Hita and the Coffee Garden

at left: :
Oni tiles in the café garden.
Two sat close together (below),
one sat apart (above),
in a frieze of maple leaves

In the summer of 1999, we lived in a hotel for a month, when we came to Fukuoka on a scouting trip: exploring where we might want to live, and what we might be able to do here. About halfway through our stay, a friend of ours invited us on a car trip to visit some interesting antique shops in Hita. Ordinarily Hita would be a bit out of the way for us. It is next door, in Oita prefecture, and although one can reach it fairly easily by train, a car trip along the Oita Expressway is quite a bit faster. Because neither of us knows how to drive, we have not been back to Hita since that trip three years ago; but it left a lasting impression. At the time, I was at an impasse in my dreaming about our move to Japan: when the practical face of things began to intrude on the good spirits of my enthusiasm. A retreat into my notebooks provided some relief, but not relief enough to lighten the atmosphere in our little room. On the day our friend arrived to pick us up, the weather broke, and two weeks of glowering clouds and daily showers became a brilliantly sunny day. One usually has to make that sort of weather up, but in this case everything came together on its own. We sped along the expressway in air conditioned comfort, soft piano music tinkling in the background, with a blue sky arching overhead, and high summer cumulus clouds framing our field of view. Even the vegetation on the mountains looked friendly. On a day like that, an abandoned coalmine would have left a happy glow in the memory. As it was, finely made things, old wood, and a charming garden came to hand.

Japan is full of far too many lovely things, many of which are for sale, at prices we can only laugh about when we tumble out of the shops. We travelled from town to town, moving in and out of antique shops, stopping at a gallery, and two venerable old houses. One was the residence of a local samurai notable: an outpost of the governing class built for business in the eighteenth century. There were certain conventions in houses like this: one had to have receiving rooms, and tax collecting rooms, and tea rooms, and cramped little staircases with beams projecting at funny angles – on the off chance that someone might attempt a run up the stairs brandishing a drawn sword. The samurai were keen on conventions and formalities, in architecture as well as in behaviour, and their houses were manifestations of this rather bureaucratic mindset. The second house we saw that day had belonged to a family of wealthy merchants. A man who looked to be a few years younger than the stones in the garden told us they made piles of money cutting down all the trees on the local mountains – those friendly mountains, now on at least their third or fourth growth of commercial forest. What magnificent timber it is: the hallways use single planks to span distances from end to end of the house. Building materials comprise some of this country’s greatest – and usually unrecognized – treasures, and not just in homes built to impress, as this one clearly had been. The gallery we visited was in a crumbling old warehouse, whose roof beams and plaster walls put on a better display than any of the goods on display.

When we reached Hita, we stopped to rest in a café. A hundred years ago, this café was an old merchant house, and Hita was an old merchant town. The front face of the building rose in two steps from the street, one for each floor; it gave no clue to the intricate confusion of angled roofs that extended back from the second floor. We took our coffee at an upstairs window and looked out over this cascade of roof tiles; even at this point we had no idea that the green below the grey of the enclosing roofs was a garden. It was only after we settled the bill and were about to go that the owner suggested we look at his garden.

Merchant houses like this one occupy long, narrow lots that run away from the main street, and end at alleys that may have been irrigation channels a century ago, or that may have always been alleys. Whatever they were, they are now damp, overgrown petering-out kinds of spaces, sometimes used by narrow vehicles and motorbikes, but most often used by mosquitoes. Our café occupied about a third of its lot, massed against the street front, with extensions under the eaves into the space behind the main house. A path began at a back door near the toilets, went straight past the inviting clatter of the kitchen, and abruptly swung out to the right and into a dense cover of trees. This was the mass of green we saw from the second floor window; but on the ground, we found a neat path set off with old roof tiles, and carefully trimmed shrubs and short trees. There was a small pavilion with benches where we stopped for a photograph. At the far end of the garden was a larger pavilion about the size of a tea room – seven or eight square metres – and display stands inside the pavilion held albums with photographs of the garden in different seasons.

A garden with a twisting path is an illusion of space much larger than the site that contains it. Curves and abrupt ends to branching paths create eddies which support little worlds independent from the mass of the garden and quite removed from ordinary time. In one of these, in the centre of the garden, we found a small collection of figured roof tiles. They were in the shape of oni heads – the heads of Japanese ogres. Each one used to sit at the crown of a roof to guard against fires. There were three: two sat close together, one with widely flared nostrils and a manic grin, the other with a sneering, lolling jaw, furrowed brows, and a covetous gaze; the third sat apart in a frieze of young maple branches, looking rougher and older than the other two, and had the rounded eyes and mouth of a terror meant to be comical. Each of the three had a wide, flat nose, stubby little horns thrust forward over little ears, and a liberal cross-hatching of demonic hair. They were an odd set of figures for greeting visitors, but that was the impression they left: that this was a garden of meeting, of surprise, discovery, and gifts of chance. Those faces not only protected the space they were permitted to watch over in their retirement from the roof: they offered a conditional welcome to us as we moved into the garden, not yet established as enemies or friends.

I remember this as the sort of garden I want to revisit, to linger in. Its appeal was heightened because we could only visit it briefly. We discovered this garden by coincidence as we were leaving, and so could only enjoy it in passing: we imagined pausing there, and our memory is of the imagined experience. This twisting, branching line of memories and inferences, pictures and feelings, lend our experience in Hita more significance than most other drives in the country. I recall the young green rice fields, the low mountains, and old wood – and in particular the structure of the café garden. Gardens give pleasure, in their physical beauty, and in the beauty of the idea behind them. Gardens also manifest relationships: ranged before us physically, between forms and spaces, objects and plantings; behind the physical, there are relationships between people, as people seek and meet each other, and as people face the world. Places like this Hita café garden can inspire us to study how we shape space, or leave it alone; or, as observers, help us to understand what kinds of shapes we favour. We should in the end gain an insight into character: of our world and of ourselves. In my case, on that summer afternoon, it was a lesson in recovering a useful paradox of optimism and practicality.

2002/06/29

Date posted: 2003-09-01