not have booms or busts, popularity or unpopularity,” sniffed Saburo Kato, 82, the Bonsai Society’s director general. “No matter how far our lives get from nature, bonsai remind us of the beauty and meaning of nature.” The society now runs classes in seven elementary schools to transmit that message to a new generation, he said.

But Shiro Nakane, a Kyoto-based designer of traditional gardens and teahouses, lamented that fine Japanese gardens are pricing themselves out of the mass market. For example, a proper stone lantern from Kyoto costs $8,600, though Korean or Chinese substitutes can be had for $1,300, he said.

Then comes the greenery. When commissioned to create a garden for a Buddhist temple on Awaji Shima island in the Inland Sea a few years back, Nakane found a perfectly proportioned black pine tree with the tangle of exposed roots that is especially prized here. The price for the 7-foot tree: $35,000.

Moreover, the pine required biannual maintenance, which included laborious hand-plucking of its needles by five gardeners brought from Kyoto.

English Gardens

Small wonder that Harumi Kojima opted for an English garden. She spent the first eight years of her married life in her husband’s family’s temple, where the annual maintenance bill for the pines topped $17,000. Now she lives in a ground-floor condominium in a far-flung suburb of Tokyo, where she has created an 18-by-60-foot cornucopia of Western and Japanese herbs and roses, and imported flowers and trees.

“To have a Japanese garden is so much more work than a Western garden,” said Kojima, 45. Besides, Japanese gardens tend to emphasize serenity over exuberance, greenery over color, harmony over dazzle--and Kojima wanted the exhilaration of riotous flowers.

“I love Japanese gardens too, but,” she said, and sighed. “You put in natural stones, and they’re so heavy you can’t put them in yourself, you have to hire a gardener to do it. Then it takes decades to get the moss on the stones just right. . . .

“The traditional things are still inside you,” Kojima added. “I love Japanese culture and think it is very beautiful. But in ordinary daily life, it is becoming more and more distant.”

Kojima’s enormous garden would be the envy of many urban Japanese, who have had to forfeit most of their already tiny gardens to make room for parking spaces. (Parking is not allowed on many narrow residential streets.)

The scraps of green that remain are often, as the Japanese saying goes, “no bigger than a cat’s forehead.” But that has not stopped their proprietors from spending lavishly on imported English gardening tools, antique-looking rose trellises and even wooden hedgehogs (an animal not found in Japan).

According to the government’s 1997 White Paper on Leisure, Japan’s 38 million gardeners spent $5.7 billion on their hobby last year--up 35% since 1988.

Growing Market

Retailers believe that Western-style gardening is the growth area of that market. Sales of potted flowers and seedlings have jumped 18% in three years. And receipts from the Mitsukoshi rooftop jumped 50% during its English garden store’s first six weeks, store spokesman Koizumi said.

The Japan Broadcasting Corp. runs a weekly television show on Western gardening. Magazines are crammed with articles on how to tour the gardens of England, how to cook with herbs and dry your own flowers, and how to create the spacious country look in cramped Japanese quarters. “Exotic English Atmosphere, Even in a Rabbit Hutch,” quipped the headline of a Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper article.

A few enthusiasts with money to spare are going all out in their quest for authenticity.

Apparel magnate Yujin Yamada imported a British landscape designer, 2,600 Western plants and a total of 15 English gardeners, stonemasons and botanists to Nagano prefecture to create the “Barakura English Garden” in what was a vegetable field in the Japanese Alps. The garden is now a tourist attraction that draws 500 visitors a day during rose season.

Fancy hotels and restaurants still rely on their elegant, traditional gardens to give an instant classy atmosphere. But Yaeko Akatsuka is gambling on an English garden to surround the beauty parlor she is building in a rice field in a small suburb of Niigata in northern Japan. Like most Japanese cities, Niigata has few parks, and Akatsuka hopes to draw customers by ensuring that they can view the roses while having their hair done.

But her dream won’t come cheap.

“My budget is $26,000, but I’ve been told that it’s not nearly enough,” she said.

Landscape architects predict that Japan’s legendary gardeners will end up appropriating and adapting the best elements of their British competition--just as English plant-hunters spiced up their gardens by importing rare Japanese species a century ago.

Whether traditional or global, said Sunaga, the director of the landscape design firm, Japanese style is “to bring elements from all over the world and put them together in a way that works.”

Makiko Inoue and Chiaki Kitada of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.