Suizenji Jōjuen Garden (水前寺成趣園) 水前寺成趣園
The water in the pond comes underground from Aso, and since 2016 less of it has been arriving.
In 1632 Hosokawa Tadatoshi, first lord of the Kumamoto domain, set up a tea house here; the garden in its present form was completed in 1671 by the third lord, Tsunatoshi. It is a stroll garden of about 73,000 square metres: the route recreates in miniature the celebrated sights of the Tōkaidō, the coastal road between Edo and Kyoto that Hiroshige had made famous with his prints. Inside the garden there is also Izumi-jinja, the shrine dedicated to the Hosokawa lords. Since 17 December 1929 it has been 名勝, a ‘Place of Scenic Beauty’ in the national register of cultural properties, and the ministry's record describes it as a garden of hillocks and stretches of water, with a spring that wells up inside the pond and has no equal. After the 2016 earthquake the flow of that spring dropped, and since 2026 volunteers have been going down into the pond to remove the gravel and clean the stones to bring it back.
Kumamoto
Shin-Suizenji, Suizenji
