Using the hitherto under-examined source base of what I term “constructed greenspaces,” public parks, gardens and the like, this dissertation makes two claims: 1) Japanese intellectuals and government officials used these to make structured arguments that were meant to impart a mindset to the people, and that, 2) whether intentional or otherwise, there were also implicit claims about the meaning and content of “nature” and the natural world. Relatedly, we can form a fuller understanding of the conceptualization of “nature” by different individuals by looking at the constructed greenspaces that they helped produce. This work serves as both an elaboration to some areas of scholarship, as well as an attempt at a modest corrective for others. The question of “nature” has attracted a great deal of commentary from historians, philosophers, and social scientists more generally for decades, both in the context of Japan and along more universal lines. Pre-1980 scholarship on the issue, following the lead of people like Lynn White and Maruyama Masao, saw, in “the East” for White, and Japan in particular for Masao, a fundamental connection between “nature” and culture, with White going so far as to postulate a reverence for or harmony with “nature” within East Asian cultures. From the 1980s onward, this view has been vigorously opposed in Western academic circles; scholars such as Conrad Totman, Arne Kalland, Tessa Morris-Suzuki, and Julia Thomas have convincingly shown that these efforts either completely ignore the material reality of Japanese history, have misconstrued what aspects of the natural world resonated with Japanese artists, and ignore the willful construction of such narratives by Japanese politicians for state purposes. My own work combines environmental and intellectual history to offer what I believe to be a fuller understanding of how “nature” was constructed in physical, mental, and social terms as part of (mostly state) projects looking to interpret philosophical ideas into forms more easily digested by the Japanese public. In my final analysis, I hold that contrary to current scholarship, neither “nature” nor “shizen” as terms are all that difficult to parse in their modern usage. Virtually all the literature mentioned describing “nature” focuses on the difficulty or impossibility of defining the term in a way that satisfies the full range of meaning. This literature can easily be expanded to included non-Japanese versions as well, such as the work of Frédéric Ducarme and Denis Couvet. I argue that such a definition is unnecessary. Considering the constructed greenspaces under investigation in this study, I maintain that the meaning of the terms, used either by we moderns or those in the past, are close to self-evident given a modicum of context, context which, I argue, can be found in the materiality of built spaces. By expanding the source base of the history of ideas to include spaces, I show that the phenomenological experience of engaging with a constructed greenspace allows for an apprehension of ideas in a more immediate, visceral form.