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• Japan - No Problem
• Travels to the South: A Trip to the Other Japan
• Omiyage - Art of Gift Giving
• Ukiyoe: "The Floating World" Revealed
• Seto: Japan's Porcelain City

Botany at Bay in Old Edo

Tokyo, often dismissed as a concrete jungle, has in fact many gardens. At one time, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, much of the city was laid out like a huge garden, with trees and flowering plants growing in great profusion, especially in the upper class residential areas where feudal lords lived in simple splendour. "Rus in Urbe" - the countryside in the city - was the Latin tag given by a foreign diplomat, gazing approvingly on the scene in the mid 19th century.

Alas, many of the great gardens of the feudal lords have disappeared, swallowed up by development and the march of progress.

Down near the mouth of the River Sumida, where now stands the head office of the Asahi Shimbun, there was once the great garden of Sadanobu Matsudaira, a magnate who functioned as Japan's prime minister in the late 18th century. His sumptuous estate had ponds and artfully arranged landscape features which he and his guests admired from his fashionable glass-windowed mansion. Now all has vanished without a trace.

But some similar gardens have survived, including one established not so much for decoration but for the practical business of supplying sick shoguns with a ready supply of organic medicines.

This is the Koishikawa Shokubutsu-en, or botanical garden, established by the Tokugawa regime in the 17th century. It lies on the northeastern side of the city, in Bunkyo ward not far from the Myogadani subway station. Don't confuse it with the similarly named Koishikawa Koraku-en garden near Suido-bashi. That is a purely decorative spread, owned at one time by the Mito clan, one of the three top branches of the Tokugawa family, and certainly worth a visit in its own right.

However, at the Koishikawa botanical garden, there were planted trees, plants and herbs used in concocting medicaments and other useful potions. It is whimsical to wonder as one examines the gnarled old branches of a venerable Jujube planted in 1727, that real shoguns once admired the same tree, alive and flourishing today despite having been blown over in a typhoon in 1917.

This tree and its plum-shaped edible red fruit have been cultivated in Asia for centuries. The Koishikawa specimen is thought to have come from China.

Not far from the tree is a memorial to the first sweet potato planted here experimentally in 1735 by a leading 18th century scholar and polymath, Konyo Aoki, fondly remembered as "Sweet Potato Professor" - Kansho Sensei in Japanese. The sweet potato had long been known in Kyushu, having been introduced there from Okinawa but it was unknown in Eastern Japan. Aoki-sensei, in his 1735 best seller "Studies on the Sweet Potato", was honoured for his contribution to the diet of the Edo citizens through this easily grown and tasty tuber.

Aoki has other claims to fame. Ordered by shogun Yoshimune to take up Western studies, he was instrumental in revoking the ban on the import of foreign books, which subsequently began to trickle in through his Dutch connections in Nagasaki.

As early gardeners like Aoki-sensei once studied plants and experimented with their extracts, so today modern researchers maintain their studies. After the fall of the shoguns in 1867, the gardens were given to the city government. In 1877, control of the gardens was handed to Tokyo University and the site is still at the forefront of valuable botanical research.

There are other connections with learning too. In another corner of the garden stands a memorial to a charity hospital set up in the grounds for poor citizens. This was founded in 1722, at the instigation of a renowned Japanese doctor, one Shosen Ogawa, who was probably the model for the legendary Edo-era doctor nicknamed Akahige or Red Beard, immortalised in film by the great director Akira Kurosawa and starring another legend, the late great Toshiro Mifune.

When the system of government of Japan changed, this hospital was absorbed by a newly established medical school that later became the Tokyo University medical school. The original Meiji period building still stands.

Despite these lofty connections with academics, the Koishikawa Botanical garden is open to the public. It is one of Tokyo's lesser known and very pleasant experiences to wander through the many groves and stands of trees, set in almost natural countryside, oblivious of the great city which sprawls around it - truly a remaining fragment of the "Rus in Urbe" of Tokyo visitors a century and a half ago.

G. Tudor is international public relations director of Japan Airlines and these articles appear in the JAL employee magazine, SORA. Copyright 2004.