庭の拝見

As a student in the Department of Visual Communication Design at Musashino Art University, I am studying typography, typesetting, and video production. For a book work built through typesetting on the theme of Japanese gardens, I visited gardens around Tokyo and, over the course of a year, interviewed tea-house hosts and their guests as well as gardeners.

Title / "Niwa no Haiken" (Viewing the Garden) About the project / A book work built through typesetting on the theme of Japanese gardens. I visited gardens around Tokyo and, over the course of a year, interviewed tea-house hosts and their guests as well as gardeners. Recognition / Selected for the 2026 Japan Typography Annual Format / Two volumes, "Niwa no Haiken I" and "Niwa no Haiken II" ⚫︎A4 ⚫︎Full color, 40p / 41p ⚫︎Thread-sewn binding ⚫︎Paper / Biotope GA-FS Table of contents (excerpt) / * Talk about the garden from the perspective of tea-house hosts and practitioners of the tea ceremony * The relationship between the tea ceremony and the garden * On the sense of distance from the garden's nature * An interview with garden designer Takayuki Hirai

Because I want to convey it while appealing to the viewer's bodily senses. I was committed to translating the very experience of appreciating a garden onto the page. For the binding, I adopted a structure that opens alternately on three faces — right, left, and center — reflecting the sensation of one's viewpoint shifting as you actually walk through a garden. Including the gentle sag that arises as the paper opens, I was mindful of an expression that conveys not only information but bodily sensation as well. A garden takes nature as its model, and the garden designer arranges the plants so that they seem to have grown there from the start. And yet it is so seamless, so natural, that one bathes in the pleasant feeling of green and passes right through without noticing. Into this work I put the intention of carefully drawing out the very atmosphere the garden itself holds, through the medium of a book.

I resonated with the part of this event's concept that says, "A book exists not only to be read, but within the experience of seeing, touching, and feeling." On that basis, when I looked into Iga as a place, I learned that many historic structures remain there. I was especially struck that the venue, the historic Sukodo, has been maintained as a hall serving as a library and cultural-property facility, cherished over a long span of time. The act of taking an experience — receiving the garden's atmosphere while still in that pleasant state — and recording it as a book was one in which the sensory experience I had been unconscious of was translated into paper, layout, ink, and thread, deepening my understanding all the more. That has nothing to do with whether one knows the proper etiquette; if anything, being an unfamiliar viewpoint may allow for a fresh way of receiving it. I would love for people to make the trip to Iga and, with a relaxed sensibility for reading, take this book in. I believe it can become an occasion to slowly draw out the appeal of gardens and their approach paths, in the same way one reads a book. It is also a way of conveying the thinking of those who made the garden and those who tend it every morning. I am very interested, too, in exchanges with the people who come all the way there to read, and with those who set up their stalls.