Rakusuien

This guide to Rakusuien in Fukuoka starts at the garden's entrance wall, pieced together from broken roof tiles and scorched stones rather than plain stone and mortar. It traces back to the 1580s, when rival warlords burned this merchant town to the ground three times over, and to the wealthy families who later gathered the wreckage into the boundary walls of their rebuilt homes, a technique called Hakata-bei. Look for the mix of split tiles and heat-cracked stone before you walk on toward the pond.