A very large private garden in Tokyo, featuring a pond, a stone bridge and an exotic looking building.
This is the private garden of Japanese businessman Sōichirō Asano (浅野 総一郎, 1848–1930) in Tokyo’s Shiba-Tamachi (芝田町), photographed in 1924 (Showa 13). The garden featured a pond, a stone bridge and buildings based on Nara Period architecture.
Located in Shiba, near Mita (三田), the Shiba-Tamachi area name vanished when the 23 wards were restructured in 1947 (Showa 22).
Asano founded many companies that are still active today, such as Sapporo Breweries, Toa Construction Corporation, Oki Electric Industry, and Taiheiyo Cement (formerly Asano Cement). At the end of WWII, the zaibatsu that he created was Japan’s fifth largest (after Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Nissan, and Sumitomo).
This glass slide is one of a series of slides of Japan that was used by the New York State Education Department to teach students about Japan.
Notes
1 I was able to identify this location using the image of Asano’s garden in Scenes of the Eastern Capital of Japan by K. Ogawa (東京風景, Meiji 44), pp. 96.
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Old Photos of Japan aims to be your personal museum for Japan's visual heritage and to bring the experiences of everyday life in old Japan to you.
To enhance our understanding of Japanese culture and society I track down, acquire, archive, and research images of everyday life, and give them context.
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Kjeld Duits
Reference for Citations
Duits, Kjeld (). Tokyo 1924: Japanese Garden, OLD PHOTOS of JAPAN. Retrieved on September 5, 2026 (GMT) from https://www.oldphotosjapan.com/photos/435/large-private-garden
Tornadoes28
Where is this? It is an amazing picture. The gardens and house look beautiful.
My guess is it is an old Feudal Domain residence.
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Kjeld Duits (Author)
It is somewhere in Tokyo. It doesn’t really look like what old feudal domain residences looked like, and it dates from 1924 when no feudal domain residences were left standing in Tokyo. It is more like the house of a rich merchant.
#000283 ·