Purple Magazine
— F/W 2012 issue 18
Tokyo Park
text and photography by CHIKASHI SUZUKI
What motivated me to take photographs of these three gardens in Tokyo — the Imperial Palace, Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, and Hamarikyu Garden — were Nobuyoshi Araki’s pictures of the Imperial Palace, which I saw in his book Tokyo Story (1989), and Wolfgang Tillmans’ picture of a pine tree inside the Imperial Palace, which he shot in 1997. Both photographs are quite different from the ancient-looking Japanese park that I saw for myself. They left both a very modern and a very minimalistic impression on me.
These three places now belong to the Imperial Palace. Before World War II they were owned by a samurai named Tokugawa, and they are perhaps among the very few places where Japan’s samurai roots can still be felt. Life has drastically changed since then.
