Okochi Sanso Garden

The gate to Okochi Sanso sits nestled into the hillside, marked by the weathered stone walls that transition into a sprawling, multi-leveled villa and garden complex. Denjiro Okochi, a silent film star from the nineteen twenties, spent thirty years meticulously crafting this retreat. He used his earnings from samurai movies to obsessively landscape the slope, planting hundreds of cherry and maple trees by hand. He lived here in solitude, perfecting the paths and views until he died in nineteen sixty-two.