Sengan-en takes an active volcano as its garden hill and a bay as its pond. Laid out in 1658 by Shimadzu Mitsuhisa, nineteenth head of the house that ruled Satsuma, the villa garden is now more than 360 years old, and Sakurajima and Kinko Bay stand in for the elements a garden would ordinarily build for itself. Among Japan's borrowed-scenery gardens it is the largest gesture of all; only a daimyo house that governed the southern end of Kyushu for centuries could carry that scale.
In 2015 the group of industrial modernization sites centered on the Sengan-en area, including the neighboring Shoko Shuseikan, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. This is where late-Edo Satsuma drove Japan's industrialization. So one garden carries two lines at once: eight hundred years of Shimadzu formality and aesthetics, and the starting point of Japan's move into the modern era.
This is where the word formality gets its weight. A dinner laid inside the palace residence, takigi Noh played outdoors by firelight with Sakurajima behind it, sessions in armor or kimono, each rooted in Shimadzu history rather than set dressing. With a live volcano and a bay for backdrop and a daimyo villa for a table, even the most exacting VIP is in no doubt about how they have been received.