Naritasan Park

Behind the main hall of Naritasan Shinshoji Temple, the ground falls away into a wooded garden of 165,000 square metres – roughly three and a half Tokyo Domes. Completed in 1928 on the hillside behind the temple, Naritasan Park holds around 250 mature trees, among them oaks, sawtooth oaks and ginkgos, along with some 350 cherries and around 500 plums, red and white.

The park was laid out to express a Buddhist idea: that all living things are worthy of respect. Its three ponds – Ryuchi, Ryuju and Monju – stand for the practice of releasing captive creatures back into the wild, and the garden as a whole is meant as a place where life is nurtured rather than taken.

Water runs down from the Yuhi Falls, which appears out of a great rock face below the temple's Komyodo hall, reached by steps that drop through the trees. The falls feed the three ponds in turn. In the largest, Ryuchi, a small pavilion stands out over the water, surrounded by carp that gather the moment anyone claps or offers food. Directly below the Great Peace Pagoda – a 58-metre tower that watches over the whole park – is a Western-style garden with a large fountain, which comes as a surprise in the middle of everything else.

Scattered through the grounds are stone monuments inscribed with poems by Basho, Takahama Kyoshi and other writers – evidence that verse was widely practised in Narita in their day.

The park also contains the Naritasan Calligraphy Museum. Beside it is a suikinkutsu, a buried jar into which water drips; put your ear close and the echo rings like a struck string.

The park runs events through the year for enjoying the seasons, the largest being a plum festival in late winter and a maple festival in autumn, when the leaves colour from mid-November into early December and the whole garden turns.

Both include music – koto and erhu performances among the trees – and both include tea. At the plum festival it is served outdoors in the plum grove, in the open-air style called nodate; at the maple festival, in the Sekishoan teahouse where the colour is at its best. Neither costs anything to join.