The Momiji Diaries – Part 8 – Matsue, Adachi Museum
by Jade Pavilions on 09/08/09 at 7:31 pm
14th November, Matsue, Shimane Province
We caught an early train to nearby Yasugi and picked up the minibus to the Adachi Museum. This was the main reason for the visit to Matue. The Adachi Museum of Art founded in recent times by Adachi Zenko is a masterpiece of paintings and ceramics on the inside and garden “art” on the outside, all viewed from within the museum. The garden is ranked by the US Journal of Japanese Gardens as the top Sukiya Garden in Japan. Personally although this is a garden of great beauty. 
It a lacks soul and can not be fully engaged by the viewer. The gardens include the visitors garden (seen here), a dry garden of massive scale, a moss garden full of morning freshness, the main dry landscape garden with its pine forest and mountain rock arrangement with flowing river of gravel, the excellent pond garden, the distant waterfall on the hill some kilometre behind and the white gravel and pine garden inspired by a painting by Hakusa Seisho (seen here). There is also a lovely tea garden and tea house serving tea if required.
We returned to Matsue for lunch and visited the lesser known temples of Gessho-ji, the burial ground of the Matsudaira clan. The temple contains a huge stone tortoise carrying an equally large tablet of stone. The temple has a small rather pleasant garden. The temple of Tenrin-ji was not open but of limited interest. We returned to the centre and called in at a riverside Minami-kan Ryokan (Japanese style hotel) with the purpose of having a coffee and seeing the garden. 
The hotel was not open for such but on presentation of our Japanese business cards we were proudly shown the immaculate dry landscape garden and tea house. The gardener welcomed us into the garden itself to take photos as he had disturbed the gravel himself. The picture shows a traditional water basin arrangement with standing rock, splash stones and Kasuga lantern. The copper roofed tea house has its’ own small garden with stepping stone path, four-eyed fence well pruned pines. A worthy find not seen by the general public.
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