The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in Japan
18 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in Japan are Arashiyama Bamboo Grove, Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan and Kenroku-en. The list covers 18 gardens, parks and forests. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Japan is a mountainous, heavily forested chain of islands with a long tradition of treating trees, rocks and water as sacred, and its gardens grew out of that sensibility. Over centuries Japanese gardeners developed the stroll garden, which reveals a sequence of composed views around a pond, and the dry Zen garden, which suggests an entire landscape with gravel and stone. The seasons themselves, from cherry blossom to autumn maples, are part of the design.
Kenroku-en in Kanazawa and Kōraku-en in Okayama are two of the classic Three Great Gardens of Japan, broad stroll gardens of ponds, teahouses and pines. Ritsurin Garden in Takamatsu is set against a wooded hill, and Ryōan-ji in Kyoto holds the most famous rock garden in the country, fifteen stones arranged in raked gravel. In the same city, the Arashiyama bamboo grove forms a tall green corridor.
Single trees are honoured here like monuments. Jōmon Sugi on the island of Yakushima is an ancient cedar thousands of years old, and Miharu Takizakura in Fukushima is a weeping cherry counted among Japan's three great cherry trees. Hitachi Seaside Park turns its hills blue with nemophila in spring, and Farm Tomita in Furano is known for its lavender fields. The country's best aquariums appear here too, among them Okinawa Churaumi and Osaka Kaiyukan, both built around vast tanks for whale sharks.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Arashiyama Bamboo Grove | Forest | |
| 2 | Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan | Public aquarium | |
| 3 | Kenroku-en | Historic garden | |
| 4 | Kōraku-en | Historic garden | |
| 5 | Shinjuku Gyoen | Urban park | |
| 6 | Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium | Public aquarium | |
| 7 | Ryōan-ji Temple | Historic garden | ✓ |
| 8 | Jōmon Sugi | Remarkable tree | |
| 9 | Ritsurin Garden | Historic garden | |
| 10 | Hitachi Seaside Park | Urban park | |
| 11 | Miharu Takizakura | Remarkable tree | |
| 12 | Farm Tomita | Urban park | |
| 13 | Cedar Avenue of Nikkō | Remarkable tree | |
| 14 | Tōfuku-ji Temple | Historic garden | |
| 15 | Ashikaga Flower Park | Urban park | |
| 16 | Kawachi Wisteria Garden | Urban park | |
| 17 | Shiroyone Senmaida | Terraced fields | |
| 18 | Shiratani Unsui Gorge | Forest |
01 Arashiyama Bamboo Grove
Japan · 7.8 km from Kyoto35.009° N 135.667° E
Naokijp · CC BY-SA 4.0 The grove belongs to Sagano, the old district at the foot of the western hills, and it is woven into a landscape of temples and villas rather than standing alone as a forest.
Did you know? Neighbouring Tenryū-ji was founded in 1339 by the shogun Ashikaga Takauji to honour the memory of Emperor Go-Daigo, his former enemy.
02 Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan
Japan · 8 km from Osaka34.654° N 135.429° E
663highland · CC BY 2.5 What makes Kaiyukan remarkable is its idea rather than its size.
Did you know? The lowest three floors of the building are machine rooms and filtration plant, closed to the public.
03 Kenroku-en
Japan · 2 km from Kanazawa36.562° N 136.662° E
663highland · CC BY 2.5 The name was given in 1822 by Matsudaira Sadanobu, and means "garden of six attributes". It borrows a Chinese idea that a perfect landscape must unite six qualities that tend to cancel each other out: spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, flowing water and wide views.
Did you know? A small stone pagoda in the garden is traditionally said to have been brought back from Korea by the warlord Kato Kiyomasa after the invasions of the 1590s.
04 Kōraku-en
Japan · 1.7 km from Okayama34.668° N 133.935° E
663highland · CC BY-SA 4.0 Ikeda Tsunamasa, daimyo of Okayama, ordered its construction in 1687, and the garden was completed in 1700. It was first called Kōen, the "later garden", because it was laid out after the castle; in 1871 it received its present name, which echoes a Confucian maxim that a ruler should worry before his people and take his pleasure after them.
Did you know? Under shogunate scrutiny the lords did not receive outside guests here; the first recorded visit was in 1830, when Ikeda Narutoshi hosted his father, the lord of Satsuma.
