Sengan-en

Sengan-en is a garden and villa on the shore at Kagoshima, built for the Shimazu, the family that ruled Satsuma. It is a Place of Scenic Beauty, a national designation, and lies at the foot of the hills with the bay in front of it.

Shimazu Mitsuhisa, the nineteenth head of the family, laid out the garden in 1658 as the grounds of a villa. The Shimazu used it to receive guests, and after the Meiji Restoration, when Kagoshima Castle passed to the government, they lived here for a time.

The family had held southern Kyushu for some seven hundred years by then. In the 1840s the twenty-eighth head, Nariakira, began the Shuseikan project to arm the domain and build up its industry by Western methods; the remains of its reflecting furnace can be seen from the garden's orientation center. Saigo Takamori, who rose under Nariakira, later became one of the leaders of the Meiji Restoration.

The garden and the house

The garden is built on borrowed scenery, a method that takes the view beyond the grounds into the design. Here the volcano Sakurajima and Kinko Bay form part of the garden's view.

The residence, the Goten, is open to walk through. Under Tadayoshi, the twenty-ninth head, it served for a time as the family's main house and as the place where guests from Japan and abroad were received, and its rooms look out on Sakurajima.

Shoko Shuseikan

The museum next to the garden holds the history of the Shimazu and of southern Kyushu: cannon, models of Ryukyuan ships, and Satsuma Kiriko cut glass. It stands in the former Shuseikan machine works, completed in 1865 and the oldest stone-built Western-style factory in Japan. The building is an Important Cultural Property and, with part of Sengan-en, belongs to the World Heritage listing for the country's early industry.

Hands-on experiences are offered: dressing in a kimono or in samurai armour, cutting a piece of Satsuma Kiriko glass at the workshop, or shooting at a target in shihanmato (四半的), an archery game samurai played from the Muromachi to the Sengoku period, kneeling sideways to the target.