One of the great lessons to be learned from experiences with other cultures is how to see things from different perspectives. The Portland Japanese Garden can be a window onto new ideas and ways of thinking you may not have considered before. One of these ideas is an aesthetic concept called mitate 見立 (literally, to re-envision or to see anew), an idea that is demonstrated both in the practice of the tea ceremony and in the design of Japanese gardens such as ours.
“The word ‘mitate’ means ‘to see an object, not in the form that was originally intended for it, but as another thing,’ and was originally a literary term used in describing the technique of writing kanshi (Chinese poems) and Japanese waka,” according to the Omotesenke School of Tea Ceremony in Kyoto. The concept of mitate was appropriated by early masters of the Tea Ceremony who sought to offer a way to renew one’s spirit through a disciplined approach to a simple act of everyday life: the making of green tea. The masterful eye of the tea connoisseur was able to re-envision interesting found objects or objects from everyday life and integrate them gracefully into the aesthetics of Chanoyu or “hot water for tea,” the term used to describe this lesson in simplicity and awareness, a practice known commonly in English as the Tea Ceremony. Mitate objects used by the early masters of chanoyu embodied the essence of rustic, unpretentious simplicity—an explicit goal of this unique art form. Where elaborate and expensive imported ceramics were essential to earlier forms of aristocratic tea, simple objects such as crudely formed farmers’ rice bowls, for example, were discovered to be the perfect vessel with which to practice this unpretentious new style of tea. An ordinary water flask could be re-envisioned as a flower container, and the entry hatch of a ship could become the tiny nijiri-guchi doorway of a tea house.
William Sutton
Following the lead of tea masters, Japanese gardeners began to incorporate the concept of mitate into their work through the adaptive re-use of old objects into the design of new gardens. At the Portland Japanese Garden, you will find examples of mitate throughout the Garden in such things as old roof tiles embedded in garden paths or used as decorative borders and drains, ballast stones from old ships that docked in Portland used as paths and borders throughout the Garden, granite slabs from the old Civic Auditorium that form bridges and pathways, and in the rustic millstones that are used as stepping stones in some areas of the Garden.
The Portland Japanese Garden itself is an example of adaptive re-use. The 5.5 acre Garden site was formerly the site of the old Oregon Zoo, re-envisioned as the perfect site for a Japanese garden by civic leaders and brilliantly designed by Professor Takuma Tono of Tokyo Agricultural University in the early 1960s.
Learn more about this and other fascinating Japanese perspectives on the arts with a visit and guided tour of the Portland Japanese Garden.
