The Secret Japanese Garden
This beautiful but at the same time strange garden is actually named the Shinto Peace Garden, located in Kanchanaburi city not far from one of the WW2 military cemeteries.
Despite it’s location it gets few visitors, and considering it’s strong links to the horrors of the Death Railway, not many people seem to know it’s there.
It’s a lovely place to wander around, or to sit under a Japanese pagoda and meditate on what it all means. You could easily spend a couple of hours here in complete harmony with your surroundings.
The garden was the brainchild of the Asia Peace Association and some Japanese organisations who wanted to create something that was almost, but not quite, a form of apology for the atrocities of the occupation by Japanese forces during WW2.
The garden was opened in 1995 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that war, designed to promote Asian peace, cultural understanding, as well as reflections on war time history.
The beautifully kept gardens contain Shinto shrines, engraved memorial stones, some formal and some random, a shrine to the warring nations, tall shady trees, and a rather odd ‘museum’.
The museum is in a carefully well kept Japanese style mansion, but can hardly be described as a museum, more a weird collection of stuffed animals, old telephones, a few Japanese masks, and a lot of unrelated knick-knacks, but it’s still worth a brief look. The caretakers are over enthusiastic in getting visitors to take a look around. (Entrance is free).
A visit here can easily be fitted in if you’re taking a tour by train from Bangkok.
Getting from Bangkok to Kanchanaburi
Google maps location reference is 3CX7+92Q or just search for Shinto Peace Garden Kanchanaburi.