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.

[Table of contents]

F/W 2012 issue 18

Table of contents

purple EDITO

purple NEWS

purple BEST OF THE SEASON

purple INTERVIEWS

purple FASHION WOMEN

purple FASHION MEN

purple DOCUMENTS

purple BEAUTY

purple TRAVEL

purple LOVE

purple NAKED

purple PHILO

purple NIGHT

purple WINTER

purple VISUAL ESSAY

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