SilkThe thread that paid for modern Japan, and the garden it left behind

When Yokohama opened in 1859, Japan had almost nothing the world wanted to buy. It had one exception, and the timing was extraordinary: a disease called pébrine was destroying the silkworms of France and Italy at exactly that moment.

Japanese raw silk filled the gap. Within a few years it was the dominant export leaving Yokohama, and it stayed dominant for decades. Silk paid, in the most literal sense, for the machines, ships and foreign engineers that turned an agricultural country into an industrial one.

The road, and the mill

Raw silk came down from the mountains of Gunma, Nagano and the Hachioji hills along a route the locals still call the Silk Road — about forty kilometres of cart track from Hachioji to Yokohama. Every bale on that road was going onto a ship here.

In 1872 the government opened the Tomioka Silk Mill in Gunma: a French-designed brick filature run with French machinery and a French engineer, staffed largely by young women recruited from across the country and sent home as instructors. It is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Japan overtook China as the world's largest raw silk exporter early in the twentieth century.

The Depression halved the price. Then nylon arrived. Within a generation, the industry that had built this port was essentially gone.

What one merchant did with the money

Hara Tomitaro, who traded as Sankei, made a fortune in silk and spent a great deal of it on something almost nobody does: he bought historic buildings that were about to be demolished elsewhere in Japan, dismantled them, and rebuilt them in his own garden above the sea.

Sankeien opened to the public in 1906 — seventeen and a half hectares, seventeen relocated structures, and the whole thing free to anyone who wanted to walk in. The centrepiece is a three-storey pagoda of 1457, brought from Tomyoji in Kyoto and now the oldest such pagoda in eastern Japan. There is a farmhouse from the snow country with a roof like a folded hand, and a villa associated with the Tokugawa family.

Hara also kept a circle of painters and craftsmen at his own expense. The garden is not a rich man's trophy so much as a rich man's argument that these things should not be lost — made in the decade when Japan was busy discarding them.