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The Japanese Garden Today

The Japanese garden in Hasselt is the largest of its kind in Europe. It’s the perfect setting to fully experience the Japanese culture. Originally, a Japanese garden encouraged meditation and reflection; this is no different in Hasselt. There are benches to sit on so you can enjoy the sound of the waterfalls, there are koi fish you can spot and feed in the water, there are many picnic places and there are many paths to walk around peacefully. Sometimes you can hear the peace bell ring. The peace bell has a permanent place in the garden since 2016. In addition, there are plenty of activities that are open to the public every month.

Guides provide a tour to give you an optimal experience in the Japanese Garden. There are Dutch, French and German speaking guides available. The Japanese Garden contains many details and background stories, making a guide very useful to understand everything. The coordinators of the Japanese Garden have a new book with all the information told by the guides; it costs €15 for the soft cover and €19 for the hard cover. Click here to purchase this book.

 

Mission

The Japanese Garden is one of the biggest tourist attractions of Limburg and helps ensure that Limburg maintains the most nature in Flanders. Limburg currently attracts the most nature-loving tourists. The main mission is to bring Japanese culture in and around Belgium. The innovations are already numerous: the pavilion was recently built and the peace bell was recently inaugurated. There is also the new website of the Japanese Garden to facilitate the reservations and to provide more transparency.

 

History

The history of the garden dates back to 1985, when the city of Hasselt and the Japanese city of Itami signed a friendship charter, allowing them to become sister cities.

Immediately thereafter they worked hard on the concrete realization of this twinning and numerous initiatives were taken to build a spontaneous relationship and provide a solid basis, for example the annual student exchanges. Proposed by Itami, they sought a permanent symbolic presence of both cultures in the two sister cities. Hasselt decided to donate a tower carillon and Itami conceived the idea of ​​a Japanese garden in Hasselt.

Japanese architect Takayuki Inoue was invited in Hasselt to choose the location for the garden. It quickly became clear that this would be no small city garden, as first thought, but a Japanese garden of 2,5ha in the place where once was nothing but a pasture.

The financial and material contributions for this were supplied by Itami. This city sought and found partners in the Japanese business world. For the remaining costs, the city of Hasselt has been able to rely on significant input from the European Regional Development Fund. And for the unsubsidized work, they found partners at Japanese institutions, Flemish companies and in subsidiaries of Japanese companies in Belgium.

Then the construction of the garden began. The original planting in the garden area was maintained as much as possible, which emphasizes the respect for nature of the Japanese. In addition, a lot of trees and bushes were planted, stones were brought from Austria to Hasselt and were carefully placed in the garden, bridges were built, rivers and waterfalls were made, and a number of traditional Japanese buildings were built. For these buildings, all the material were brought in from Japan, with the exception of power lines, the alarm system and sanitary fittings. The full realization of the garden, from the first diggings to the inauguration on November 20, 1992, took 250 working days.

Want to know more about its history? There are two books about the Japanese Garden. The first book is freely accessible.

Itami - Shi

Itami (伊丹市) is a city located in the Hyogo prefecture in Japan. The city has 197,335 inhabitants and covers a surface area of 25.09 km². It lays around 30 minutes from Osaka, an hour from Kyoto and six hours from the capital Tokyo.

The international airport of Osaka is almost completely located in Itami, just like our Brussels Airport is located in Zaventem. Aside from that the city is also known for its Koyaikepark, a beautiful nature park with a large model of the Japanese archipelago in one of its lakes. 

map itami

Sake

Just like Hasselt is famous for its Jenever, Itami is known for its sake. The Japanese alcoholic beverage, sake (酒) is rumored to be invented in our sister city Itami. The city houses one of the largest sake breweries in Japan, Konishi Brewing Company and Itami Oimatsu Brewing Company. Every year they organize the famous Shirayuki Kura Matsuri where they also serve our own Belgian beers. 

Konishi's 'Shirayuki' (white snow) sake is world famous. It was brewed for the first time in 1550 in the Nada quarter not that far from modern Itami. The sake was inspired by the white snow peaks of Mt. Fuji, and as such the company's slogan is: "the most beautiful mountain is Mt. Fuji, the best sake is Shirayuki".

You can taste this famed sake in the Japanese Garden: here you can find a link to group-activities (at the bottom of the page you can find the sake workshop)

You can buy the Shirayuki in Belgium at Het Anker, the beer brewery of Gouden Carolus: here a link to their page

You can also visit the city and experience their sake culture yourself: here a link to their website

sake fles

Sistercity

In the spring of 1984 the city of Hasselt was asked the question if they were interested in entering into a sister city relation with the Japanese city Itami. This was during a period that the Japanese economy was booming and had become the second largest economy in the world. The city of Hasselt grabbed this unique opportunity with both hands and this was the start of a fruitful sister city relationship between the two cities.

On April 5th,1985 the friendship agreement was signed in Itami by Yoichi Yano, former major of Itami and Paul Meyers, former mayor of Hasselt. 

In Hasselt the Flemish-Japanese golf-and business club(Nippon Golf) was founded and it was also the startof annual student exchanges between the two cities.

For the celebration of five years sister city relations Hasselt gave Itami a carillon tower with 43 bronze clocks in November 1990. And at the same time the city of Itami gifted the very authentic and largest Japanese Garden in Europe.

google map

Here you can find a video fragment made during the first opening days of the Garden.

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