Japanese Garden in Hawaii

September 8th, 2009

A former classmate recently posted an online note saying that she wished she could read a book in the Japanese Garden at the East-West Center.   She is in Indonesia, so it’s not an island she is missing — it’s the serene surroundings of this wonderful garden.  The Japanese Garden is behind the Hawaii Imin International Conference Center, which faces East-West Road near the University of Hawai‘i campus in Mānoa.

I happened upon the garden while staying at the East-West Center for an academic conference.  Its beauty is magnetic even if you are unaware of its symbolism.  The stream in the center of the garden has three levels representing the way a river begins in the mountains, flows down and across the plains ends in the sea.  In Japanese tradition, this symbolizes life that begins in turmoil, steadies in adulthood and slows to "a tranquil, majestic senior citizenship."  (This description is from the East-West Center website, linked below.)

I often see people meditating or reading silently in the shade of the garden.  There are schools of very large, very colorful fish that glide through the stream.  I try to visit the garden in the morning to be able to watch them.  At mid-day, they hide from the direct sunlight inside rocks or by hugging the stream bank.  The Center website says the fish are carp, which symbolize valor.

The creation of the garden was a joint project funded by a 22 businesses in Japan.  Specialists from the United States, Asia and the Pacific worked together on it.  Pretty much every piece of the garden has a symbolic meaning  — signs tell you about them or you can read about them on the website.

A traditional Japanese Tea House is located at the end of the garden near the waterfall.  It is used for special events, so it is closed unless a tea ceremony is scheduled.  I was able to peek inside while staff were preparing for one such ceremony.  I had just been reading about traditional Japanese furnishings (or the lack of them) and the use of tatami mats as flooring so it was a sort of real-life illustration.

I promised my absent friend that I’d take a book down to the garden and spend a moment enjoying it on her behalf.  I plan to send her a photo — the garden is so beautiful it’s hard to take bad pictures there.  But no photograph, no matter how stunning, can capture the sense of serenity that envelops it.  For that, she’ll have to pause and remember.

related link:
http://www.eastwestcenter.org/about-ewc/campus-maps/japanese-garden/

Posted by Cindy Scheopner  Follow me on Twitter @Scheopner 

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