TOUR THIS JAPANESE GARDEN

The Kokoen Garden is near Himji in Japan and is part of a tourist trail whose main feature is the Himeji castle. I stumbled across this post by Yooya on her yooya wordpress blog. It appears that she was not overly impressed by the garden, but she has posted some great pictures. Well worth a look as distraction from the winter gloom.

I bought a ticket for both Himeji Castle and the adjoining Kokoen Garden, so after my 2-hour visit to the castle and lunch at the station, I headed for the garden. To be honest, I didn?t like it that much. Maybe the type of garden is just not my style or I was there in the wrong season, but it was rather plain to me. It was a beautiful garden in general, of course, but nothing out of the ordinary. After seeing Kumamoto?s Suizenji Garden my expectations might just be too high. It?s my favourite garden so far, so anything less might well be disappointing to me. It only took half an hour to go around the garden, so in any case it wasn?t big.
I did like the parts with the ponds though! The reflections were beautiful. Oh and fun fact; some scenes from Rurouni Kenshin were supposedly filmed here.