Tetsugakudo Park: Where Even the Bridges Have a Philosophy

A park with a syllabus

The person responsible was Inoue Enryō, a philosopher and the founder of Toyo University. Beginning with the construction of Shiseidō, the Four Sages Hall, in 1904, he developed the grounds as a place where people could cultivate their minds through philosophy. Buildings, paths, stones and water became parts of the lesson, arranged into 77 named features.

Enryō said he paid for it with his handwriting. Over some thirty years he gave 5,291 lectures across Japan, and between engagements he wrote what he called his poor calligraphy for anyone who asked, saving the fees for the park. A verse carved on the park’s Brush Mound sums up the arrangement: writing characters and disgracing myself, just a little longer, until Tetsugakudo is built. In Japanese, the writing and the disgrace share a sound: kaku.

Shiseidō honours Confucius, the Buddha, Socrates and Kant. Nearby, the red, hexagonal Rokkendai tower honours six sages from Japan, China and India. Together, they give the park a faculty drawn from several countries and considerably more than one century.

The main gate has an equally deliberate selection of residents. Tetsurimon, the Gate of Philosophical Reason, houses a ghost and a tengu, a supernatural being familiar from Japanese folklore. For Enryō, they represented mysteries of the mental and physical worlds respectively.

The gate’s other name is the Yōkai Gate, and its signs are admirably direct. One reads, in effect, “Ghost: within.” The other: “Tengu: within.”

Matter and mind

Beyond the buildings, Enryō gave two approaches to understanding the world their own gardens. Yuibutsuen represents a view grounded in matter; Yuishintei represents one grounded in mind. The distinction determines more than the names on the signs. It shapes the routes between them.

A path cut through the hillside towards the garden of mind is called Dokudankyō. Its name refers to a philosophical approach based on thought rather than experience. The path is paired with an “Experience Slope” on the route towards the garden of matter.

A little light inside

The oni has a philosophical job of its own. Enryō designed it as a lantern bearer, with the weight of the light pressing down on the creature. The design made conscience visible as a force restraining the darker impulses within the human mind.

Across in the garden of matter, a stone tanuki offers another assessment of human nature. Tanuki are raccoon dogs, animals also familiar in Japanese folklore as tricksters. This one had a rounded belly with a conspicuous opening in it.

The opening was for a light. The accompanying explanation compared human behaviour to the tanuki’s trickery, while allowing that people could sometimes reveal a brighter spiritual nature. The lamp inside the belly represented those moments.

Enryō had left room for improvement. In this case, inside a tanuki.

The faculty keeps growing

The park’s international gathering of thinkers has also grown since Enryō’s day. Added in 2009, the Garden of Philosophy is a sculpture group by Nándor Wagner, bringing figures from religion, philosophy and law together in concentric rings. Photography is prohibited around the group, so this part of the park is missing from my photographs. I have also visited its counterpart in Budapest, Hungary.

For all these demands on the mind, the grounds also offered a straightforward spring afternoon. In March 2023, cherry blossoms hung over the paths, and people sat on benches beneath the trees. The philosopher’s carefully arranged world had room for shopping bags and a rest.