Joseph Wu's Origami Page: the art of folding small squares of colored paper into fanciful shapes has a long history in Japan and even today captures the interest of both young and old on both sides of the Pacific, one of many ways in which elements of Japanese culture touch those outside the Japanese islands. 

Another across-the-seas influence at work can be seen in Portland, Oregon, where a beautiful Japanese garden located in the city's Washington Park has been nicely described and documented online -- the result is a great introduction to another area in which the Japanese impact on American culture is readily apparent.

To learn something more about gardens and garden design in Japan, begin with an illustrated web lecture that will take you "Beyond Moss and Stone" into a world of quiet charm and beauty.

To continue your exploration of Japanese gardens, you can undertake a "virtual tour" of Seiwa-en, maintained by the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis. Harold Melville (Faculty of Economics, Shiga University) will take you on a narrated tour of Ryotan-ji, a Rinzai Zen temple garden located in Hikone on the shores of Lake Biwa in Shiga prefecture near Kyoto. Other reflections on the experience of visiting gardens in Japan can be found among the observations left by a group of university students studying at the Michigan Center for Japanese Studies in Hikone as part of The Shiga Project from 1996.

A ThinkQuest site, The Art of Japan, (developed by Chris McFall, Ben Meyers, and Andrew Miller from Palo Alto, California) contains a nicely-organized and illustrated discussion of Japanese garden design and history. As part of its Spotlight series, the Embassy of Japan in Denmark also discusses five different styles found in Japanese garden designs. A more extensive discussion can be found on the pages devoted to the Japanese Garden among those found on the East Asian Learning Activities Center (Columbia University). The Explore Japan web site uses an illustrated overview of this same subject as an introduction to its exploration of Japanese culture.

The Nature of Japanese Garden Art is discussed at length by Professor Lennox Tierney as part of a web site devoted to the Japanese Friendship Garden in San Diego, California.

An extended and detailed illustrated discussion of the gardens surrounding Katsura Imperial Villa ("Katsura Rikyu") in Kyoto can be found as part of the JGC (a Japanese engineering firm) Waza: Japanese Tradition web site.

Albert H. Jean's web site contains a number of captioned photographs picturing more than a dozen of the most famous large scale formal gardens in Japan. "Shadow" provides a gallery of photographs illustrating the changing seasons on a colorful web page devoted to Japanese Style Gardens in Kyoto.

RESOURCE BIBLIOGRAPHY

A brief excerpt about Japanese Gardens from Kyoto Gardens: A Virtual Stroll through Zen Landscapes (©Digital Wallpaper 1996) can be found on Jerry Greenfield's course web site for his Miyazaki International College "Aesthetics of Environment" course.

For those interested in exploring further the history of gardens in Japan, take a look at the detailed monograph from the Nara State Institute of Cultural Materials entitled Cultural History of Japanese Gardens of the Middle Ages: A Study on the Daijoin Garden.

The JGarden: Japanese Garden Database, maintained by Robert Cheetham, represents an expanding source of specific information on well-over 200 different Japanese gardens, both those located in Japan and those found elsewhere; included, in many cases, are historical overviews, expert commentaries, source bibliographies and photographs (many contributed by Lynn Perry).