Japan was the first nation to dedicate its pavilion, on February 24, 1915, and its garden was one of the most admired places at the fair. The landscape engineer H. Izawa, who had built the Japanese Gardens in London, worked on a little over three acres of bare ground. He used 257 rocks of more than a ton each, seven of them over three tons, nearly 1,300 trees of 36 species and 25,200 square feet of turf. Paths wound past pools, cascades and dry watercourses bridged with stepping stones, stone lanterns and bronze Buddhas, dwarfed cycads said to be 800 and 1,000 years old, and a wistaria two centuries old. From one spot the garden seemed to run on into the Presidio hills.
The main building, the "Golden Pavilion", copied in large part the Kinkaku-ji of the Rokuon-ji temple in Kyoto. It held the offices and reception room of the Imperial Commission and was built entirely of Japanese material by Japanese carpenters. Another building held a tourist office, life-size scenes of silk culture and a model of the Nikko shrines, some 25 buildings at one-twentieth scale on a base about 18 by 40 feet. Two tea houses, one for the Japan Central Tea Association and one for Formosa Oolong tea, stood at the northern end of the garden. A tea-ceremony room about nine feet square sat in a far corner.
The gardens opened with a small piece of theater: a silken cord was pulled from a balcony, and water rushed down a rock cascade to fill the pool. Japan's government appropriated 1,200,000 yen for its participation. It was separate from the commercial Japan Beautiful concession on the Zone.
Here you heard the murmur of little streams and the gurgling of cascades. At a certain spot you felt the illusion that this fairy region extended to the Presidio hills.
Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, vol. 3, p. 210 (1921)