05 Shinjuku Gyoen
Japan · 3.5 km from Tokyo35.687° N 139.711° E
Kakidai · CC BY-SA 3.0 The redesign was the work of Henri Martinet, a French landscape architect, and it explains why the park feels like three gardens stitched together. In the north there is a symmetrical French formal garden and an English landscape garden of broad lawns and loose groups of trees; in the south lies a traditional Japanese garden of ponds, islands, bridges and clipped shrubs, with a traditional tea house.
Did you know? Before becoming a botanical garden, the former Naitō estate served from 1872 as an experimental agricultural station of the new Meiji government.
06 Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium
Japan26.694° N 127.878° E
Image by Yukaloha from Pixabay The aquarium stands in Ocean Expo Park on the Motobu Peninsula in the north of Okinawa's main island, on the site of the 1975 International Ocean Expo. Its predecessor, opened there in 1976, became one of the first aquariums anywhere to keep whale sharks and manta rays over long periods; one whale shark has now lived in its care for about three decades.
Did you know? Its sea turtle pool was the first in the world to breed hawksbill turtles to a third generation in captivity.
07 Ryōan-ji Temple
Japan · 2.7 km from Kyoto35.034° N 135.718° E
- UNESCO World Heritage
663highland · CC BY-SA 4.0 The temple belongs to the Myōshin-ji branch of Rinzai Zen. The land was an estate of the Fujiwara clan, whose large pond still lies in the temple grounds. In 1450 the warlord Hosokawa Katsumoto founded a Zen temple here; it burned in the Ōnin War, and his son Masamoto rebuilt it in 1488. The garden's own origins are uncertain.
Did you know? Because the rebuilt garden sat higher than before, visitors once looked over the wall to distant hills; trees now block that view.
08 Jōmon Sugi
Japan30.361° N 130.532° E
Σ64 · CC BY 3.0 Its age is a matter of long debate. Early estimates in the 1970s spoke of more than 7,000 years, figures that gave the tree its fame and its name, which recalls Japan's prehistoric Jōmon period; another reading links the name to the rippling surface of the trunk, which resembles the cord-marked patterns of Jōmon pottery. Later work was more cautious.
Did you know? Its discovery helped build Yakushima's tourist industry, which today accounts for more than half of the island's economy.
09 Ritsurin Garden
Japan · 1.7 km from Takamatsu34.330° N 134.044° E
Leela Soden · CC BY-SA 3.0 It took more than a century to make. The feudal lord Ikoma Takatoshi began it around 1625, and when the Matsudaira family took over the Takamatsu domain they continued the work, generation after generation, until the fifth Matsudaira lord, Yoritaka, completed it in 1745. After the Meiji Restoration the government took it over, and on 16 March 1875 it opened to the public.
Did you know? The interlocking black pines of the Hakomatsu, the 'box pine', have been shaped by the garden's gardeners for more than 300 years.
10 Hitachi Seaside Park
Japan · 10.5 km from Mito36.401° N 140.591° E
Image by nyan8 from Pixabay The ground was not always a garden. Before the park, the land was the Mito East airfield, later used by the US Air Force as a bombing range. Planning to turn it into a public park began in 1979, construction in 1984, and the first 70 hectares opened in October 1991.
Did you know? The name Hitachi has nothing to do with the electronics firm: it recalls Hitachi Province, the old name for what is now Ibaraki Prefecture.
11 Miharu Takizakura
Japan · 10.7 km from Kōriyama37.408° N 140.500° E
Ｒ type poplar · CC BY-SA 4.0 The tree is estimated to be more than a thousand years old. 5 metres around, and the canopy spreads roughly 22 metres from east to west and 18 from north to south. It was designated a national natural monument of Japan in 1922, and it is counted both among the five great cherry trees of the country and among its three giant cherries.
Did you know? In the Edo period the lords of the Miharu domain protected it as an official domain tree.
12 Farm Tomita
Japan · 37.5 km from Asahikawa43.419° N 142.427° E
t-konno · CC BY-SA 3.0 Its story begins with settlers. Tokuma Tomita came to Hokkaido among the wave of migrants from Honshu who arrived after an 1897 law opened the island's uncultivated land, and in 1903 he started clearing the ground in what is now Nakafurano.
Did you know? The farm has its own distillery building, where lavender cut from the fields is processed into essential oil on site.
