Gardening Wisdom

Featured Garden: Jackson Park’s Osaka Japanese Garden

October 24th, 2009

Chicago, Illinois

The Osaka Japanese Garden began over a century ago with the scraping and building up of a natural oak savanna sandbar—then a peninsula—for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. On what became Wooded Island, it was constructed with a Ho-o-den building that served as the government of Japan’s pavilion during the Exposition. The Japanese Garden survived through many changes and, after recent restoration efforts, has been known formally as “Osaka” since 1995—a tribute to Chicago’s sister city in Japan.

Landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted was at first reluctant to accept the offer by the Japanese government to build a formal garden, temple, and tea house, because he had originally conceived of the island as a rustic resting spot and a retreat from the bustle of the Fair. But the offer was too good for Fair architect & manager Daniel Burnham to resist, and ultimately, the pavilion and Ho-o-den blended harmoniously with nature in a way the rest of the Fair buildings clearly did not—making it highly popular.

1893, Starks W. Lewis (Brooklyn Museum Archives)

The Japanese exhibition and pavilion at the fair helped introduce Americans to Japanese culture, religion, arts, and architecture. (Frank Lloyd Wright was one of several architects and artists affected by the Pavilion.) The exterior look and visible structure—form following function—as well as the interconnecting corridors and holistic flow of the “rooms” influenced Wright and others.

The Ho-o-den Pavilion remained after most of the rest of the Fair was torn down or burned, and Olmsted (followed by his sons) redesigned the island, lagoons, and park. Today, one special lantern, now found south of the current tea house, is probably the only original furnishing that remains—although some say this was made later as a replacement.

Changes since the Fair:

• In 1933–4 the city of Chicago, with help from the government of Japan, constructed a traditional Nippon Tea House at the Century of Progress World’s Fair on Chicago’s south lakefront, built a garden on Wooded Island’s northeast side, and refurbished the Ho-o-den at the renovated north end of the Island.
• The Torii Gate, Nippon Tea House, and lanterns from the Century of Progress were moved in 1935 to Wooded Island, near the Ho-o-den, and a traditional Japanese Garden was designed by George Shimoda and built thanks again to Japan.
• In 1973, Chicago re-established its sister city relationship with the city of Osaka, Japan. One of the goals of the Sister City program was to revive the Japanese Garden in Jackson Park.
• When Jackson Park was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, the Park Distinct added new landscaping, stabilized the shoreline, and restored and reconstructed most of the original features over the next decade.
• Efforts to restore the garden and rebuild a simplified tea house reached fruition, starting with reopening in 1981 and 1983, when the Garden restoration was completed and the garden rededicated. Featured were flowering trees, evergreens, shrubs, and flowers. Other features included a pavilion, moon bridge, rock waterfall, two granite symbolic boat docks, lanterns, and new landscaping.
• The garden was renamed the Osaka Japanese Garden in 1995.