Yoshikien Garden

This guide to Yoshikien Garden in Nara begins with an oddly stubborn chore: keeping a carpet of cedar moss alive beside a thatched teahouse, watered by hand from underground springs. It traces how this plot passed from a Kofuku-ji sub-temple through Meiji-era land seizures into a private pleasure garden built in 1919, then into a postwar reception house where civil servants took tea. Watch the moss closely as you walk, it is the one thing here that never changed hands.