Isuien Garden and Neiraku Museum

This guide to Isuien Garden in Nara starts in sixteen seventy, when Kiyosumi Michikiyo, a merchant grown wealthy on Nara-zarashi hemp cloth prized even by the Tokugawa shogunate, bought a plot of temple land along the Yoshiki River and built a modest teahouse he never meant as scenery, just a place to eat lunch beside a new pond. You'll hear how a Zen priest's name for that house stuck, and how, two centuries later, a Nara businessman named Seki Tojiro added a second, wilder garden framed around Todaiji's gate and the hills beyond it. Listen for how a borrowed view and a working kitchen ended up sharing the same address for three and a half centuries.