Introduction

Let’s imagine a garden. A garden that is part of people’s everyday life, not one that you visit to admire. Imagine the garden with leaves and flowers, vegetables, and perhaps chickens in netting or a cage so that they are safe from stray cats. There’s an old skateboard, scrapped carpentry materials and tools left in an obscure corner. Under an enormous tree lies the grave of a pet. Garbage is composted into the field, which is swarming with earthworms, and some of the worms are fed to the chickens. In autumn, a ceaseless rain of leaves from the trees bothers the neighbors next door.

Imagine a garden in a dense city. We end up using the rooftop of our apartment building, after wandering around looking for a place to grow vegetables, as there was no space for farming in a park. We layer humus over a light-weight artificial soil in a large planter. As a result, we might have bees visiting the flowers in our garden, which surprises us and inspires us to become interested in beekeeping, and soon we are searching for a beekeeping guide. Or, we could end up planting herbs alongside the street trees in front of our apartment, which might result in the neighborhood management office putting up a sign charging a fine and the herbs being rooted up. These are the images I picture when I start thinking about a “garden.”

The primary meaning of the word niwa or niha, garden in Japanese, is, according to Shogakukan's Japanese Dictionary (Nihon-kokugo-daijiten), “a place where you conduct something.” The dictionary also states, “an area for hunting and agriculture located near a space for living, such as a house.…While there are various theories about the origin of the term, it likely stemmed from the kanji for soil (ni) and place (ha).” Thus, a garden is a workplace where humans and objects interweave. With the word niwa’s origin as a starting point, in this fourth issue of HBH we treat gardens as an experimental workplace surrounding our living space, a workplace where we can co-produce sustainable relationships with different species; it is a place where technologies to maintain the connection with an ever-changing life are constructed. This process may result in many different outcomes, successes, failures, or other changes, depending on how much human control is applied.

Historically, gardens have been a foundation for the human living environment. Untouched fields with living organisms are turned into gardens to accommodate human habitation and used for trial breeding and farming—the style of which, in HBH, we consider as Building Mode 1. The feature of a garden changes through Building Mode 2 and Building Mode 3. The former made the interchange of materials, both capitalistic and symbolic, possible after the rise of human civilization. The latter is when capitalism, after the Industrial Revolution, has reduced Earth to a mere resource to be consumed. Gardens in Building Mode 3 are enclosed spaces for viewing eccentric and beautiful things collected from all over the world. Take, for example, Asian gardens depicting Mount Penglai or the Buddhist Pure Lands, as well as the imperialistic and museum-like gardens that are created by plant hunters in the modern age. These gardens are the ones that most garden theories examine, and they are like a scale model or an encapsulation of the world, as if suggesting a passage to a different world. Even if gardens are sometimes enclosed—the word gardening apparently refers to enclosure—they change unpredictably, as they are still connected to the outside. The garden in Building Mode 4, which we focus on in this issue, appears from a blind spot after capitalism surrounds a garden, invades it, makes it uniform, destroys it, and eventually leaves it alone; it is a result of reforming the bond between Earth and life after things have been released from human control.

The uniqueness of our garden theories in HBH is, instead of talking about what a garden symbolizes, we examine a garden through connections between its components, living organisms, and the technologies that create and sustain a garden. In particular, in the first article of the issue, Dr. Masaki Fujita, an archaeologist who, inside a cave in Okinawa, discovered the oldest seashell fishhook, leads us to a garden in the Paleolithic Age. It is different from a so-called garden since there was apparently no place for farming and breeding before human settlement occurred, but we might guess that the “workplace” already existed. Dr. Fujita depicts a scene in which humans of that era demarcated certain areas as their territory for hunting and making tools in every season, letting us imagine the earliest form of workplace that coexisted with different species.

The next article takes up bonsai, or “minuscule garden.” Readers may wonder if bonsai suits the concept of this issue, since it often falls into the museum-like, garden-of-the-world category, symbolizing sacred mountains—well, it surely does. However, Dr. Toru Yoda, a bonsai historian, reveals that bonsai has duality. It has a symbolic form but also growing bonsai is a concrete process in which, over multiple generations, humans continually interact with non-human elements using precise techniques. It is a garden that deals with something that is out of our control since it lives beyond one generation of human life. Bonsai is one of the densest forms of sustainable and experimental relationship between human and non-human that characterizes a garden.

In the following two articles, we introduce two case studies of gardens outside Japan, which we think of as closest in form to gardens in Building Mode 4 at the present moment. One article discusses taking over an abandoned space for growing vegetables within an urban city, which we name “edible-avant-gardening.” Some American cities are outside the distribution system for fresh, cheap, and healthy food. There, edible-avant-gardening takes place as an experimental method for producing vegetables as well as for encouraging change in society and politics. The article includes an interview with Dr. Kristin Reynolds, a critical food geographer who works in theory and practice.

Another case study outside of Japan, and the last garden featured in this issue, takes place at Oostvaardersplassen, near Amsterdam, the Netherlands. It is a nature reserve covering about 56 square kilometers. It started off as an experimental project, led by Dr. Frans Vera, of the so-called “Pleistocene Rewilding,” introducing proxies for two extinct large herbivorous species from tens of thousands of years ago in Europe. The proxy species began breeding and shaping the ecosystem with other species that moved to the area. It is a “maximum garden,” one that started with human intervention and now is continuing without it. Dr. Noriko Matsuda, HBH editor, captures the present form of this ongoing project.

Each article develops its theory not just verbally but also visually to explain particular experiences and technologies of making a garden with the hope of encouraging readers to feel a world filled with living and non-living elements. Let's now step into our gardens.
(Translation by Mimu Sakuma)


Kei Hirakura
HIRAKURA Kei is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Urban Innovation, Yokohama National University. He earned his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Information Studies from the University of Tokyo. He has published widely on 20th and 21st century visual and performing arts in Japan, Europe, and the U.S., and theories of extended mind and embodied art making. He is the author of How Figures Think: Studies of Art Making (University of Tokyo Press, 2019), and Godard’s Method(s) (Inscript, 2010).

（4th Issue Editors: Kei HIrakura, Akihito Aoi, Naohiko Hino, Noriko Matsuda, Matthew Mullane）