bottom of the pond, symbolizing the misery of the human condition, but its flower is pure white, symbolizing the purity of spirit that can be achieved by following the teachings of the Buddha. The Japanese rock gardens were intended to be intellectual puzzles for the monks who lived next to them to study and solve. They followed the same principles as the suiboku-ga, the black-and-white Japanese inks paintings of the same period, which, according to Zen Buddhist principles, tried to achieve the maximum effect using the minimum essential elements. One painter who influenced the Japanese garden was Josetsu (1405–1423), a Chinese Zen monk who moved to Japan and introduced a new style of ink-brush painting, moving away from the romantic misty landscapes of the earlier period, and using asymmetry and areas of white space, similar to the white space created by sand in zen gardens, to set apart and highlight a mountain or tree branch or other element of his painting. He became chief painter of the Shogun and influenced a generation of painters and garden designers. Japanese gardens also follow the principles of perspective of Japanese landscape painting, which feature a close-up plane, an intermediate plane, and a distant plane. The empty space between the different planes has a great importance, and is filled with water, moss, or sand. The garden designers used various optical tricks to give the garden the illusion of being larger than it really is, by borrowing of scenery ("shakkei"), employing distant views outside the garden, or using miniature trees and bushes to create the illusion that they are far away. Noteworthy Japanese gardens In Japan The Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of the government of Japan designates the most notable of the nation's scenic beauty as Special Places of Scenic Beauty, under the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties. As of March 2007, 29 sites are listed, more than a half of which are Japanese gardens (boldface entries specify World Heritage Sites): Tōhoku region Mōtsū-ji Garden (Hiraizumi, Iwate) Kantō region Kairaku-en (Mito, Ibaraki) Rikugi-en (Bunkyō, Tokyo) Kyu Hamarikyu Gardens (Chūō, Tokyo) Chūbu region Kenroku-en (Kanazawa, Ishikawa) Ichijōdani Asakura Family Gardens (Fukui, Fukui) Kansai region Byōdō-in Garden (Uji, Kyoto) Jisho-ji Garden (Kyoto, Kyoto) Nijō Castle Ninomaru Garden (Kyoto, Kyoto) Rokuon-ji Garden (Kyoto, Kyoto) Ryōan-ji Garden (Kyoto, Kyoto) Tenryū-ji Garden (Kyoto, Kyoto) The garden of Sanbōin in Daigo-ji (Kyoto, Kyoto) The moss