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 middle of the nineteenth century the twenty-eighth head, Nariakira, set up ironworks and factories on the land next to the garden, to arm and supply the domain by Western methods. 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 stands for the hill in the garden and Kinko Bay for its pond.

The residence, the Goten, is open to walk through. It served as the family's main house and as the place where guests from Japan and abroad were received, and its rooms look out on the same view.

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 machine works Nariakira's successors built, the oldest stone-built Western-style factory in Japan, which is part of 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 with the short bow used in Satsuma.