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The Japanese try to express the beauty of nature in their traditional gardens. The elements of a Japanese garden represent the elements of nature. Two basic styles of Japanese gardens are:
    Tsukiyama Style: In a Tsukiyama garden, small hills and stones represent mountains, and a pond represents the ocean.
    Karesansui Style: Dry garden style: White sand represents the ocean, and stones represent the hills. This garden style is strongly influenced by Zen Buddhism.
The Japanese garden embodies native values, their cultural beliefs and religious principles. This is why there is no one prototype for the Japanese garden, just as there is no one native philosophy or aesthetic. In this way, similar to other forms of Japanese art, landscape design is constantly evolving because of the influx of mainland, namely Chinese, influences as well as the changing aesthetic tastes and values of the patrons.
The Japanese garden evolved from the landscaping of gardens and it developed into an original art form to become an important part of the Japanese culture. The art of Japanese garden is closely associated with the art of architecture and the stone arrangement which are the integral part of the comprehensive art of gardens. History of the Japanese garden goes back to around 7th century and the early documents about the design of gardens are from approximately the 10th century.

From the ancient remains of the rock arrangement ( of the AD 5th century ) we seem to find some likely resemblance in the existing Japanese gardens. They are the circular layout of rocks either flat or upright found in Akita and Hokkaido. However, it appears that they were used for the spiritual rituals and not designed for as stone arrangement for the beauty of gardens. It may be fair to say that the concept of gardens were yet premature in this period.
Although these early circular stones or other rocks that are jutting out in the cliff were the objects of worship and prayer for the spirits of nature, such spiritual foundation for the stones continued to sublimate in the later art form of stone arrangement and gardens. In the transition process from 7th century to 10th century, Buddhism and new cultures were brought in from China and Korea and they played important roles in the development of garden art. They became the philosophical foundation for the original design of the Japanese art of space in the form of gardens.
Raked sand, particularly white raked sand (shirakawasuna) is a feature of many Japanese gardens. If the conjectures of historians regarding the early history of Shinto are correct, the earliest shrines of Japan's native religion may have been forest clearings in which the ground was purified and made hospitable to the spirits (kami) by putting down a layer of washed sand or gravel. The practice appears to live on in those areas of historical Shinto shrines in which a simple rectangle of white sand appears among the architectural structures. That the tradition was associated with the divine ancestry of the Imperial family is suggested by the broad expanses of white sand located in front of important palace buildings, the Imperial Palace in Kyoto being a prime example. In the Heian Period, the area between the main hall of a noble residence—the shinden—and the pond to the south was often covered with white sand, an echo of which can be seen today at Daikaku-ji in Kyoto.
While the sacred associations of white sand were probably never far from the minds of their designers, the gardens of later periods also employed this element in ways that appear to simulate rivers or seas, the raking of the sand apparently intended to evoke waves or currents. In some instances, this simulation was clearly intentional, as in the corner garden at the Daisen-in in Kyoto, where the raked sand is meant to represent a stream flowing from the mountains. In other gardens—that of Ryoan-ji, for example—the sand-equals-water equation is more problematic, although many interpreters insist upon that association.
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