Abstract: Japan ended the closed “shogunate rule” since the Meiji restoration, and gradually introduced the western modern industrial technology and ideological culture. Many significant cultural and art cultural thoughts were formed in the process of impact and the fusion, which had a significant impact on Japanese gardening art and the landscape architecture. Based on modern Japan’s major historical events, cultural ideological trend and social activities as the context, this paper paid comparative analysis on the traditional Japanese culture and the western modern design ideas and design methods, tried to sort out the process of Japan to accept, digest and absorb the new art movement, secession, metabolism, decorative art, land art, minimalism, structuralism and postmodernism western ideas, and gradually make it reality and “root” in Japanese history, so that create distinctive “Japanese style” full of national pride; and then generally divided Japanese modern landscape into five phases: imitation, accumulation, integration, innovation and expansion, and carried on the brief introduction of the representatives and works of each phase.