The Ritual of Silence in Japanese Gardens: Wellness in Stillness
- Kimberley Cookey-Gam
- 19 hours ago
- 4 min read
Something that continues to surprise me after a few months of living in Japan is how much silence shapes daily life. It’s not the kind of silence that feels heavy or uncomfortable, but one that settles softly, like mist. I notice it walking through crowded streets, during the long stillness of bus rides, or in the rhythmic sway of a fast-paced subway. Even in cafés, public parks, and gardens, there is a shared agreement of quietude.
Here, silence is not absence – it is presence. Even an offering. Signs on trains remind you not to take phone calls, not as a rule to scold you, but as an invitation to respect the collective. What emerges is a culture where quiet moments are allowed to stretch and breathe. Whether it’s about not disturbing the person beside you, or creating a pause for your own reflection, silence is always within reach.
That became especially clear to me when I stumbled upon Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu. It wasn’t a planned visit but more of a lucky accident. I’d booked a hostel a 5-minute walk away, and one afternoon, after a long and intense few days of exploring the art islands of the Seto Inland Sea, I decided to stroll through. I thought I’d spend an hour or so there, maybe visit the teahouse or browse the small craft exhibition. But what I found was something far deeper… a landscape that invited me into stillness in a way I hadn’t experienced before.
‘Ritsurin Garden is designated as a “special Place of Scenic Beauty”’, the garden’s introduction notes, a title reserved for sites of exceptional cultural and aesthetic value. It is vast, with seventy-five hectares shaped across centuries, with six ponds, thirteen carefully arranged hills, and over a thousand pines, each one pruned by hand. Walking through, I felt the silence differently here. It wasn’t simply the lack of noise. It was the way the garden seemed to listen back. My footsteps softened on the gravel, the air thick with heat, and pine, and earth. The stillness of water broken only by the ripple of koi and the slow and graceful glide of turtles. I realised that silence here was not passive, it was active and deliberate. Crafted with as much care as the stones and trees themselves.
I stayed longer than I expected that day, lingering on benches, watching the light shift across the ponds. It was the kind of silence that doesn’t demand anything of you, but instead seems to open a door. I left feeling not only rested but rearranged somehow, with a new awareness of how silence can nourish.
The next morning I woke early, before sunrise, and found myself drawn back. By six o’clock I was at the gates again, wanting to experience the garden before the heat of the day enveloped me. This time, I brought my crochet. For me, crochet is a way of working with form and process, a way of slowing down and paying attention. Sitting by the water with my yarn, I felt as though the silence held me in place. It allowed me to experiment, to play, to let my creativity flow without interruption. This is one of the gifts of silence in Japan. It creates a container, a ritual space, where you can meet yourself more fully. In a culture that values longevity, silence is one of the threads that holds things together. It offers rest to the body, clarity to the mind, and the utmost respect to the community.
I went back to the teahouse within the garden to meet with a new Japanese friend I had made at the hostel the evening before. She needed a pause in her travels, and expressed her excitement to have a ‘serene setting where [she] could re-centre and ground [herself] peacefully and quietly.’
In Japanese gardens especially, silence is cultivated as carefully as the plants. The design of a garden is never random. It is ‘maintained down to the smallest detail.’ Every pond reflects the sky, every stone is placed for balance, every tree shaped to reveal its essence.
Within that order, silence becomes another material of design. It is the pause between sounds, the invitation to breathe, the softening of edges. When you walk through a garden like Ritsurin, you are not just looking at beauty — you are being invited into a relationship with it, one where silence is the language.
For me, this experience has altered the way I think about wellness. In the West, wellness often arrives packaged through apps, programs, even supplements – all telling us how to fix or improve ourselves. In Japan, I’m finding that wellness often arises from something much simpler: the space to be still. Silence, when practiced as a ritual, is a form of medicine. It soothes the nervous system, slows the breath, and makes space for imagination.
Looking back, I think what moved me most about Ritsurin Garden wasn’t simply its beauty, but the way it reminded me that silence is not empty, but generative. It makes room for creativity, for connection, for the long view of life. To sit quietly with yarn in hand, listening to nothing and everything all at once, was to feel part of a much larger design – one where silence is not just background, but the very ground on which wellness grows.
