Paper short abstract

Gardens became a national symbol of Japan in the late nineteenth century, with garden history grounding these sites in deep time. After 1945, excavation and reconstruction reshaped historic gardens, raising new questions about their ephemeral character within heritage policy.

Paper long abstract

Gardens became a national symbol of Japan in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the early twentieth century, garden history established itself as the field that defined this symbolism by situating gardens within depth of time. The discipline subsequently branched in various directions. After World War II, the excavation and reconstruction of historic gardens gained momentum, with Mori Osamu of the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties among its leading figures. Mori was instrumental in the (re)creation of gardens in Nara and Kyoto, as well as in more peripheral locations such as Hiraizumi, which later became a World Heritage Site. These reappearing gardens lent credibility to claims of a renewed garden history, while their scientific framing made the reconstructed sites convincing to a broad public. At the same time, the ephemeral nature of gardens raises questions about the premises of excavation and reconstruction, questions that have gained new urgency in light of recent transnational trends in World Heritage policy. As World Heritage decisions increasingly require demonstrating a site’s global relevance, a purely national understanding of garden history becomes problematic. The reconstruction of a temple garden in Hiraizumi by Mori is therefore now reinterpreted as being embedded in cultural flows between China and Japan during the Heian period.