Adachi Museum of Art — World's Best Japanese Garden

Adachi Museum of Art has been ranked the #1 Japanese garden in Japan by the Journal of Japanese Gardening for over 20 consecutive years, beating every temple garden in Kyoto, every imperial garden, everything. Founder Adachi Zenko designed 165,000 square meters of grounds as 'living paintings'—you view six separate gardens through picture-frame windows that compose the landscape like a scroll painting. The gardens change with the seasons, and gardeners work daily (raking gravel, trimming moss, adjusting every branch) to maintain the aesthetic. You can't walk in the gardens; you can only look through the frames. Adachi believed 'the garden is also a painting,' and the museum enforces that literally. The museum also holds a world-class collection of modern Japanese paintings, especially Yokoyama Taikan. You alternate between viewing painted landscapes on the walls and actual landscapes framed in the windows, and the line between them blurs.