Honmoku & Sankeien Garden

The name Honmoku is old: a 1545 (Tenbun 14) edict issued by Hojo Ujiyasu records it as “Honmoku-go.” Although the name contains the character for “pasture,” it also appears in records written with other characters, and judging from the lie of the land, it is thought to have had nothing to do with pastures (Naka Ward, Yokohama).

The district of Honmoku Juniten takes its name from Juniten, the village’s guardian shrine, known today as Honmoku Shrine. Its beginnings, so the story goes, lie in a sacred object that appeared in a fishing net and was enshrined. In the O-uma-nagashi, the town’s misfortunes are entrusted to the “O-uma-sama,” a figure with the head of a horse and the body of a turtle, and sent out to sea. The rite is an Intangible Folk Cultural Property of Kanagawa Prefecture.

The sea off Honmoku was a rich fishing ground. People raked for shellfish, set nets, dove for their catch; until the early 1960s, all kinds of fishing went on in these waters. In autumn, wearing tall nori clogs, they planted poles in the sea, and from winter into spring they gathered the nori. The dried sheets, it is said, were bundled by the hundred and sent to market (Yokohama City Hasseiden Local History Museum).

Between 1963 and 1968, that sea was filled in for Honmoku Pier. What had been sea became Honmoku Shimin Park in 1969. Sankeien’s own chronology records it too: “Reclamation of the Honmoku coast in front of Sankeien begins.” Before the garden, there was once the sea.

Hara Sankei (born Tomitaro, 1868–1939), who created Sankeien, was a Yokohama businessman who made his fortune in the raw silk trade. His pen name, Sankei, was taken from the name of this place: Sannotani, “the third valley.”

On May 1, 1906 (Meiji 39), Sankei opened part of his garden, today’s Outer Garden, to the public free of charge. “This beautiful natural scenery belongs to the Creator; it is not private property.” Those, Sankeien tells us, were Sankei’s words. In the early years, it is said, the garden welcomed visitors under the words “Yuran go-zuii” (“stroll as you please”), keeping the Outer Garden open, free, all day long. 2026 marks 120 years since the garden opened.

Sankei moved old buildings here from Kyoto, Kamakura and elsewhere: a three-story pagoda from the Muromachi period; a villa once thought to have belonged to the Kishu branch of the Tokugawa family; a tea room attributed to Oda Uraku; a farmhouse from Shirakawa-go. In 1922, with the relocation of Choshukaku and Shunsoro, the last of the moves made by Sankei himself, the garden was complete. It covers about 17.5 hectares. Of its 17 historic buildings, 10 are designated Important Cultural Properties of Japan and 3 are Tangible Cultural Properties of Yokohama City, and the garden itself is a national Place of Scenic Beauty.

Sankei was also a patron of painters. At Kakushokaku, his home, artists such as Yokoyama Taikan and Maeda Seison stayed and painted, and in 1916 the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore spent two and a half months in the garden, writing poetry.

In April 1923, a tea gathering was held to celebrate the completion of the Inner Garden. On September 1 of that year came the Great Kanto Earthquake. As chairman of Yokohama’s reconstruction association, Sankei gave his own fortune to the rebuilding of the city, and came to be called “Yokohama’s benefactor.” Air raids in 1945 left the garden badly damaged; after the war, the Sankeien Hoshokai Foundation took it over and set about restoring it. It was not until 1958 that the Inner Garden was opened to the public for the first time.

Wabi-sabi is a phrase that does not translate easily. It is the heart that finds a quiet beauty in what is lacking, in what has grown old, in what is passing away: an aesthetic of Japan, polished over time in the world of tea.

Sankei was counted among the three great tea masters of the modern age. The tea room at Shunsoro is three tatami mats, and one more about three-quarters that size. Into that small space, nine windows open.

And to the pavilion for enjoying the autumn leaves, he gave the name Choshu: “listening to autumn.”

From here on, this is only how it feels to us.

Every building in Sankeien stands far from the place where it was born. The temple pagoda, the lord’s villa, the tea room, the farmhouse from the mountains. Each still carrying the time of its own land, they stand beside a pond in this valley.

Not to force what is missing to be filled. Not to try to hold still what is passing. Perhaps wabi-sabi is a way of standing before the time that has flowed past, and receiving it just as it is. Not to look at the autumn leaves, but to listen to autumn. Sankei’s choice of name, it seems to us, came from that same place.

When the war ended, Honmoku was requisitioned by the US military: from 1946 to 1982, according to the Hasseiden Local History Museum. A vast housing area for Navy families stood here. A history lecture featured on the Naka Ward website gave that era the title “Until the America Built in Honmoku Became Japan.”

In March 1982, the requisition came to an end. After land readjustment, the returned hilltop opened little by little from 1998 as Honmoku Sancho Park. Covering about 22 hectares, it is a park with fine views from the heights of Honmoku.

In the years of the requisition, it is said, the homes of American service members and their families lined Honmoku, along with schools, churches, an officers’ club and even a movie theater. An “America” inside Japan. R&B fresh from across the ocean was playing in this town (materials for “The Era of The Golden Cups” exhibition at Yokohama Takashimaya, 2014).

