Yoko Museum, Japanese Garden Keishuen

This cultural facility features an art museum set within a Japanese garden. Keishuen, which spans Approx. 3,000 tsubo, is a strolling pond garden created by landscape designer Kinsaku Nakane, known as the “Kobori Enshu of the Showa era.” Highlights include dramatic rock arrangements made with Approx. 2,000 tons of massive stones, waterfalls large and small, ponds, tea fields, and the scenery they create together. With Mount Mifuneyama as its borrowed scenery, the garden reveals a different beauty in every season: colorful azaleas and weeping cherry blossoms in spring, the chorus of cicadas under the bright summer sun, autumn foliage, and the quiet look of withered plants and snow in winter.

Yoko Museum, which appears to float on the pond like a pavilion, exhibits Chinese ceramics—the roots of ceramics in Saga, a place regarded as the birthplace of Japanese porcelain. Its collection includes valuable works such as the Qing-dynasty “Jade Gourd Vase with Carved Insects and Movable Links” and the Yuan-dynasty “Blue-and-White Jar with Fish and Aquatic Plant Design.” There is no permanent exhibition; displays change with special exhibitions and themed displays, making it a place where visitors can encounter something new each time.