Go-Mizunoo abdicated in 1629 after years of friction with the Tokugawa shogunate, which had steadily stripped the imperial court of real power. Denied political authority, he channeled his considerable intellect into the arts. To build his villa, he first had to displace the Ensho-ji nunnery, founded by his own eldest daughter, Princess Ume-no-miya. The nunnery was relocated to Nara, and construction began on what would become three separate gardens spread across 53 hectares of hillside. There were never any grand palace buildings here, despite the name "imperial villa." Go-Mizunoo wanted teahouses and viewing pavilions, intimate spaces designed for contemplation rather than ceremony. The result is less a palace than a choreographed walk through landscape, each turn calculated to shift the visitor's relationship with the surrounding terrain.

The Lower Garden greets visitors with restraint: white sand, stepping stones, a small brook dividing a quiet pond. The Jugetsu-kan villa here is deliberately modest, its largest room just fifteen tatami mats, though it holds a painting of the Three Laughing Sages of Kokei attributed to Ganku. The Middle Garden came later, built around a temple established by Go-Mizunoo's daughter Princess Mitsuko after she took religious vows. Its Kyaku-den reception hall contains the celebrated Shelf of Mist, carved from zelkova wood, and paintings by masters of the Kano school. But everything points upward, toward the Upper Garden, where the true genius of the design reveals itself. Two straight pine-lined allees, each about a hundred meters long, cut through surrounding rice paddies to connect the gardens, framing views of the working landscape that feeds the city below.

The Upper Garden delivers its revelation through a simple act of choreography. Visitors climb through a gate and pass along a narrow path hemmed by clipped hedges that deliberately block all sightlines. Then the hedge falls away, and the full panorama opens at once: a vast artificial pond created by damming a ravine, scattered with small islands, flanked by the Chitose-bashi bridge with its twin pavilions topped by a gilt copper phoenix. Beyond the pond, the Kyoto hills stretch to the horizon, folded seamlessly into the garden's composition. The Rinun-tei pavilion, whose name means "Cloud Touching Arbor," sits at this commanding vantage. A ten-meter waterfall of rough-hewn stone tumbles nearby. The effect is neither purely natural nor purely designed but something in between, an imperial claim on the landscape made not through force but through framing.

After Go-Mizunoo's death, the gardens drifted toward ruin. Buildings were destroyed or dismantled. The careful plantings grew wild. It took the 11th Tokugawa shogun, Ienari, to order a thorough renovation. Then in 1883, the Imperial Household Department assumed control, moving a large building into the Middle Garden and constructing the fences and enclosed pathways that define the Shugakuin's character today. The surrounding rice paddies, still actively farmed, remain essential to the villa's design. They provide the middle-distance texture that connects the manicured gardens to the borrowed mountains beyond. The Imperial Household Agency now administers the site and accepts visitors strictly by appointment, preserving the sense of intimate discovery that Go-Mizunoo intended nearly four centuries ago.