The Home: Lanterns for Landscapers

Aboard the Japanese freighter Oshima Maru, which left Yokohama last week, were two stone garden lanterns on their way to Hyannisport, Mass. The lanterns —one a three-ton, nine-foot model called kasuga, the other a one-ton, four-footer called yukimi (“snow-viewing” lantern)—are a present for President Kennedy from Professor Gunji Honoso, silver-haired international law expert at Tokyo’s Aoyama Gakuin University, who got to know the President back in the days when Kennedy was a junketing Senator. Cost of both lanterns: $1,250.

Stone lanterns, part of the current boom in all things Japanese, are popping up like granite mushrooms in thousands of U.S. gardens, patios and motel parking areas. The average small lantern, standing three feet high, costs only about $100, including crating and handling. So great is the demand that Japanese stonemasons, a traditionally unhurried lot and given to meditative puffs on bamboo pipes between mallet whacks, have a tremendous backlog of orders piling up. Japan is exporting an average of 2,000 lanterns a month, most of them to the U.S. Many U.S. tourists buy them at Ishikatsu, Tokyo’s largest masonry shop, and have them shipped home.

Good lanterns, say Japanese landscape gardeners, must have a “built-in” feel of age, restraint, and a special beauty known as shibui. Placing one in a garden is a matter of the most delicate importance: it must stand beside a pond or brook, where its reflection will be seen by garden strollers “at exactly the right moments and in the right angles.” One problem facing Professor Honoso, who arrives at Hyannisport early next month to personally supervise the installation of the gift lanterns: the Kennedy compound has neither ponds nor brooks.