13 Cedar Avenue of Nikkō
Japan · 25 km from Utsunomiya36.723° N 139.691° E
koh-etsu · Public domain The planting belongs to the age of the Tokugawa shoguns. Their road system was marked with distance mounds and shaded by rows of pine or cedar, and the routes to Nikkō mattered more than most, because Nikkō held the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the shogunate, and later of his grandson Iemitsu, so shoguns and feudal lords travelled there on pilgrimage for generations.
Did you know? Since 1996 a sponsorship scheme has let companies and individuals become symbolic owners of individual trees, raising money for their protection.
14 Tōfuku-ji Temple
Japan · 6.7 km from Kyoto34.976° N 135.774° E
PlusMinus · CC BY-SA 3.0 The monastery was founded in 1236 by the imperial chancellor Kujō Michiie, who took its name from two great temples of Nara, Tōdai-ji and Kōfuku-ji. Its first abbot was the monk Enni, who had studied Rinzai Zen in China under Wuzhun Shifan; a portrait of his teacher painted in 1238, which Enni brought back with him, is still kept here.
Did you know? The temple bathhouse of 1459, with two steam baths side by side, is the oldest surviving bathhouse building in Kyoto.
15 Ashikaga Flower Park
Japan36.315° N 139.522° E
ja:User:京浜にけ · CC BY-SA 3.0 The park traces its beginnings to the 1920s, when a landowner in Ashikaga planted a wisteria in a corner of his garden. In 1968 the family opened the garden so that local people could enjoy the vine in bloom, as Hayakawa Farm, the forerunner of today's park.
Did you know? A national night-view ranking placed the park's illumination first in Japan for seven years running, from 2016 to 2022.
16 Kawachi Wisteria Garden
Japan · 5 km from Kitakyūshū33.832° N 130.792° E
そらみみ (Soramimi) · CC BY-SA 4.0 The garden is private and was opened in April 1977 by Higuchi Masao in the hills of Yahatahigashi ward, on the southern side of Kitakyushu. It covers roughly 10,000 square metres, and the area under blossom alone runs to about 6,000. Around twenty varieties are grown, from the long-tendrilled Noda wisteria to double-flowered and white forms, with azaleas planted among them.
Did you know? In 2015 CNN included the garden in its list of the 31 most beautiful places in Japan.
17 Shiroyone Senmaida
Japan37.425° N 137.000° E
Totti · CC BY-SA 4.0 The fields are a product of the Kaga domain. After Maeda Toshiie received Noto Province in 1581, land clearance was encouraged, and around 1632 the Taniyama and Sasora irrigation channels were dug to bring river water to this slope.
Did you know? The soil on the slope is naturally fertile, so the paddies need less fertiliser than usual while yielding around 2.6 koku of rice per tan.
18 Shiratani Unsui Gorge
Japan30.380° N 130.574° E
Σ64 · CC BY 3.0 The protected area covers about 424 hectares between roughly 600 and 1,100 m above sea level. Here the evergreen broadleaf forest of the lower slopes, with oaks, distylium and machilus, begins to mix with hemlock and fir, and gives way to the old Yakusugi cedars for which the island is known. The best-known of them, the Yayoi-sugi, is estimated to be around 3,000 years old and has become the emblem of the gorge.
Did you know? The rain gauge at the gorge entrance averages about 7,400 mm a year, and in October 2017 alone it recorded 3,381 mm.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful gardens, parks and forests in Japan?
- On our list, Arashiyama Bamboo Grove ranks first, followed by Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan and Kenroku-en.
- What are the Three Great Gardens of Japan?
- They are Kenroku-en in Kanazawa, Kōraku-en in Okayama and Kairaku-en in Mito. All three are large stroll gardens created by feudal lords during the Edo period.
- What is a Japanese Zen rock garden?
- A Zen rock garden, or karesansui, is a dry landscape of raked gravel, stones and sometimes moss, with no water. The gravel stands for water and the stones for islands or mountains, and the garden is meant to be contemplated from a fixed viewpoint, as at Ryōan-ji in Kyoto.
- How old is Jōmon Sugi?
- Jōmon Sugi is the largest Japanese cedar on Yakushima, and estimates of its age range from around 2,000 to more than 7,000 years. Its exact age remains unknown.
- How many gardens, parks and forests are on this list in Japan?
- The list covers 18 gardens, parks and forests.