Kinsaku Nakane

Kinsaku Nakane (1917 – 1 March 1995) was a landscape garden designer, builder, restorer, and professor. He was the president of the Nakane Garden Research Institute and president of the Osaka University of Fine Arts.

Nakane studied city planning in college and became interested landscape architecture on a vacation trip in Kyoto, Japan. There he learned about Japanese architecture and landscape architecture, professions he was not familiar with before his trip. He visited structures such as the Silver Pavilion, Ryoan-ji Temple, and the Katsura and Shugakuin detached palaces. He inspired by what he saw in Kyoto, and consequently turned down a position in the Tokyo Metropolitan City Planning Department after graduation to better understand what he saw in Kyoto.

Nakane returned to Kyoto where he lived the rest of his life. He had a son, Shiro Nakane, who also made contributions to landscape architecture. Shiro Nakane took over as president of Nakane and Associates, a garden research center and landscape consultancy that was founded by Nakane in 1966. Nakane, by the end of his career, had projects in multiple countries, not just in Kyoto, Japan.

Nakane died from a heart attack in Kyoto, Japan on 1 March 1995; he was 77 years old.

Career

Starting in landscape architecture Kinsaku Nakane began his landscape architecture career by constructing a complicated fence design in the gardens in which he worked. Once he worked his way up to having his own gardening crew working for him, he believed that there are two phases of being an apprentice in the landscape architecture industry, both lasting five years each. The first phase consisted of apprentices learning the basic skills of construction and maintenance within a garden. The second phase consisted of apprentices making their own construction decisions and being their own teachers by learning from their decisions. The apprentices had to learn the ritualized ceremony of drinking powdered tea because the orientation of the garden is crucial in the ceremonial process.

Nakane admired the aesthetic of the tea-drinking ceremony because anyone could copy the operations of the ceremony, but not everyone could replicate the aesthetic in them, much like building gardens. Nakane did not build his own garden till he was thirty-eight years old, thirteen years after he started working in Kyoto.

Some of his other work includes his first project, the Jonangu Shinto Shrine in Kyoto. The Jonangu Shinto Shrine is a garden in a Shinto shrine where people go to pray for good health and fortune. Another notable project of his in the United States is the Japanese garden at the Jimmy Carter Library and Conference Center in Atlanta, Georgia. His garden at the Adachi Museum of Art in Singapore is another project which he completed outside of Kyoto. This garden used the Japanese style because Singapore did not have a style of garden at the time and the client, Mr. Adachi, wanted a unique garden built in a traditional style.