In 1964, the club Golden Cup opened in Honmoku. The group formed as its house band won a following playing R&B the way it was played in America, and in 1967 it took the name The Golden Cups and began making records. The next year’s “Nagai Kami no Shojo” (“The Girl with Long Hair”) made the band widely known, and in 1969 it also left behind a song called “Honmoku Blues” (same source).

In time, the day of the return drew near. With the handover of the US housing area a year away, citizen volunteers answered a call from the Naka Ward Office, and plans for a jazz festival in Honmoku began to take shape. The first idea, it is said, was a concert of avant-garde free jazz inside the US housing area itself. In Yokohama at the time, jazz and rock were not allowed in public halls and auditoriums, and the open-air music hall had been torn down.

The venue became the baseball ground of Honmoku Shimin Park. It was an open-air festival that did not insist on jazz alone: a “hodgepodge” with rock, samba and world music too. Every year on the last Sunday of August, people spread their sheets on the field and let the day pass at an easy pace. In 1995, the YOKOHAMA Honmoku Jazz Festival marked its 15th anniversary (Yokohama City, Chosa Kiho no. 125, 1995).

Begun in 1981, the festival has carried on in the hands of local citizens. Past 2010, when it lapsed once for lack of sponsors, it reached its 30th edition in 2011 (Yokohama Keizai Shimbun, 2011). It continues today in forms such as the “Winter Session” for amateur bands, and on February 1, 2026, the “YOKOHAMA Honmoku Jazz Festival Winter Session: Amateur Jazz Band Festival Vol. 14” was held at the Yokohama Port Opening Memorial Hall (YOKOHAMA Honmoku Jazz Festival Executive Committee).

In the 1980s, the town of US housing gave way to a shopping center and other new uses. The days of the young people who longed for that town live on in records, and in the memories of those who remember.

And yet the music has never stopped. More than 60 years after opening in 1964, the club Golden Cup still opens its doors in Honmoku. People young and old drop by, and on live nights it welcomes the musicians who come to play, or so the club tells us (Golden Cup official website).

The fishing sea, the shallows where nori was gathered, the housing area where families from a country across the ocean once lived: none of these can be seen anymore. Yet that time remains, in the names of places, in a festival, in the rise and fall of a park’s ground.

Sankeien’s flower calendar lists flowers in season for almost every month of the year. The old buildings, the ponds and the trees stay where they are; only the seasons pass before them. Whenever you come, there is a Sankeien of that season.

Spring is announced by the plum. In 1908, Sankei gathered more than 1,500 old plum trees from the Kamata, Komukai and Sugita groves, famous since the Edo period, and held a plum-viewing gathering to celebrate the completion of his plum grove. Interrupted by the war and other events, it began again in 1975 and in 2026 was held for the 52nd time. Today there are about 500 plum trees, among them the late-blooming garyubai, “reclining dragon” plums surviving from Sankei’s own planting, and the early-blooming ryokugakubai, green-calyx plums given by the city of Shanghai in 1977.

On weekends and holidays during the plum festival, barley tea is offered at Hatsune Chaya, an arbor at the far end of the Outer Garden. In the garden’s early days, water was always kept on the boil here, and anyone could freely drink a cup of tea. In 1915, Akutagawa Ryunosuke is said to have stopped by and written a haiku about this hospitality.

From mid-March to early April come the cherry blossoms: about 250 trees of nine varieties. Somei-yoshino around the Great Pond, Oshima-zakura in the open ground before Rinshunkaku, double-flowered red weeping cherries near the Yatsuhashi bridge and Kakushokaku. In front of the Main Hall of Former Tomyoji Temple and beside the gassho-zukuri farmhouse bloom cherries with ties to Gifu Prefecture, rare in the Kanto region. On cherry-blossom nights, the three-story pagoda is lit as well.

April and May bring wisteria, azaleas and tree peonies; May and June, Japanese irises and satsuki azaleas.

June is for hydrangeas. July and August are the season of the lotus, the flower Hara Sankei loved above all, for the pure blossom it raises out of the mud. Lotuses begin to open at dawn and are at their best from about 7 to 9 in the morning. On the days of the early-morning lotus viewing on summer weekends, the gates open at 7 a.m. to match.

At the moon-viewing gathering in September, with the lantern-lit Rinshunkaku as its stage, the biwa lute, gagaku court music and the koto are played. In the garden at night, light falls on the three-story pagoda and on Choshukaku too.

The autumn leaves turn in November and December. The place Sankeien names as its most beautiful for autumn color is the area around Choshukaku. Behind the building lies a ravine set with great rocks brought from Nara. Look downstream from partway along the ravine, and beyond Choshukaku, wrapped in autumn leaves, stands the three-story pagoda. Sankeien describes the view as “a single painting.” In this season, the path behind Choshukaku is opened, and around the Former Tenzuiji Juto Oido the ginkgo trees turn to gold.

December and January bring narcissus, winter camellias and sasanqua. From January into February, the wintersweet is fragrant. In the first three days of the New Year, Kakushokaku, once Sankei’s home, is specially opened to the public, with koto performances and other events.

In the season with the fewest flowers, perhaps the shapes of the buildings, the ponds and the trees are seen most clearly.