Adachi Garden & Museum of Art

“Glory to your home! Glory to your home!”  So sung Byron Louis Cage, an American singer.  This is my tribute to Zenko Adachi (1899-1990), who built the Gardens of the Adachi Museum of Art in Yasugi City, Shimane Prefecture.  He was born exactly where the museum sits – not with a silver spoon in his mouth however.  He likened his boyhood to male “Oshin”, a country girl sent off to work as a babysitter to support her family at age 7.  The Oshin TV movie, though fiction, held sway over the minds of not only the Japanese but all Asian minds around the early 1980s.  Zenko wrote in his autobiography that he tackled all kinds of jobs – carter, coal/charcoal retailer, shellfish dealer, street trader, rice broker, etc. He was discharged at age 20 from the military service with a superior private ranking.  His stint in the military opened his eyes to the world and gave him strength and confidence.

He traveled to Osaka. After working for a coal/charcoal wholesaler, 
he started his own firm in good earnest. Adachi returned to Yasugi 
for marriage and opened his firm in charcoal venturing, the beginning 
of the Adachi Conglomerate. He had extremes of fortune, ups and downs, frequent changes of commodities, from grains and textiles to hardware 
and swords manufacturing.  He worked at many different side jobs such as automobiles, real estate, financing, all which helped to produce synergism.

While developing his taste for arts, he started to purchase Master Taikan Yokoyama’s (1868-1958) artwork to which he was personally attracted.  I believe he bought them as an alternative to mortgage and insurance, as they were actually sold whenever necessary.  But the accumulation of artwork, his treasure trove, should have encouraged his ambitions not only to create an art museum but also the museum garden.

It was in 1968 that he submitted to Yasugi City Office his building
permit to erect the Adachi Museum, and in 1970, the museum had its opening ceremony for the public.  To date, the Adachi Museum has existed for 46 years, almost half a century.  I myself left for the U.S. in 1973 and returned in 1994 and was not aware of  the museum.  In 2003, the Journal of Japanese Gardening, a
 magazine on Japanese Gardens in the U.S., ranked Adachi No. l 
and I was surprised.  Adachi Museum has kept its dominance 
since then.

I planned to visit Adachi for a long time but did not make it
 until this summer. For one reason, it took me a while to find where it is located.  JR Yasugi Station (famous for Yasugi folk song of
 loach scooping with a bamboo basket) is the closest station where I waited for the first courtesy shuttle bus in the morning. The bus was packed.  I asked the driver how far he was driving. His answer was 15 km. To the west on the San-in Road toward Matsue and south along the River Iinashi, merging with Hii-River (supposedly the raging river personified 
as an 8-headed, 8-tailed serpent tamed by God Susanoo per the Kojiki, the Legendary History of the old Japan).

At Furukawa-cho, about 20 big luxury buses were ahead of us offloading passengers. They were all Chinese visitors, showing their passports at the ticket counter. 
I checked in my knapsack while waiting then followed the hordes of Chinese tourists. Adachi was reported to be concerned about the annual visitor declining down to 10,000 visitors after the initial visitor rush.  Were he still alive, he would have been all smiles to see a huge number of Chinese tourists. It started raining but luckily visitors observed each garden gallery  through wide screen glass windows.

Each garden gallery observed what Mr. Adachi advocated
 as “Japanese Garden be like a Living Painting”.  The garden is
huge - 200,000 square meters (50 acres) has hills, pagodas,
 cliff and falls.  The garden has 1000 pines – 800 red pines and 200 black pines. The red pines are from Noto Peninsula.  At one time after the garden opened, Adachi had a company trip to Noto.  From the railroad train window he saw pines of great posture and abruptly got off at the next station to search the pine forest he saw.

Authentic stones used for the dry gardens are from Totteri Sajigawa Stones, and Osakabe River stones, on the border of Tottori and Okayama. 


It seems Adachi lived inside the museum upon completion until his death 20 years later. The original landscape was designed by Kinsaku Nakane, President of Osaka University of Art.  The landscaping is indeed spectacular - acres of meticulously arranged rocks, moss, trees, and sand set against an unspoiled mountain backdrop, and for good measure, a waterfall in the distance.

Adachi Art Museum now enjoys its honorific title as Taikan Yokoyama Art Museum because of its awesome possessions of Taikan’s  master artwork. Visitors should be thrilled to spot so many Taikan’s Mt. Fuji, Sunrise in the Ocean, a timeless child clad in rags called “innocence”, and may wonder why such Taikan’s exhibits were made possible.  Zenko’s personal attachments came to fruition. Here’s to the long cherished zeal and obsession of Zenko Adachi which has finally found the moment of his life endeavors.  “Glory to your home! Glory to your home!”

