ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the tea garden, which evolved in the sixteenth century as an aspect of the preference for wabi taste, through Japanese cultural negotiations with China. The design principles which informed roji, conceived and built by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chanoyu masters, were the result of Japanese cultural interactions with China in the medieval period. The chapter argues that design ideas represented in roji and informed by wabi are evidence that the taste of formative tea ceremony masters was deeply informed by Chinese culture. The aesthetic principles of ordinariness and plainness permeated every aspect of the tea ceremony that developed in line with wabi principles: from the garden, teahouse, scroll, and flower arrangement decorating the room, down to even the way of preparing tea itself. The chapter considers roji as complex sites where the intellectual traditions of ascendant culture of China, transmitted by way of religious philosophy and literary theory to Japan, were realised in the form of garden type.
