Soil, Symbol, and Synecdoche

This chapter traces the evolving history of the Albert Kahn Japanese Garden in Boulogne-Billancourt, near Paris, from its creation in the late 19th century through major redesigns in the 1960s and 1980s. Initially a product of Japonisme, the garden became a site of Franco-Japanese cultural diplomacy and an experimental arena for competing visions of ‘Japaneseness’ in landscape design—from Urasenke&s;s tea-ceremony aesthetics to Takano Fumiaki&s;s participatory, Jōmon-inspired reinterpretation. Matsugi shows how the garden functioned not only as a mirror of shifting international relations but also as a living laboratory in which Japanese culture was reimagined abroad, highlighting the transnational dynamics that shape even the most ‘traditional’ of cultural symbols.