Sankeien

Sankeien — the historic garden in Yokohama developed by silk merchant Hara Tomitaro in the early twentieth century, which contains transplanted historical buildings from around Japan including several designated National Treasures — provided Yoshida with a garden landscape of unusual depth and historical resonance in this 1935 print. The garden's transplanted architecture — a three-story pagoda from Kyoto's Tomyo-ji temple, a farmhouse from Gifu, tea ceremony buildings from various origins — sits within a designed landscape of ponds, hills, and seasonal plantings that offered Yoshida the combination of architectural and natural elements he found most compositionally generative. Sankeien was a site he could visit easily from Tokyo, and his treatment reflects the intimacy of repeated observation.