“Vedi Fujisan e poi muori!” (“See Fujisan and Die”)

The former Prime Minister Nakasone was said to have confided to his aide that he would not leave this world until he saw Mt. Fuji inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Center. Nakasone was presiding over the “National Congress” that was petitioning the campaign. It was in 2013 that Mt. Fuji finally got its cultural heritage designation, relieving Nakasone’s anxieties. The naturally majestic Fujisan does not really need it. Fujisan has been overly abused to date and I’m afraid the UNESCO designation might attract more climbers from overseas to aggravate the situation.

There is a legend, supported by the records of ancient Chinese “Shi-Chi” about a Chinese explorer named Xu Fu who journeyed twice to the eastern seas to look for the elixir of life between 219 BC and 210 BC on behalf of Qin Shi Huang. On each trip, Xu Fu was accompanied by thousands of crew, craftsmen of various fields, boys and girls. However, he did not return from his second journey and it is believed that he perished in Yamato (Japan), after traveling near Mt. Fuji. Xu Fu is enshrined at the foot of the mountain and around the nearby lakes.

I’ll give a quick overview of Fujisan’s cultural heritage:

1
“When I’m walking along the Tago Coast
I can see the snow falling on the lofty peak of Mt. Fuji.”
- from the most ancient Anthology of Japanese poems (8th Century)
So sung the poet Akahito Yamanobe. He is enshrined in the East Omi, near Biwa Lake, in Western Japan.

2
Lady Sarashina, born in Soshu Province, now a part of Chiba, in the early 1000s traveled to Kyoto with her father, Takasue Sugawara, governor of the province. The Mt. Fuji she saw from Soshu looked more dignified and awesome as she approached. She wrote in her diary that the smoke near the top which glowed after dark and the thick cover of unmelted snow gave the impression that it wore a white jacket over a dress of deep violet. The Tale of Genji, the first novel in the history of world literature, written by the Court Lady Purple, was her favorite book while in Kyoto.

3

Mt. Fuji became the ground of mountaineering asceticism during the Ashikaga period (1300-1500). In the middle of the Edo period (after 1600), people began making pilgrimage ascents of Mt. Fuji. Shintoists consider the peak sacred to the goddess Sakuya, while the Buddhists believe the mountain is the gateway to a different world. Their wishes included recovery from illness, good harvest, easy childbirth, stability of heart, etc. Reverence and admiration for the mountain was soon depicted in many ‘Ukiyo-e’ woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai, both completing their respective “36 views of Fujisan” since Mt. Fuji could be then seen from everywhere in Edo. Hokusai’s “Red Fuji” and the “Great Wave at Kanagawa” influenced many western artists.

4

In the Meiji era (after 1868), Taikan Yokoyama worked almost exclusively on Mt. Fuji. His “Mr. Fuji and soaring crane” is now printed on the back of the Japanese 1,000 yen note. Contemporary Nihonga artist Tamako Kataoka (1905-2008) left many Fujisan works. She wrote: When I stood in front of Fujisan and looked, it seemed to be saying ‘you’re not depicting me, you are not looking at me, you haven’t captured the height nor the mass. What are you looking at? Be sure that you portray me properly”. I found Tamako’s conversation with Mt. Fuji intriguing, as I associated it with “100 views of Mt. Fuji”, a novel written by Osamu Dazai (1909-1949). The writer cooped up for three months in 1938 at Misaka Pass directly facing Mt. Fuji every day and night. His lines on Mt. Fuji began with harsh slanders against the Hiroshige and Hokusai’s artistic distortions, but turned gradually to marvelous expressions of attachment. He left after regaining his strength to live, thoroughly charmed by the glamorous Diva Fuji.

5
The photographic medium brought totally new artistic dimensions, especially with the accelerated development of hi-tech cameras. Fuji Albums of Koyo Okada (1895-1972) dominated works by professionals as well as amateurs. On each and every New Year, hundreds of climbers / photographers compete to take better shots. My old photographer friend Todasan returns to Mt. Fuji whenever he finds time, so I consider him a Fuji specialist and I hereby wish to salute him for the photos of Mt. Fuji he gave to me as gifts, which I wish to share with you, with his permission. They are all superb shots and I’m really very proud of him.