A photographic work centered on Nakanoshima Rose Garden, photographed just after 5 a.m. on May 16, 2026, with 60 selected images each from Nagai Botanical Garden and Kyoto Botanical Garden Rose Garden.
The music is the complete Brahms Symphony No.3, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan, lasting 32 minutes and 18 seconds.
This work is not merely about the splendor of roses, but about morning light, maturity, stillness, and layers of time, all placed within the inward world of Brahms’s Third Symphony.

May 16, 2026.
Nakanoshima Rose Garden, photographed just after 5 a.m.
The sunrise in Osaka that morning was at 4:55 a.m.
I quickly prepared myself and went to Nakanoshima by taxi.
It was not completely empty.
Yet, compared with my previous visits to Nakanoshima Rose Garden, I was able to photograph the garden in a condition very close to what I had hoped for.
The morning light on that day was exceptional.
This time, I created the work around Nakanoshima Rose Garden in the early morning of May 16, adding 60 selected images each from Nagai Botanical Garden and Kyoto Botanical Garden Rose Garden, 120 images in total.
The morning light of Nakanoshima Rose Garden.
The splendor of Nagai Botanical Garden.
The dignity of Kyoto Botanical Garden Rose Garden.
I placed them within the 32 minutes and 18 seconds of the complete Brahms Symphony No.3.
The music used here is Brahms Symphony No.3, performed by the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan.
The following is an explanation of Brahms’s Symphony No.3.
Brahms’s Symphony No.3 is, among his four symphonies, the most condensed, the most inward, and the most poetic.
It does not have the Beethoven-like weight of the First Symphony.
It does not have the pastoral brightness of the Second.
It does not have the tragic severity of the Fourth.
Instead, the Third Symphony contains burning passion and deep resignation at the same time.
It was composed in 1883, when Brahms was fifty years old.
It has four movements, but at around thirty-five minutes it is relatively short for a Brahms symphony.
Yet its content is extraordinarily dense.
It is not music that overwhelms the world with a loud voice.
It is music that seems to sound from the deepest part of life.
The third movement is especially famous.
It may be called one of the most beautiful melodies in all of Brahms’s works.
Sadness, nostalgia, restrained passion, and irretrievable time.
All of these are written not as mere sentiment, but as strict music.
The first movement begins with a motif often associated with Brahms’s own motto.
It is powerful, but it is not a simple victory.
It rises with exaltation, yet there is a shadow within it.
From the beginning, the conflict between passion and restraint, which governs the entire work, is already present.
The second movement is calm and prayer-like.
What we hear is not outward brilliance, but a quiet inner voice.
The third movement is the most widely known movement.
Ordinarily, the third movement of a symphony is often a scherzo.
But here Brahms wrote not a fierce dance, but a movement of deep lyricism.
This gives the entire Third Symphony its unique character.
The fourth movement begins darkly and with tension.
Yet it does not end with the brilliant triumph one might expect from a symphony.
It ends quietly, as if disappearing into the distance.
This is the greatest characteristic of the work.
Brahms does not sound a final hymn of victory.
Rather, he seems to accept quietly what remains after passing through the storms of life.
This ending is profoundly deep.
Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic are exceptionally well suited to this work.
Brahms’s Third Symphony requires the richness of thick strings, the depth of the lower strings, the shading of the woodwinds, and the restrained brilliance of the brass.
The Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan possessed precisely these qualities.
Karajan’s Brahms is grand in construction, and the sound is polished to the utmost.
It is romantic, but it never collapses loosely.
There is passion, but it is always contained within a great architectural form.
In that sense, his interpretation brings together the burning inwardness and classical balance of the Third Symphony at a very high level.
The thickness of the Berlin Philharmonic strings gives this music great persuasive power.
In the first movement, the world of Brahms opens at once from the beginning.
Yet the sound does not become muddy.
It rises like a vast architectural structure.
In the second movement, the woodwind sound is essential.
Brahms’s woodwinds can sometimes sound like human voices.
With Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, those woodwinds rise gently from within the thick sonority of the strings.
In the third movement, what is admirable is that the music does not fall into sentimentality.
This movement can be made as sweet as one wishes.
But Karajan lets the melody sing beautifully while never losing the dignity of the whole.
Here the beauty of the Berlin Philharmonic strings appears at its fullest.
In the fourth movement, a dark passion rises from within.
And at the end, the music does not force its way forward by power.
It returns quietly.
Karajan shapes this “ending without victory” with great beauty.
In a single sentence, Brahms’s Third Symphony is the music of autumn in life.
It is not the music of youthful victory.
Yet it is not the music of decline.
Heat, memory, pride, resignation, and stillness.
These are qualities possessed only by one who has come to know life.
They become one in this work.
Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic’s performance is, I believe, a great performance that reveals the essence of this work through rich sonority and vast architectural beauty.
In this photographic work, I used this performance not merely as an accompaniment, but as a force that gives depth of time to the photographs as a whole.
The morning light of Nakanoshima Rose Garden.
The splendor of Nagai Botanical Garden.
The dignity of Kyoto Botanical Garden Rose Garden.
What runs through these three is not only the beauty of roses.
It is stillness, maturity, memory, and layers of time.
That is why Brahms’s Symphony No.3 became one of the most fitting pieces of music for this photographic work.